Team Britbongs and a Yugo — Season Review
Roster: Madsen © (1), Matotim0 (2), Jayachdee (3), bitch im a cow (4), Nappa (5)
Was hoping I wouldn’t need to write this so soon, to be completely honest.
I’m a bit conflicted with how far we got. At one point in the group stage it looked somewhat bleak and there was a very real chance that we don’t make the playoffs at all, but looking back at a combination of what we were able to do in good games and how we started the playoff series, I feel like we could’ve gone at least a bit deeper into this bracket.
As is the norm with my season reviews, I’ll talk a bit about the team as a whole, go shortly over how the thought process in the player draft and finally move onto the individual player reviews. I won’t really have an interlude where I go over the results or set anything up too much, and will rather focus on just sharing my thoughts on the team.
On the team overall
I think the first thing that comes to mind is that this season as a whole felt fairly low-effort as a whole. As a team we just went through the motions of an RD2L season for the most part; compile some hero pools, play officials, maybe squeeze in some scrims occasionally. I’d describe this mostly as a personal failure as a captain (though I do feel like a lethargic season on a Madsen team is still a higher committal adventure than the “average” RD2L team). I wasn’t necessarily too motivated to Dota as a whole throughout the season, but admittedly I also didn’t exactly feel much exuberance from the rest of the team. I can be somewhat low-energy and when I am, I often depend on the motivation and energy of others to become more invested, and I don’t think I got too much of that. That being said, I think that’s not an expectation a captain should have from his players, and a captain should, ideally, be the one to create these sparks and generate motivation and effort. Some previous season reviews from past teammates brought this up in my assessments (fair ones, at that), in particular in terms of how divided my attention can get between captaining multiple teams (which I did this season — on top of a very tiring, high commitment content schedule). Without getting into it too much, I think there’s a fine line in terms of how much you can divide your attention as an RD2L captain before one or both teams start to suffer for it, and it’s one I’ve probably crossed multiple times at this point, which is just a bit unfair to any potential teammates. I want to apologize for that, but at the same time, I simply can’t get myself to feel too bad, since the alternative is not captaining and being at the mercy of the other captains.
Milo and Nappa both focused a fair bit on just how much the lack of a solid shotcaller affected the team, and I’m inclined to agree. While I maintain that the team is built out of many incredibly valuable individual pieces, that does not always a great player draft make; more often than not, RD2L teams need someone to tip the scale, and I come into drafts with the unfortunate quality of very much not being that someone, especially in comparison to some peers in my MMR bracket. The simplest way I can put it is that we didn’t really have anyone to make shit happen in games; I think that, when you can’t get your hands on a dedicated, experienced and reliable shotcaller — the pool of which in RD2L is sparse at best — the second best thing you can do is have someone who makes shit happen. This can be a core who is really keen to play active and has the ability to read the game well; it can be an offlaner who can spot openings and have their team play around that quality; it can be a support who has well-developed pattern recognition and can drag their team to play around objectives they know are of higher value. This team, I think, didn’t have any of that. I’d say specifically the idea of finding openings and abusing them is something we weren’t great at. I feel like I generally have a good eye for these things, but my ability to communicate them (especially in a timely manner) is sorely lacking. My own ability to make things happen on the map, as it were, hinge entirely too much on how my game is going. Like Nappa said, our games oftentimes depended on me popping off (and I usually do that on heroes that are fairly high burst and can find pickoffs), which at first was flattering, but on second thought brought me to the realization that an RD2L team depending on me to pop off and take control is about the most horrifying thing I can imagine. I think all players on the team are on a fairly solid level mechanically, but we needed someone to tie that all together and lead the charge, and we very much didn’t have that.
On an overall note, I’d say we had many great listeners, but no one to listen to. This would lead to a lack of discipline and, naturally, copious amounts of throwing. I’d attribute this all in large part to what I perceived as a lack of individual confidence across the board, one that perhaps wasn’t warranted when talking about ability.
On the draft
Could I have drafted better, getting a core partner whose playstyle is better matched with mine and a shotcaller to boot? I mean, maybe. Probably, even. I could’ve perhaps picked up Raffie or Valchers, or even played mid myself (lol) and picked up Xela or Takeshi; I could’ve picked up someone like Barg or Dildawg and let them focus on shotcalling.
Would one of these setups make for a better team? Potentially. Do I regret the picks I did make? Nah. It’s a lovely group, just one that I wasn’t good enough — either as a player or a captain — to get the most out of. I’m glad to have played with them, and do genuinely believe that they make for great pieces to pick up in drafts.
Player Reviews
2 | Matotim0
First thing’s first — I picked up Mato at 5.1k in the draft. He ended the season at 6k. While the team as a whole might not have worked out too well, the one positive is that my eye for value is as sharp as ever. It’s also worth mentioning at the start that Mato came into season 20 wanting to play 4, but I’d wanted to play with him and knew he was a capable enough mid player, whose sheet MMR would also let me get fairly favorable positions in subsequent rounds.
Mato didn’t always show up in the way I might’ve expected him to — or the way the team might’ve needed him to — but this applies more to the start of the season than anything: I was a bit distraught at his performances in the first couple of matches, but slowly, he started winning lanes he had no right to, played with a lot more discipline and developed his effective hero pool at a pace I haven’t seen many do over the course of one RD2L season.
A perhaps slightly random note, but one that stuck in my mind nonetheless, is that Mato is — maybe more than anyone I’ve played with — very mindful of neutral items and their timing. Past that, I’d also pawned off the role of drafter to Mato, and I think he did a very serviceable job of that. One especially lovely quality Mato has as a drafter and teammate is that he’s very trusting; I appreciated his confidence in giving me things like Morph when the time was right, despite my own doubts. As a matter of fact, looking back at it, I feel like I had this idea that Mato and myself had a fairly diverging view and approach to Dota, but he ended up being right more often than not — which particularly stood out to me in his ability to get me the right hero in spite of my own protests. I think he has a fairly well developed general sense for Dota as a game, and I’d wager he sees things I don’t ever consider.
I do think, however, that Mato+me is a bit of a mismatch in terms of core duos, since I feel like we both lean more towards a more active playstyle, which could often leave us without someone to just sit down and farm up — though that’s less a fault of his than it is a reflection of my inability to perform that kind of role. I felt really bad after choking in the playoffs, because Mato — with the confidence of a fresh 6k — played his ass off. Lovely guy.
3 | Jayachdee
I’ll start by stating the obvious — Jay is very, very quiet. This wasn’t helped by the fact that his mic would randomly go AWOL, and we often wouldn’t even realize until he didn’t respond to a prompt, at which point we could remind him to check his mic. This hurt us a bit here and there, since I think as the offlaner, he would often have the role of the tempo setter in fights (especially when initiating) or in the game as a whole (mostly when playing his excellent Furion, which we probably didn’t pick enough).
There’s this (fairly old at this point) idea that what really sets apart lower and higher MMR players is the speed at which they do just about everything. Making quicker decisions, pressing spells on time, etc. I’d say this is something Jay suffers from a bit; oftentimes he could miss an opening to use a spell or be slow to react to a call.
In fact, Jay probably suffered the most from us not having a quality shotcaller; while he himself also probably didn’t communicate enough to get help on these issues, he could occasionally build his hero in questionable ways (which is admittedly reasonable if one doesn’t keep up with trends too much), but more significantly, I feel like Jay tended to get a bit lost on the map, especially when not playing something he’s too comfortable on. The way this manifested itself was most commonly in the form of staying in lanes he couldn’t survive in for too long or just hitting jungle creeps a bit mindlessly when there’s a lane that could be cleared instead. However, this is something I believe the higher MMR players on the team should be contributing to solving, and I can’t blame Jay at all for these things. I know I’d personally never taken the time to talk him through these issues between games and I would instead get snappy during them, which is very much not the way to fix issues.
With that said, I think if given the opportunity to play with someone who did provide him with that direction and guidance, on top of him expanding his hero pool and working to get a feel for the nitty-gritty of how those heroes operate, he could become an extremely effective offlaner player. He’s not far away at all from that, and I think that showed in his Furion and Underlord play, as well as some great decision making on Doom in a scrim.
4 | bitch im a cow
Milo, I hope you won’t be mad but…I don’t actually have that much to say about the boy. I think Milo is a great player for his MMR, and I’ve seen him thrive when playing with better players who can provide him with more direction — though that’s not to say he didn’t put up serviceable performances on this team even without that shotcaller.
I think it’s worth mentioning that Milo seems to play first and foremost to have fun. He might meme a bit — it might be a bit of a grief sometimes — but he’s an entertaining and chipper personality to have in a team. He tends to perform much, much better when he’s playing a hero he enjoys and can definitely make huge plays; I think realizing that he can do good work on heroes like Clock and Nyx to provide our team with catch made drafting the rest of our lineups a fair bit easier. It’s worth mentioning that while he does a fairly good job using his spells in the midgame, he’s not the greatest laning 4, and as a result I think he had a tendency to walk around the map a bit in losing lanes, which paired with Jay’s hesitance to leave hard lanes, gave opposing carries a bit too much.
I’ll also note that Milo’s internet proved problematic on occasion, but that’s hardly something to fault him for, and he’s definitely a worthwhile pick.
5 | Nappa
I think most people are fairly familiar with Nappa at this point, and should know by now that he’s a very capable and consistent support, so I’ll instead focus on the elements of Nappa’s game which might not be as obvious (or, well, as positive).
The first thing that comes to mind is that I think Nappa should spice up his comfort hero pool by adding heroes that can have more impact as the game develops. Nappa’s a reliable laner, but as he moves up into higher brackets, I think he would benefit a lot from relying less on the Jakiros and Liches of Dota; he’s firm second pick territory, but to have more impact in that role, I feel like he’d need to get comfortable on heroes that can lead his team to play around him, rather than him being in a sacrificial role where he plays around them.
Nappa can get fairly frustrated when he realizes that we, as a team, aren’t doing the correct things, but struggles to vocalize solutions ahead of time, so his calls to deal with these issues (most often ones relating to map control) would manifest less as concrete calls and rather in the form of fairly vague suggestions, which I’d assume has to do with confidence (or lack thereof). Nappa definitely has the game knowledge to shotcall, but just…doesn’t, which I assume is a consequence of playing with more individually dominant players who fulfill that role, so he hasn’t really needed to.
With all of that said, Nappa is still an excellent player and you’d struggle to find anyone who disagrees. I’d snap him up to be my lane partner any day of the week.
1 | Madsen
I usually finish these off by reviewing myself, but I think I went over a good bit of what I would’ve said in the segment where I talked about the team overall. Past that, I just didn’t have enough impact (or at least not consistently enough) and choked big time in playoffs.
I think that’s about all I have to say, so, uh, yeah — thanks for reading. GG, good luck to my teammates in their future endeavors, good luck to the teams left in the season.
