Team spade warriors Season Review
Madsen / f mega / jihadi / Polarize / eisi
I’ve spoken at length about the idea that there is an inherent comfort to teams consisting entirely of long-time veterans; how you need not spend time becoming accustomed to one another, learning how to communicate or guiding anyone as they learn the ropes of the team environment and experience. I make reference to this most commonly when discussing my approach to player drafts, espousing the values of aiming for at least two players you’re closely familiar with, and then searching for coin and role value for the rest, be it past teammates or not. Now, while I hadn’t previously played on teams with f mega and Polarize, we’ve all been around the block so long that we know, be it through stacks or inhouses or simply word of mouth, what the others are like. I say all of this to lead into what was personally a surprising experience and subsequent realization:
You can overdo it.
You can overdo this prioritization of familiarity and comfort and managed expectations, and it results in something a bit…peculiar.
By and large, the impression I’ve been left with from this team is one that is…stale. I struggle to escape from this feeling that the presence of every single one of us, not just in the team but in the season, is owed to rote, unthinking habit and routine. There’s a new Clarity season, and we’re going to sign up — because that’s what we do. We’re gonna play with people whose names we’ve been seeing for years, matched with and against us. We’re going to roll up to the Discord and the lobby on Tuesdays, between 19:55 and 20:05 CET, and we’ll play out our two matches — perhaps eventually three. We’ll put in an average amount of effort, when all tallied. We’ll chat very briefly about the flow of the matches, perhaps dedicate the odd minute to planning for the next week, should it be the case that we or our opponents should require a standin or reschedule. Then, we’ll say our goodbyes and good nights, and scatter into the wind, reabsorbing into our usual circles to play an inhouse, or a pub, or we might solo queue, or simply wind down for the night.
And, fundamentally, nothing is wrong with that. It is, quite genuinely, an above average experience; I like every single one of my teammates. I think they’re cool people and capable players, and I hadn’t suffered this sinking feeling when seeing my name on a list with their names (except, perhaps, for the fact that said list was on the Division 1 tab, but more on that later).
It is also not an indictment of any one player on the team, nor frankly the team as a whole. As life moves along and I’m able to dedicate less time to the space, I come to better understand certain approaches to the game and to the leagues. I can empathize nowadays, in a way I was unable to prior, with the player who plays Clarity not because it’s where they go to put their hours honing their craft in pub to use or whatever, but because they enjoy the ability to dedicate one day, with some degree of certainty, to the game they enjoy.
I’ve also come to appreciate that I don’t think I’ll come to be someone who approaches it this way.
It’s a bit of an odd thought; I’ve participated in a great many seasons purely because it’s what I do and gone on to be wholly ambivalent to the performance of the team and not really make any effort to push it forward or even really get to know my teammates on a deeper level — and I certainly didn’t mind it then, so this entire diatribe ultimately becomes a hint hypocritical.
Really, that might be a bit of an understatement. I think I’ve become accustomed to having to put minimal effort in, and sort of coasting through things in these leagues; I’ve enjoyed the cycle, and tend to figure “if this should accidentally happen to be one of those amazing experiences that got me hooked on this shit…nice!”, and if not, oh well. Without doubt, this is partly a consequence of simply being an underwhelming player, stuck perhaps in the worst place to be as such an individual: too bad to be anything more than roster filler in the top div, too known to be passed up for marginally higher MMR options that may pose a greater risk, not quite good enough to be a dominant presence in a lower div, yet very likely to be overvalued (be it in coin budget should I captain, or coin value should I not) in said lower div. As such, my successes come from the cozy comfort of a certain Pole’s backpack, or not at all — especially now that we’re past the point where a stack on which I’m not definitively the worst player can still be competitive in the top div.
I’ll cut the woe is me act while I’m still in control; I make this sound immensely glum, when really it’s not. Playing video games with people you’ve known for a long time is fun. I’ve had fun this season. I cannot underline this enough. In that light, it’s perhaps difficult to ascertain what my point is; and I’m not necessarily sure there is one. I think perhaps this particular team consisted of people who are a bit similar to me in these regards; they enjoy the cycle, they enjoy the game and the experience, but are perhaps similarly past the point where they have significant energy to commit to moving the needle, as it were, of the team experience. It’s very possible I’m simply making assumptions that are wrong there, but I don’t know that anyone popped up with the idea of playing a scrim, or discussing future drafts in much detail, or analyzing a loss, or working on individual hero pools. I am, myself, included in all of this. And perhaps there’s a bystander element to it all, where no one wants to be the one to make the leap at the risk of putting themselves out there and inconveniencing the others who might not want to commit this energy. Maybe we all sat there wanting to do better, and do more, but not wanting to be the one to publicly say this.
Or maybe we’re all just veterans caught up in the cycle, functioning wholly on autopilot. Being quite frank, I suspect there’s an element of me writing this review on autopilot. I insert this tangent during a re-read, because it’s apparent that I say some things for the sake of them being said. I mean, yes, there have been moments where I had fun this season, but there were plenty where I did not, and there’s an element of keeping up appearances and status quo when I make efforts to underline the idea that I did enjoy some parts of it, without harping further on the bits where I didn’t — yet here we are. It’s, I suspect, a fallback to hide behind, one that I manufacture by instinct, one that allows for the simplification of thoughts and feelings had that might otherwise be too convoluted to express, or the expression of which might paint a picture that I don’t particularly wish to showcase. It’s a similar conundrum to the one that stood in the way of my streaming the occasional game on this team; there was a moment where it became apparent this team wouldn’t go on to do great things, probably quite early at that, and that realization is enough for me to know that I’ll inevitably come to have games where I’m tilted or upset, be it at my own mistakes or what I perceive to be shortcomings of my teammates…and that’s just not what I want to share and put out there. But, more than that, the decision not to stream is just really again the decision to hide behind something. It’s an odd, irrational thought — I, and my personality, is known to, like, shitloads of people. I’ve been around the block for so fucking long, y’all don’t even realize. Like, if you made an amateur league with only people I’ve played on teams with, you’d have more divisions than RD2L does.
I’m not really entirely sure what compelled me to say all of this. I think there was a moment where, in jihadi’s absence, we had Waloo stand in, and that triggered some memory of the single best experience I’d had in these leagues (shoutout to Harb, Chris, Waloo and Myst), one that was on paper perhaps similar to the setup for this season, yet one that functionally was very different. Maybe it’s an unfair point of comparison; that team was a dragon that I continue to chase, one that perhaps fuels all of these thoughts, one that felt so innately easy that it changed the way I approach things. That, frankly, might be the bottom line; I have worms in my brain and they wriggle around and make me think thoughts instead of, like, clicking creeps. Alas.
Oh, uh, right, this was a review. Uh, yeah, yeah, definitely. For sure. Player reviews too.
Actually, fuck it, I’m this deep into just blogging-blogging I might as well stick to it: let’s go on a tangent about season reviews.
For one reason or another, there’s been a decent amount of chatter about them this season; about their purpose, their goal, what one ought to look like. I’ve generally tended to be of the mind that they’re, sorta, for everything. Ultimately it’s just a vessel for people to express themselves and share thoughts in a space where they might otherwise not engage much, and that’s where I find their most base value to be. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s creative or new, or a way for someone to make a statement or a fairly generic rundown of their teammates that says very little of actual value, or serious or flamey or jokey or even high or low effort, or whatever else. The one indisputable truth of “content” in this space — and it’s one I feel equipped to espouse, considering I’ve probably shat out the most of it — is that people love, nay, adore, reading about themselves, and they adore reading about drama. And once in a blue moon, they’ll read something constructed with some amount of thought and effort, and it’ll make for a welcome respite from fiending reviews for the other reasons.
For the first however many of my at this point dozens of season reviews, I mostly went into them with the ambition of sharing something about my teammates that may be of value to future drafters, with secondary goals including creating something the players of the team can look back on to reminisce on the season; but I don’t know that I ever did a particularly good job of it. I’ll refer back to the point about playing things safe so that I might hide behind them; I suspect the general inclination towards writing a “safe” season review comes from a similar place, so many of mine tended to boil down to potentially interesting but ultimately not particularly valuable coverage of draft processes’ or the traits of teammates that I’d managed to recall in the moment of writing (and that tended to be very little, since I have the memory of a goldfish). I’ve always somewhat recognized this, though I don’t know that I ever thought it a negative. Maybe not consciously at least, but on some level I must have, since I did try to switch things up by writing a more journal-y review for a couple teams. Frankly I’ve come to think those are similarly…uninteresting, chiefly because, in what is a sentiment I believe many share, I don’t particularly care about your season in that way. How each series went is something I don’t really care about. I have no investment in your team or the matches you played or why you’re writing about them when you are. The ways in which you collectively became better and the realisations you reached about your drafts and how you implemented progressive changes might be interesting, if you’re an enticing enough writer with a good enough grasp on Dota, but most aren’t (myself included — I can’t really think of a season review I’ve written that I would deem interesting or good, at least off the top of my head).
This entire diatribe is largely in service of saying the following: I don’t know what it is I’m writing right now. It’s hardly a season review. I could’ve made it one, in much the same ways I always have. I can give you my thoughts on the player draft, I can give you my thoughts on the matches we played, I can give you my thoughts on what went well and what went wrong from my perspective, and I can launch into paragraphs about any of f mega, or jihadi, or Eisi or Polarize and how they did this season and whether I did or did not like it…but I don’t see much of a point. I think the perspective I’ve shared thus far illustrates most succinctly what thinking about this season makes me feel and think, in a way that listing tired clichés and laboriously recounting what happened in the games doesn’t. And, you know what, I’d have to sit down and go through the games to really come up with much to say, because I don’t remember much. It’s all overshadowed by that more general feeling.
And so I arrive at the point where I’m, I suppose, expected to nevertheless do that; to give non-answers to how I felt about my teammates performances. Maybe I do the funny thing where I praise them for the most part, throw in one negative comment each, maybe skip the bit where I actually review jihadi and just call him a fucking idiot and then jump right back into describing f mega as if nothing happened.
But, I’ll resist that impulse. I have no such thoughts. We kinda sucked ass. Maybe we were just worse. Maybe in another season, at another time, this team works out. But no part of it really affects my view on these people, all of whom I know and have known (or known of) for a good while now; I can go rabble rabble eisi doesn’t play stun heroes and I think he might’ve gotten worse at laning, rabble rabble! But this isn’t a thought about him I’ve internalised. In 3 months time, we’ll be sat in a draft, and there’s a dozen other things about eisi that will spring to my mind before that one season we didn’t do well.
So, instead, I will leave you with a rundown of what I will think of when I see all of their names again, with the caveat that I’ll note they all mostly sucked ass this season — and by golly, I did too. But it’s okay, because I’m a low mmr bot and they should all be better, smh.
When I see f megas name, I’ll think about how he popped out of out nowhere, and how he was this immense value for his high-4k MMR. I’ll then think of how he gained about 3000 more of it from Glicko, the headaches he gave me as an admin at the time, and the rate at which he flops between justifying his new MMR and doing definitively not that. I’ll think of the funny meme where he, as an Irish fellow, sets his flag to the Ivorian one, and not really being sure whether he might actually be Ivorian given his ambiguous accent. I’ll think about how before hearing that accent you’ll see this psychopath unmute his mic, rather than just using push to talk or voice activation. I’ll think of the silly little robbit he’s had as his profile picture forever, or of the quest of his former lower div teammates and captains like Kurou to find the new f mega in div 3.
When I read Polarize on a sheet, I’ll think of his stupid fucking bullshit rubick god fucking damn it stop fade bolting me. I’ll think back to Chris talking about his experience with him, and how warm and loving he is, and how he wanted so desperately to keep playing with that stack despite their season ending. Maybe I’ll contemplate on how it’s a shame I didn’t really quite get to know him like that because our season here went the way it did, but nevertheless remain satisfied that I can scratch his name off the shortlist of people I’d wanted to play with, and sort him neatly into the shortlist of people I want to play with again.
When I read “jihadi swamp”, I’ll probably think about Tommy Shelby and railing femboys. I’ve been overexposed to jihadi on Discord, sorry. I don’t know, I feel like the next time I read jihadis name on a sheet I won’t be thinking about it because I’ll be talking to him about the shitshow he’s been freshly drafted onto, most realistically.
When I look at Eisi on the sheet I’ll first think “okay, that’s 1 more support on the list, epic”, and then I’ll recall talking to Marci about me stepping down and recommending she ask Snufkin and eisi, and how that worked out pretty fucking flawlessly, considering how I’ve never once since then needed to have the thought that we made a mistake or that I might need to come back, because eisi contributed to the ship sailing perfectly well — and then I’ll very specifically avoid the thought that aforementioned sailing has been smoother since he replaced me since that’s too severe a blow to the ego. I’ll think about how he made some insane DnD campaign or what the fuck ever I don’t get that nerd shit, and then I’ll recall him flexing having a wife at any moment where it’s remotely applicable. Maybe I’ll think “Ligbank has corrupted him”, then stop to consider whether it might be the other way around. I’ll think of a kind, calming presence that utterly refuses conceptually to play a hero that can stun enemies. And then I’ll bid 15, and let him go at 26, because that’s what friends do.
