This is my first blog and I’m not much of a writer but I’ll try my best. I’ll be writing about ESWC, Dreamhack and our team’s future.

ESWC

Preparation

Going into ESWC we had around 15 scrims of practice vs DK and IG with our stand-in, bulba-saur (shoutout to an awesome guy and player). This was more or less the first time we practiced since August as there was a low amount of tournament games after TI2 and people don’t want to take school off to practice.

Once we were there, there was no way for us to “warm up” on extra computers at ESWC or lan cafes. So all we could do was plan stuff from the knowledge we had of NAVI while at the hotel room.

Lan experience

As most people know, ESWC was our first lan. Match gameplay wasn’t affected that much, in my opinion Aui actually played better on lan than he does online. I feel like the rest of us and the overall team play was affected negatively even if just slightly, small things do count in high level DotA.

Things I learned at my first LAN:

- If you don’t bring your gear you’re a dumbass (me)

- If you have a small monitor (like me) be prepared to be mindfucked by a big monitor

- Be prepared to shout at the top of your lungs

- Try your damn best to get a sleeping schedule oriented towards your match times when you travel

- There’s a high chance that when you travel to big lan events you’ll get really sick, do everything you can to prevent that

Losing & conclusion

I’ll get straight to the point. We lost to NAVI 0-2, and it was not an easy loss for us, we really wanted to win. We all returned from Paris sick and demoralized but with newfound experience and knowledge. Every professional DotA player hates losing but has to learn from it if they want to continue and attempt to reach their goal of winning The International.

Dreamhack

Preparation

Everyone on our team was sick, but we had a small amount of time to practice with Sneyking before we went to Sweden. We started practicing right when we got back from Paris and I could barely move/talk from being so sick. But we needed to practice desperately and people would be busy with school and dealing with other things in life during most of the time leading up to Dreamhack.

Unfortunately we barely got any practice in and the few times we did it ended up being terrible. I remember a teammate saying after our last scrim “we’re going to Dreamhack like this” in disappointment. We knew we were in poor shape before we played there, but I did not think about it once we were there since there was nothing we could do to change that fact.

Lan experience

- You could hear the other teams if they spoke loudly:

1. EG shouted “nice nice nice nice” at the top of their lungs everytime they got a kill or tower which I suppose affected the enemy negatively and themselves positively

2. Someone from Fnatic & one of us gave away when they were smoking/roshing/sometimes ganking.

3. NTH played mind games by shouting false information on occasion (which didn’t affect the outcome but it was funny)

-My old keyboard doesn’t work with new computers, time to use a new one

-Time to buy that new monitor since I need to get used to giant monitor size

Our team’s Future

After our loss to NAVI at ESWC and not even placing in Dreamhack (losing to Fnatic.EU and Team Empire) obviously something needs to change. What exactly? Practicing is probably the biggest thing that needs to change, but that’s pretty simple and straightforward, everyone would be better individually, our teamwork would be better as well as our picks. What else… Roles? Players? Maybe, maybe not. That’s something we don’t know yet but are discussing openly as a team. Obviously, as professional DotA players our goal is to win The International.

We need to figure out as a team if every player has potential to win ti3 and if they have the time to dedicate towards practice. Every player that gets invited is incredibly talented and the competition will be fierce (competition - a big reason why DotA playersOne things for certain, everyone that’s on Team Dignitas will continue to improve as well as other teams aiming for ti3 . Game on.