Overall Thoughts

My apologies for taking so long to write this team review. I wanted to put a bit of effort into it and writing time always seemed to hard to find recently.

All in all, this season was a bit of a disappointment for me. Being my first time captaining, and potentially my only time captaining (it’s unclear if I’ll have time next season), I really made an effort at the start to make sure this season went well. I spent lots of time prepping for the draft and, for the most part, the draft went well. Most other RD2L folks thought we had a good team that could preform well and make a good run. While our 5–11 record may indicate we were terrible, we started out the season going 5–5 and were definitely in the playoff hunt until our back to back losses in weeks six and seven, knocking us out of the playoffs.

After some reflection, our team seems like a classic example of a good group of players doing poorly due to a lack of direction. Ultimately, this is my responsibility and I realized our lack of in-game leadership too late in the season to make any adjustments. My apologies fellas, that is on me. Our team simply lacked a firm direction, especially in the middle parts of the game and our team setup made addressing that quite challenging. I would have liked to address this with more scrims, but unfortunately we couldn’t ever get scrims in with the entire team because both of my 4s weren’t available, though for different reasons. I kind of assumed that I’d do my best to lead the team after the laning stage and leave the late game shot calling to PF and to a certain extent that worked fine. The problem is that we had no mid game cohesion at all. This is a pretty typical of net worth graphs in games we lost.

The story here is that we’d do well in the laning stage, fumble away our net worth lead, then either come back from behind or just lose, more often the latter. I had hoped that we could navigate by consensus during these parts, but, as my bud The Mantis says, “a fist is stronger than five fingers.” Advice, I should have heeded more strongly this season. If I choose to captain next season, I am going to prioritize either a 3 or a 4 at some point in the first 3 rounds in the draft who can help me lead the team during the mid game. Or I can just accept that I need to be a bit more of a hard-ass and make calls, even if I know they aren’t perfect. With all that said, here are some player reviews.

Potato Farmer

(Divine 5 -> Immortal)

Before the start of the season, I spent a lot of time researching and asking folks about the pool of top tier players I knew I’d be able to pick from. The impression that I got from what I read was that PF was good but had a tendency to tilt and potentiality would be a negative influence in game. After playing a season with him, I really don’t understand those criticisms at all. Indeed, PF was a pleasure to play with and would easily recommend him. He was consistently available to scrim, communicated well, and willing to talk through strategy, all of which I value highly as a captain. His play was what you’d expect from a Immortal player (read: good).

I don’t have much to offer in terms of advice for PF, though the only suggestion I have is to try to look beyond heroes that are considered ‘good’ or in meta in RD2L. There were a few times where I felt that certain heroes were discouraged because you felt they weren’t good in the abstract. You’re correct, but in RD2L, I don’t think those power level differences matter to the level they might in your pubs. Comfort and synergy matter much more.

To anyone thinking of drafting PF, especially if you are a lower MMR captain, I’d recommend prioritizing a player that can dictate tempo early on. When you draft a safe lane carry with your first pick, they are going to need to focus on getting farm so they can come online and not on making strategic calls in the early and mid game. I didn’t realize this until too late in the season and it definitely cost us a few wins in the season because we didn’t have team direction after the laning stage. This isn’t a fault of PF by any means, it is just something you’d need to plan for in your player draft.

Emu

(Ancient 3 -> Ancient 5)

Even though we run in the same circle, I didn’t play with Emu all that much before this season. I’m pleased to say drafting Emu was another decision I am very happy with. Apparently he can sometimes flame, though the only time I’ve seen the flame is when Steven decided to cancel Dark Rift in a team fight at the very last moment (without telling Emu) and killed him as a result (I blame Steven). Really though Emu was a wonderful teammate and a stellar player. Again, he was communicative, available to scrim, was always willing to theorycraft with me and most importantly was a great mid laner. Looking back at our ticketed games, out of the 13 games available, he lost his lane only twice. In a league where the middle lane is critical and is full of high skill mid laners, I think that is a pretty good result.

Honestly, it’s hard to find bad things to say about Emu. If there is one suggestion I’d provide to him is to be more proactive making calls early on when the situation provides for it. The mid lane can be a position where they need to direct the pace of the game due to the power spike of their particular hero (obviously), and there where times during the season when I think you could have been more proactive leading the team after a good start. I don’t think this is essential by any means, but could be something to keep in mind if you’re looking for something to improve on.

Varona

(??? -> ???)

Honestly, I am pretty conflicted with how I feel about Varona this season. There were times where he played like a god (any Pango game, for example) but there were other times where it felt like he had very little impact (not getting a blink on Cent). Varona is not a talkative player, which is problematic because he is at his best on heroes that are good initiators and have early power spikes. That isn’t to say Varona was a bad teammate, he was pretty responsive, had some good strategic insight and was generally a good teammate, though there were a couple times where I felt he flamed his 4s (I realize, though, it is tough to not work with the same lane partner each game). His cat, Greg, became somewhat of an unofficial mascot for the team and was hilariously loud and would often come through on his mic.

I wanted to put him on heroes that scale well, especially in the tri core meta, but he admittedly isn’t the best farmer in the world so I didn’t draft those for him. He did go off on certain heroes, in particular his Pango and Axe were always excellent and did a great job of catching up after lanes that didn’t go well. On the flip side, though, I found that there were lane match ups that I thought were good for him, but that he wasn’t able to capitalize on.

Part of the reason I think Varona didn’t perform as well as I would have hoped is that he just didn’t really play much DOTA beyond our matches and scrims. In the entirety of the RD2L season, he only played one pub game outside games with the team. That isn’t a recipe for playing super well. He does have a lot of experience with the game (4k games played), but he didn’t practice at all on his own and, honestly, it showed. If I were a captain considering him in another season, I’d make sure he is actively playing again.

The Law

(Ancient 2 -> Ancient 3)

The Law, or PK as he sometimes goes by, was a great addition to the team. He was very relaxed, friendly, and generally played pretty well (our win percentage with him was much better with him than our other 4, though he is more skilled than Suney). His hero pool is mostly position 5 heroes, but that was fine and we drafted accordingly. The biggest issue with The Law was that he raided in WoW Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week and that, combined with Suney Bick’s unreliability, meant that we couldn’t ever realistically scrim (most of us were busy on Friday, Saturday & Sunday). We were able to fit in some scrims on Monday occasionally, but his tight schedule made it challenging. I can’t fault him too much here since scrims are not mandatory at all. If an admin reads this, as a captain, it would be helpful to have somewhere a player can put their schedule in the player sign up form so a captain can see if they are available at the same times you are. Overall, would definitely draft him again.

Suney Bick

(Legend 2 -> Legend 2)

I don’t think this dude really understood how RD2L works. He was totally unresponsive outside of official matches, where he was quite friendly and a good teammate. He never checked Discord, never responded to requests to schedule scrims, missed at least one official match that I can remember, and no-showed for one scrim that I explicitly planned with him the Sunday prior. He only plays core, which is fine and drafted him knowing that he’d have to play out of his comfort zone, but my efforts to draft around him were very unsuccessful. Nice guy in game but the lack of communication was very frustrating. Again, if an admin reads this, I think some sort of ‘code of communication’ would be nice to be able to point to when a new player comes into the league. I think it’s fair to expect as a captain to get a hold of someone with 48 hours to see if they can scrim or not. It doesn’t have to be a rule with punishment, but some sort of guideline would be nice to have.

That’s all folks. I want to thank my team for a good, though unsuccessful season. I wish you all the best in future seasons. Thanks to Bjorn for standing in during scrims. Thank you to the admins for all the work you do. Hopefully I’ll see you all next season.