Team Stay Hydrated — Season Review
Roster: Madsen © (1), Dota (2), Vivern (5), Ra1n.Reloader (3), Spicy (4), Xhasper (¾)
After becoming a council member in the preseason of S15, the admin team lacked one more captain for the season. I offered to do it if no one else stepped up, but I wasn’t too keen on the idea, considering that uni would start in the middle of the season and becoming a captain less than a day before the draft isn’t an appealing prospect, considering the others would have a big head start on scouting. In any case, here we are, my first season captaining behind me, and we managed to win the season with the objectively strongest roster in the league. I’d take more credit for that, but it was honestly in large part due to me getting lucky and the other captains letting me get away with a lot in the auction. Before I talk about the players in the team specifically, I’ll talk about the draft process and the things that lead to the team coming together. Also, if you’re a future captain here to gather information on some of these players, you can skip to the bottom where you’ll find a recap of the things that might be important for you.
Draft Review
Becoming a captain 20 hours before draft was pretty daunting. I did my best to look over the players and it helped that I had an idea of who I wanted to play with based on conversations I’ve had with others and on earlier play. Shoutout to some of the players I planned on picking, like Stl, LPSD, Nyk, fred, Liquid.Oxygen, borninbronx and some others.
My personalized draft sheet was very simple — I went through the players, their Dotabuffs and their comments on the sheet and based on that put them into color coded tiers, higher priorities being green, lower ones being yellow, unknowns being blank, dodges being red, etc. This helped immensely because whenever a player I was interested in got snatched (and this happened a lot) I could glance over to find an alternative quickly and easily. This was a bit hard to manage actively once the draft got going and picked up pace, but that’s neither here nor there — I managed. I made sure to pay attention to the lower MMRs as well, since I’ve seen people focus too much on the higher skilled players and then end up with people they hadn’t scouted at all as their lower MMRs. Unfortunately, a lot of the players I was interested in went for prices that were way too high for me, as the only captain with less money than me and some others was Crispy Bacon. Anyway, at that point I looked over my draft sheet and decided to switch it up. I had all of my money still, but no players. Some captains had picked 2–3 players by the time I got my first; some had full teams by the time I got my second.
Looking at the sheet at that point, Dota became my instant priority. Having rated him as tier 1 in my sheet, I was always interested, but honestly thought I wouldn’t have the chance pre-draft and was somewhat more interested in people I knew already. Well, once we got to draft, I became quite confident that I’d get him, considering everyones’ budgets at that point. I was ready to build the team around him, as he has a ridiculous Dotabuff which, combined with the draft and cheat sheet comments, suggested a lot of very important things to me personally as a captain. He’s versatile, he’s higher skilled than me (I’ll get into this later), he said on the sheet that he’s comfortable drafting and his personality seemed easy going around the Discord. How I got him, I still don’t know. Looking back, obviously not all captains are incompetent, and some definitely noticed him as well; some noticed that I was planning on getting him (shoutouts to Crispy). Either way, people went for the bigger names and didn’t have the budget to contest. Now, this was all to some degree understandable, but if this pick set me up, the next one was the nail in the coffin.
Vivern was on the bottom of the sheet, alongside Sbx, as the two uncalibrated players. Neither had been adjusted, but Sbx was a household RD2L name, while Vivern was a first-timer…except, he was a first timer who used to be 5k. No one could or did contest me, except for Regu, who could’ve snatched him had I not realized my mistake and bid more. Suddenly I had a 5k+ support with two 5k+ cores. Admittedly, this did leave me with no money but I wasn’t concerned. At that point, it didn’t really matter who else I got, but once again, the other captains treated me well, letting me get 2 legends in a draft where archons were already being picked. This was mostly due to role preference, and admittedly that wasn’t something I thought about too hard, because — and this was a hugely underappreciated element of my draft at that point — I had picked up multi-role players for every slot and was confident in any of the role setups. Figuring out the right one took some time at the start of the season, but we settled pretty quickly. My last pick ended up being Xhasper, who often overperformed for his crusader badge, and was definitely one of the more value picks out of the lower MMR bunch, which, again, was pretty lucky for me, considering that there were like 3–4 people left to pick when I got him.
With that said, while our play did revolve around Dota, my draft was realistically tailored for me specifically, getting versatile players with drafting comfort (I can’t draft to save my life), as well as getting a high MMR support to make my safelane easier. Overall, my first main season captaining experience was already looking good by the time the draft concluded; well, okay, that’s an understatement. I had just drafted the clear favorite team, with an MMR spread that wouldn’t have looked out of place in prior, much more competitive RD2L seasons. End of draft, I had a team with: a D3, an adjusted D5 (who calibrated to rank 1.8k Immortal), an adjusted D2 (who calibrated to D3), a L3 (who went up to L5), L1 (who went up to L3) and C2 (who didn’t play solo but could easily get low legend with some grinding, probably higher).
Long winded as that was, it’s time to move onto…
Player Reviews
Dota — The centerpiece of the team in play, Dota was a crucial player for the team even outside of carrying our asses. He served as our drafter throughout the season, to which I attribute a lot of our success, as he made great use of our hero pools and allowed us to all play to our potential. Mainly a position ¾ player, he took up the mid role for the team and made it look like it was his main role. Dota also did his a lot of shotcalling, especially later into the season. One of his best traits was reactivating our communication when it got quieter, as well as actively advising everyone’s decisions and encouraging them to think about them, which in game made everyone more mindful of their itemization and positioning and contributed significantly to everyone improving as players throughout the season. In doing all of that, he subtly controlled the dynamic of the team’s atmosphere and the tempo of our movement in games. Dota is very hard to tilt, but even if he does, he resets very very quickly and he is always pretty self-aware, so his contributions to the team atmosphere was really great for many reasons, one of which is the classic “Madsen getting super quiet when tilted” — he instinctively became more vocal whenever that’d happen. As far as my experience playing with him, it was marvelous, considering he was the perfect kind of core player for me to pair with. He excels at laning and adjusting to the midgame properly, being able to both create space on the map and to farm very efficiently, so he applied a lot of pressure on the map in either case. This fits with me being a subpar laner, but also my strong suit being midgame pressure and rotations. A criticism I’ve gotten in the past is that I’m a feast or famine player, and that it’s more often famine if I haven’t got a better player on the team to keep me on a leash, and in every way possible, Dota fulfilled that function very well. Easy going, well mannered, very hard to tilt, active in the Discord, easy to schedule with, communicative. This is usually the part of the player review where the captain’s like “would draft again” but honestly if I was told I’d get to play another season with Dota I wouldn’t even think about it. Very much the whole package for an RD2L player and one in a hundred in many many ways.
Vivern — Vivern was a cornerstone of the team, performing consistently well, winning us lanes that we had no business winning and salvaging countless fights with great item or spell usage. His KDA’s matching those of Dota and myself show quite obviously that his amazing positioning is part of the reason behind much of that, and it’s one of his greatest strengths. Vivern can play any support you want him to, but if you get him on something extremely comfortable like a Wyvern (fittingly enough. Nominative determinism at it’s finest?) he would shine as one of our star players, even from the 5 role. As my lane support, I felt like we had a very solid understanding of each others’ play and that made us a very formidable laning duo and our staple heroes regularly tanked bans. Generally, if we weren’t absolutely destroying a lane it was me fucking up. A very positive player, I don’t think I’ve ever sensed any negativity coming from Vivern, and he always made sure to structure his advice in a very constructive manner. Once again a player who subtly influenced the dynamic of the team, despite not taking up the role of a main shotcaller that we planned on having him fulfill at the start. Vivern is a somewhat quiet person, which I feel was at times accentuated by Spicy, Dota and myself being more vocal. That being said, everything he did say did have purpose behind it, which made our communication very concise and understandable. Many times he was the calm and collected voice who got us all to refocus. This season was in some ways his comeback to the game after a bit of a break and he always got progressively better as he shook off more and more rust. For what it’s worth, if this was what Vivern plays like when rusty, RD2L is in for a show when he shakes it all off. As the season progressed he also became more comfortable in the team and therefore more talkative which was really nice because Vivern’s just a great guy. He was also super reliable and again easy to schedule with, missing only one series (the only groups game we dropped, go figure) because of real life responsibilites. As it turns out, I’m guaranteed to have chemistry with Witcher fans as my supports (shoutout to Aux). Overall just a great player, but moreso teammate. A joy to play with, especially as a safelane player.
Rain — After spending all of my money on my first two players, I grabbed up Rain and Spicy as the next two highest MMRs remaining. Even without that, I had scouted Rain prior and saw an impressive core player Dotabuff, and for a good minute I considered playing offlane this season and letting Rain play safelane; anyway, all of that influenced his eventual move to the offlane for us. Rain is a very aggressive player, which is both a blessing and a curse. Being the 3rd farm priority, Rain often even managed to keep up with Dota and myself, and his carry instincts allowed him to catch up after bad laning stages. On more traditional offlane heroes, he sometimes struggled to hit certain item timings, somewhat stubbornly returning to very hard lanes only to die, but I can’t hold this against him, considering I’ve seen much higher MMR offlaners do the same. After a while, it became hard to tell that Rain was playing off role, and he made some excellent plays. In all honesty, I see bits and pieces of my old (and current, lol) self in Rain and his play, as he’s a young player who will always have you scratching your head, be it because he died in some random place pushing up a lane despite being warned and seeing enemies, or, almost just as often, because he’s gotten a solo pickoff on a core halfway across the map…god knows how. I think seeing some of myself in Rain is part of why I was at times pretty hard on him but he took it well. Now, if you’re a future captain considering Rain, you need to understand some things about him. A 16 year old player, he committed to the team despite having a lot of other things going on with school struggles, strict parents and dodgy internet, which did make for some tricky scheduling and some mic-less games later at night, as well as the unfortunate disconnect in the first round of playoffs where we ended up losing game 1 4v5 (although, in hindsight, this was more my fault than his, because he had already mentioned his ISP being iffy around that time but I still decided to play him because he’s always very enthusiastic about playing with the team). At the end of the day, though, Rain will always do his best and do what is best for the team. That said, Rain often doesn’t listen to calls and is somewhat careless, both in and out of games, often being late to officials during the group stage because he forgot despite reminders an hour before (seriously, I don’t think Rain has a clock or calendar at home). He often jokingly complained about the heroes we picked for him which was sometimes funny, and sometimes pretty annoying when it went on for a while, but he’s a very cheerful kid and he’s fun to play with, and I have no doubt that a lot of the issues he has in a team environment will get straightened out with age. Just uhh…remind him to unbind his allchat keys, if not for the enemy team, for the sake of your own teams sanity. As long as you communicate with Rain, though, his enthusiasm for the team and league will always stand above the other things.
Spicy — The second half of our legend(ary?) offlane duo, Spicy turned out to be a great addition to the team. A versatile player open to any role and any hero, Spicy was originally our offlane player with Rain playing 4, but he gave up the role and swapped with Rain after some team discussions about the role setup. When Rain was replaced by Xhasper, Spicy took back the offlane role and occasionally made me have second thoughts about his role, but I think that’s what made him a great addition to the team, gameplay wise — pretty consistent in his play with a decent chance to pop off. Spicy was also very active in the team and took any and all advice to heart. He’s very talkative, so much so that he ended up having to tone it down a bit for officials, but this did help the team as he ended up being the makeshift team cheerleader in maintaining high spirits. Admittedly, he did himself get tilted occasionally, but he was always pretty self aware about it and managed to reset sooner or later. Spicy can at times become a bit argumentative, but he generally does let up in order to avoid conflict. I think a big part of both his tilt control and arguing was diminished significantly by a certain dose of respect he had for everyone in the team. Halfway through the season he got a job, which meant that from then on he would only be able to play 1 game per series every second week, which did cause me some headaches, considering that Rain also could sometimes play only the first game unless we started earlier. We got through it pretty easily, though, and I think that there was a lot of mutual trust and good communication in the team which made that possible. Either way, Spicy was active in Discord and always conveyed his schedule clearly, so when I wasn’t failing my job as the captain we managed to work around it all. A super nice dude, he also did help me out with some captain duties like maintaining parts of our Discord like the scouting and past result channels (alongside Dota), as well as occasionally pulling on Rain’s leash while Dota was busy holding mine, which all made my job a lot easier. Though this applied to everyone on the team, Spicy also made an effort to discuss and plan during drafts, and was overall a great teammate.
Xhasper — It was oftentimes hard to tell that Xhasper was our lowest MMR player by a good margin, and he slotted into the team pretty seamlessly whenever it was his turn to come up and play, despite having to fill in for 2–3 different roles throughout the season, depending on who he was playing instead of. Ignoring the one week when he couldn’t turn up to play and didn’t notify me on time, scheduling with Xhasper was a breeze and he was always ready. I’ll admit that that week was one of the very few moments with the team that upset me, but my god did Xhasper go on to make up for it. After that, he was always readily available, oftentimes being ready to play with as little as a couple hours notice because of my awful sleeping patterns. With some of the uncertainty about who was going to be available for what game, Xhasper often was available for matches he didn’t even play, which I felt really bad about. At the start of the season, as a less experienced player Xhasper didn’t have the deepest hero pool, but he excelled on heroes like Phoenix and got a lot better at laning and playing with the team as the season progressed. Eventually we figured out that he’s a godly fucking Ogre, and the greatest part of having Xhasper on the team was that even if someone couldn’t make it, I (and honestly most of the team) felt comfortable just playing Xhasper instead of looking for standins. Seriously, I’m not joking when I say that he could easily get Legend or higher just spamming some Ogre or Phoenix or whatever. Genuinely doubt that a lot of captains can confidently say that about their sixth players. Another easy going and friendly teammate, he rounded out the great atmosphere in the team and was a great 6th.
Madsen — I won’t lie, between having no motivation for the game, having the least time to prepare and having my first year of uni start midseason, I wasn’t thrilled to captain. I like to think, however, that I fulfilled that job pretty well, with some shortcomings, like slacking on scrims after uni started, because it seemed like some of us were becoming pretty busy and I always hated dealing with scheduling. My absolutely abysmal sleep schedule didn’t help, either. I think a big part of why I tried pretty hard to be a good captain — especially at the start of the season — was that I replaced my fleeting motivation for Dota with being motivated to have the team succeed. This was especially true of the first weeks, where I did my best to set everything up properly to make everything easier for the team.
Having lost in previous playoffs with some catastrophic throws, which were mostly my fault, I was pretty scared that it’d be the same, if not worse, considering I didn’t really play as much anymore. This wasn’t helped by my PC dying midway through the season, which meant I had to switch to being a laptop gamer. Really though, with a team like this it would’ve been an impressive feat, even for me, to throw a season, even though I did try my best at some points lol. The interesting part, however, was that this motivation for the team made me focus pretty hard on the officials, and having a team to keep me on a tighter leash than before, I played some of the best games I’ve ever played in RD2L, atleast in groups, since my tiny brain always starts to initiate mode: choke as soon as I see a playoff bracket. I think I’m most upset that a lot of the issues that described me as a player still stuck around. I still didn’t feel comfortable outside playing things outside of “Madsen heroes”, I still made stupid, rash mistakes for no real reason, I still ego trip on the regular, I still get tilted and become insanely quiet and that still hurts the team atmosphere. Just like before, there needed to be a coordinated team effort to pull me out of the tilt shadow realm, much like Yugi did with his grandpa. I think the most frustrating part of all of that is being well aware of it but still not being able to do anything about it when it happens. Now that I’m done pitying myself, I’m a god tier Tiny and y’all fools for not banning it earlier. Anyway, the team made a lot of things very easy for me, though — after games and scrims they’d always stick around to listen to my long winded, nonsensical monologues, they’d do their best to make scheduling easy, they communicated with me and between themselves whenever we had to make a team decision, and overall, my only regret is that I couldn’t push them a tiny bit further in order to really have them progress as players and reach their full potential, which was really hard considering that I wasn’t really playing enough myself to facilitate that. Something I found pretty interesting is that I felt a lot of confidence when making a decision as a captain, both from myself and from the team, which I appreciated a lot because it made me feel respected at times where I’m trying to just do my best in a new situation. This did lead to me making mistakes that in one way or another damaged or upset my players and I’m sorry for that. I’m very proud of the team and I’m sorry that I sometimes wasn’t the best of captains, but overall I think I did passably well as a first timer…though I’m not too keen on doing it again.
A note for future captains (tl;dr)
In case you are considering picking one of these players but don’t want to read through the whole novel, you can get a simplified recap of things that you might find important here.
Thanks for reading, cheers for the great season lads, hope to see you all stick around in RD2L. GG, remember to stay hydrated.
