Editor’s note: The English has been cleaned up for readability in this interview.

Using English was the biggest problem, as well as cultural differences because I lived in Korea exclusively my entire life. and didn't try to learn English at all before joining team secret.

Behind the scenes, the way we played Dota was different. The meta kept changing due to patch changes after each major, and we had differences in how we believed the game should be played. Ultimately, we had a change in roster, with me being booted first, followed by March. Even though March was team captain, this decision was voted upon by the team democratically.

Haha, how could I have rejected it? Of course I had to move on.

Well.. making a stack

[sic]

before TI ( 2 weeks ago) was really hard first of all, because everyone already had a team which wanted to try winandrain, unlike last year

[sic]

. Last year, we had 1 month to practice, so we bootcamped and had enough time to set everything into place.

This year, I made the same deal with some Korean investor that I did with windandrain. So we went on to bootcamp on the 18th of June. We practiced in Korea for 2 weeks until July 1st. After that, we moved to Singapore and played a qualifier at a netcafe. The process and the result has been much greater than I expected.

We didn’t have much time to set a team strategy and stay on the same page. Falling just one step short of making it to TI is...still a nightmare. Whenever I wake up I keep reminding myself what I could have done better in terms of draft and play. I then use these moments as a lesson that will give me the opportunity to learn more. It was an amazing experience and I deserved to lose. I wanted to say, good luck at TI to all the Mineski players. Hopefully you guys do a great job at TI, much like OG did, because they beat us in the grandfinals, as well.

laughs.

Experience is a justification, and plays a big impact whether it be a short few hours to several years; if we had one more week to practice, our pool of strategies would have been much different.

No comments on the Korean investor, haha, because I failed to give the money back to them.

They banned a lot of my heroes during the draft. We were tunnel visioned, even though we picked Viper. My play could have been better and I could have itemized better, too. I should have gone Crimson Guard instead of Pipe, etc.

Game 4, I could have played Underlord, but we chose Ench again. I kind of fucked up during the laning phase and failed at snowballing. We lacked waveclear and had critical failures in certain map movements.

I just stayed true to my word. A year ago, when 23savage was around rank 300, he asked me about being in the same team in the pro scene during a pub game. I just told him to become top 5 and I will consider it. Amazingly, he made #1 at 9.3k MMR in March-April this year.

After I got kicked from Jstorm, I was thinking about playing with him in this qualifier, and he was first priority.

Uhm...I did try other games with some high ranked players (like Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends) maybe 2.5 years ago. For example, I played with the rank 1, 2 and 3 teams on the leaderboard in HotS and Challengers in LoL. There were 9-10 people total. All of them said learning Dota would take a year or longer for them, and they were already thriving in their current scene, so I gave up on that.

Dota is a really hard game for beginners, even though they are so talented. Worse yet, in Korea, we don’t even have a server (lost it 4 years ago). We’d need to play on the SEA server with 120ms delay (and not even stable at that). You can reduce it to 70ms or so with a VPN, but realistically it feels like a 90-100ms delay.

We need to register to Chinese servers with a Chinese phone number to play there, and a Korean player also needs to learn Mandarin to adjust.

It’s...a really awful environment - so we don’t have a large player pool and people are not even willing to try, save a small few. If I was a Korean organization CEO or something, I also wouldn’t invest in the Korean Dota scene to raise it up, like publishing a server, etc

[sic]

.

The meta changed a bit after TI qualifiers - the biggest thing being Stout Shield. I guess summoner heroes will arise more like NP, Chen, Brood, Enigma. Cutting waves is also a bit hard because you lose a lot of HP from creeps. If Pos5

[sic]

chases there, it’s hard to handle it and there’s a high chance to die.

I’m rooting for so many teams, since I have friends there on multiple teams. Seriously, predicting TI champions is a really stupid thing

laughs

. Nobody knows what will happen.

Real quick, I just want to say that I love all my fans and that faith has been much stronger than before. After I failed at TI, I suffered depression and mental illness I guess (although I didn’t go to the hospital). After I wrote a tweet about possibly needing to stay away from Dota 2 (...it was really hard handling it), so many fans and friends cheered me up.

At the end, I stopped up again and am now practising Dota super hard for next season. That’s it.

If you would like to know more about my work, you can follow me at. You can head over to our Dota 2 hub for more content. Headline image courtesy: PGL