League of the Ancients 2 April 23rd, 2016 21:17 GMT Text by Ver DotaPit Season 4 Playoff Preview Table of Contents

Intro

Dota Is a-changing



The Truth of Rubberband: Pubs

An Example Looking at a Pub



The Lies of KDA

Does KDA really matter anymore?



Rubberband Repercussions

Or "How to not consider 2nd and 3rd order ramifications"



Hero Balance Repercussions

Balancing Heroes In The Era of Rubberbanding



What We Lost

The Ghost of Patches Past



A Call to Arms

Let's Make Dota Interesting Again



Dota Is a-changingAn Example Looking at a PubDoes KDA really matter anymore?Or "How to not consider 2nd and 3rd order ramifications"Balancing Heroes In The Era of RubberbandingThe Ghost of Patches PastLet's Make Dota Interesting Again



Icefrog is synonymous with Dota. He is the brilliant game designer who transformed the Warcraft 3 mod from a mess of ideas from various contributors to an extraordinarily successful casual and competitive stand alone game. He is also the biggest mystery in Dota. Just who is Icefrog: Bruno? An ordinary Chinese gentleman? The butler next door?





But more relevant to you, the gamers and the spectators; how do you know Icefrog is still in charge of patching Dota? What if he’s been fired? What if he tragically died in an accident but is still being used like big brother? What if the entire “James is an ass” incident was staged to prop up the illusion that “Icefrog” is still in charge? Or perhaps Icefrog has lost his autonomy and Dota is now subject to design by committee?



“Why joke about such a crazy conspiracy theory?” you might ask. Simple: Dota is a-changing. The changes are as subtle as they have been consistent: for the past year and a half, Icefrog has quietly patched Dota in a new direction compared to the previous 9 or so years. That direction is clear: Dota is slowly moving from an extraordinarily intricate and complex game towards a simplistic hero brawler along the lines of League of Legends and worse, Heroes of the Storm. Games are becoming more static in nature compared to previous years, and players are encouraged to take less risks. No, this isn’t doomsday, but given the consistency of recent patches it’s unlikely the transformation will slow or stop unless we the community become more aware of it and do something about it.



The clearest indication of all this is quite simple: the effort required to make a comeback is far too small compared to the difficulty of building a lead. This creates very damaging second and third order repercussions that are not always obvious. For players who began dota before 2015, the current comeback mechanics (where kills when at a net-worth disadvantage give much larger bounties than kills at an advantage) go against our hard-won instinct. We’ve reached an extreme where one hero kill 8 minutes into a game can match the gold swing of a tower.



The comeback mechanics, which were originally implemented in response to the fast deathball pushes of TI4 Grand Finals, were never necessary in the first place. Those strong pushes were the result of a lot of already-strong deathball and pushing heroes being buffed at around the same time; there was no fundamental flaw with the game that minor glyph and tower changes could not fix. In fact, TI4 actually had enormous strategic diversity outside of the very last, yet highest profile two series.



The Truth of Rubberband: Pubs Most people know that rubberbanding exists, but aren’t aware of quite how powerful it is since it runs counter to all their instincts about dota. Let's look at an example. Here is a typical 6.86 Miracle pub game on EU servers: he’s blasting Russian-account-boosted players off the map. Not surprisingly, Miracle takes a large lead as Juggernaut in the laning phase, going 9-0-5 and giving his team an 8000 gold lead. Then he kills an isolated Witch Doctor, but dies as the enemy rotates all 4 other heroes in a desperate attempt to get that juicy, undeserved rubberband gold. What were the results?





Miracle earned 271 gold for the kill on the WD (271+40 for track=the stated 311). The enemy team earned 1943 gold for the counter-kill. Miracle is 10-0. It would take him 8 kills (yeah they were all around the same value) to surpass the same income as 1 kill on him. Why should good players have to outplay their foes with an 8:1 ratio? Yes Miracle does earn more overall since he gets gold earlier, which he can translate into faster farm, and loses less gold to deaths overall, but the point still holds. The penalty for dying just once is absurd.



Now how does it factor overall? Miracle’s team worked hard to get their 8k lead, having to repeatedly hide and kill the enemy on over a dozen occasions over many minutes. The enemy team chipped off 25% of that lead in a few seconds by rotating every hero to kill a single juggernaut because he went in a bit too far.



But still, justice prevails. 6 minutes later, Miracle’s team continues to outplay their account-boosted foes and get a 4 for 1 trade. How much do they earn (ignoring track)?





Miracle’s team, discounting the 840 gold from track, earns 1400 gold. Subtracting the Dire's 62 gold earned, that makes a net positive of 1338 gold for their dominating 4 for 1 victory. But wait, you may ask: something’s wrong, isn’t that way less than the enemy got for killing Miracle earlier? Absolutely, just compare the values: the net value of the even 1 for 1 on Miracle earlier was 1943-271=1672 gold, while here the radiant’s much more lopsided 4 for 1 victory was only worth 1338g, a net difference of 334g to the dire's 1 for 1 trade.

Apparently, it's now better in Dota to make a 1 for 1 trade than a 4 for 1. Experience wise, note that the enemy team, at an earlier point in the game (less XP to give), earned 1201 XP net for the 1 for 1 trade on Miracle. Now the trade is a 4 for 1, later in the game, where the experience rewards should be higher as everyone is higher level, and Miracle’s team earns 1688 XP net; just 487 XP more after a 4 for 1 trade versus a 1 for 1. One of those is a lot harder than the other, yet the rewards do not match.



In summary, for each of his 10 kills Miracle earned approximately 1/8th of the gold that the enemy got from his 1 death. In the same game, Miracle’s team earned less gold and barely more XP for winning a 4 for 1, despite higher levels overall, than the enemy got for trading a 1 for 1. This is nothing more than a tax on being good. Only one thing needs to be said. To Icefrog: ?

The Lies of KDA Though not everything, your kill score is often a barometer; a reasonable approximation for how things are going. What is a good score to have in dota? 15-3? Most people would consider that an excellent score, the mark of a high impact player who got large amounts of gold for himself and gave away little to his foes. This, however, is an illusion. Our intuitions have not adjusted properly to the current realities of the game. Kill score, unless it is a two digit number along with 0 deaths, is a virtually meaningless indicator of success or failure. Everything depends on the rubberband values of each kill and death.



At the recent Starladder i-League Invitational tournament VG.R demolished Na`Vi 3-1 in the Grand Finals. During game 3, after a disastrous 0-3 opening Mikasa’s Queen of Pain turned it around with





The 6000 extra networth for VG.R came from 15 kills and the 4600 network for NaVi came from 3 deaths

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Mikasa’s brilliant 15-3 midgame performance, with a kill-to-death ratio of 5 to 1 which by any reasonable metric is a score of total domination, gives him only a slight advantage. It isn’t hard to extrapolate that if he was 15-4 he would have barely broken even, and at 15-5 he would have given away more gold to Navi than VG.R earned from his kills, despite having 3 times the kills. Let’s not even get into what would happen if his team had had a real lead; VG.R spent the midgame with a lead ranging from 0 to 10,000 gold, which is almost nothing these days. The worst part is, had Mikasa not began the game at such a deficit and benefited from extra rubberband gold in his early kills, this disparity likely would have been even worse.



Obviously, kills provide many intangible benefits on top of simply rewarding the killing team with gold and costing the dying hero some amount of unreliable gold. When a hero is dead their team loses initiative around the map, which can compound into less vision, less control,and a greater farm advantage for the enemy. More kills will give you more intangible benefits than less kills, often linearly, excepting that if you are doing well and die, your death penalty will be much harsher in both cost and time.



Before 2015, kills really never gave that much XP or gold: their worth came mostly from the intangibles stated above. You might only get a small amount from a kill directly, but the enemy would lose a lot of ground and your team would similarly gain extra farming space. Now, kills at the right moments provide ungodly amounts of gold, enough to make the intangibles virtually trivial in comparison. While farming efficiency is still important, high-networth or streak kills occupy a very disproportionate amount of networth relative to the effort involved. People look at networth charts and praise players for their farming efficiency, but what they should be really praising them for are difficult plays like



When the gain from 15 kills can be mostly neutralized by 3 deaths and almost completely offset by 4 deaths, something is very very wrong with the game.



Rubberband Repercussions The tricky thing about balancing a game as complicated as dota is that seemingly innocent changes have significant 2nd and 3rd order ramifications, especially in the professional matches. With rubberbanding, things aren’t so simple as the (assumed) intended goal of reducing snowballing and changing the cancerous pub mentality of giving up after first blood. If teams must struggle for 20-30 minutes to build up a lead that they can very easily lose in 1-2 minutes, they will naturally adjust. If the losing team can also knock off huge chunks instantly from a large deficit if they counter an aggressive solo kill attempt or risky farming play, players will adopt in ways to maximize their chance of this. Unfortunately as we will see, these adaptations aren’t better for the spectator or the player.



From a pub standpoint, the biggest effect of heavily punishing cores for taking risks is that sticking together as 5 becomes an epidemic. The logical response to the tax currently in place on being ahead is to take far fewer risks to ensure that tax won't be collected. After all, rubberband only takes effect if you die. Cores have always balanced the reward from farming a bit further against the chance that they are caught and killed. With the penalties of dying being so astronomically high, the risk of you getting caught has to be virtually zero to make it worth farming an extra wave or hard camp.





A 30k/30k lead, 45-12, a well-deserved victory against a dumpster Dire team who was yelling at each other and intentionally feeding all game. Until the Dire get 3300 for a single pickoff, then proceed to hold high ground with the extra funds and win the game in a couple minutes. There were no throws, just two failed attempts to high ground and one pickoff - nevermind that the dire got picked off 3 times immediately after this picture, but these only gave back a fraction of the gold as this one Razor death.

If you would give away 1.5-3k gold & XP for getting picked off (a normal amount when you have a sizable lead), you are incentivized to farm an area with 0% chance of death or for your team to position in such a way that you would come away with a lopsided victory in any possible engagement - such as by camping 4 heroes behind a carry. In the past, top carry players would skirt the line between being ganked and pushing out lanes deep into enemy territory to increase the pressure and create more space. Oftentimes they’d even try to make a solo kill or 2 man gank behind enemy lines. It was this type of risky play that made the old DK so exciting to watch, as we will see later on. Now if you do that when ahead, you risk losing a huge chunk of your lead in the blink of an eye. People still do it, but boy do they pay when they guess wrong.





LGD.Maybe sees an opportunity to get a quick pick, but unluckily for him Mind_Control's boys were huddled up pretty close and managed to catch Maybe before he got away. The result is Maybe's team trading 2 for 2, losing 3k out of their 12k lead for this supposedly somewhat "even" trade.

Think about this: if you are behind and can trade 2 for 2, or 1 for 1 as in the Miracle example earlier, and remove a quarter of your deficit, you are going to put yourself in that situation whenever possible. Why bother taking a risk pushing 3 towers when you can get the same rewards by hiding behind one of your farming heroes and looking for even trades? In the past if you were behind you had to take risks to get back into the game, but now all you do is 4 or 5 man, hide heroes behind 1 or 2 farmers, and jump out if anyone tries to kill them. This isn't taking a risk; this is playing extremely safe and it works. Because even the very best pros can be baited into taking risks and by sticking together as 5 you punish them obscenely hard. This is why high mmr 5 stack games are simply not fun to play anymore. The moment a team falls behind, they'll just 5 man for eternity praying that the enemy tries to gank, get a kill, or (god forbid) do anything other than fight 5v5. This 5 man strategy is not difficult to beat. It just requires extreme patience to sit around and farm the map for 20 minutes after acquiring a lead. Let's see how the masters do it.





Some pro teams are hot blooded and will take crazy risks regardless of the patch, but at the very highest level there has been a gradual shift in the direction of safer play when ahead. Amidst all the fanfare about Sumail’s flashy plays and thrown games, Aui’s cancer heroes and PPD’s nonexistent networth, 2015 EG innovated in a way that few ever noticed. Beginning with DAC, EG perfected the safest way of using an advantage to close out a game: afk farming in the jungle for 20+ minutes. The problem that other teams would run into is that after they built a massive lead over 30-40 minutes, they would try to breach high ground and lose half that lead within 2 minutes. All the buildup was for nothing because they were too impatient with a 20,000+ lead.









Sadly, the only thing that lead meant was that their deaths were worth 1,500-2,000 gold each. The more of a lead you build, the more you give back. Instead of the previous status quo where the bigger your lead, the more allowances you had to screw up, now you get roughly the same amount of screwups allowed no matter how far ahead you are. It’s unintuitive, but that’s how it is. Naturally, the best teams adapted. Here’s how:









Even back in early 2015, ppd knew better than everyone else: it was wiser to never attempt to go high ground and rather play safely. Taking it to the logical conclusion, the optimal way to play was to never take any risks, assert control around the map, and to farm, and farm, and farm some more until the enemy got bored and left their base. If EG ever dropped their guard and the enemy scored a pickoff, they farmed another 5 minutes to make up for it. Unfortunately for spectators, it meant EG games were regularly snoozefests. If the other team decided to play ball, great, EG would crush them outside the base. If the enemy utilized the highly effective tactic of hiding in base and waiting for EG to make an egregious error, they were out of luck. EG were the paragon of patience and farmed to a 30k lead for multiple hexes before taking barracks’ off of kills when the enemy finally had to leave their base after an eternity of EG’s slow suffocating farm strategy. But that meant we got to “enjoy” some games which averaged 1 kill per team every 10 minutes in the midgame.





This game set a new record for the midgame: 2 kills in 18 minutes.

At TI5 LGD copied this approach to be extra sure that they beat Empire. The game was effectively over at 20 minutes: 3-19, total map control, and a 15,000 gold lead thanks to Bounty Hunter. But Empire had a nasty high-ground defense with Magnus, Dazzle, and Tusk, and LGD didn’t want to risk any chance of losing what was an assured win. LGD did what they had to in order to cement the win they had justly earned: farm the jungle tightly as a team until their lead was big enough that Empire couldn’t possibly hold. Fans and likely players as well hated it, as it meant 27 minutes of patient boredom for everyone, but this is the optimal way to play. Just as optimal as it was for Secret, oppositely, to ride their way to a Frankfurt Major 2nd place by picking Ember/Magnus and cowering in their base except to use smokes whenever they fell behind.



The bigger the lead you have, the less risks you can afford to take, when logically it should be the opposite. Otherwise what is your reward for playing well early? Obviously all strategy is lineup dependent, and this type of play isn't always possible, but it is disturbingly effective and often necessary. Note that not every team follows this formula EG and LGD set. Sometimes they get away with it, but many teams have paid a very harrowing price for straying from the EG formula.





VG.R thinks that because they have a 7,500 gold lead with strong early game heroes, they should try to close the game instead of farming the jungle for 20 minutes. And they lose 5,000 of that 7,500 gold for doing so, which gives LGD a new lease on life with almost no effort required.

This "afk farm as a team for 20 minutes" works, but it is absolutely not fun to play or to watch. And good luck trying to emulate it in a solo pub game. Some clown on your team will walk out of position and feed away several minutes of a farming advantage in several seconds. Of course, this cuts both ways, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to huddle as 5 in your base than it is to farm the entire map without ever overextending when you have a lead. And it doesn’t matter much if the trailing team feeds a little, since their kills give disproportionately small amounts, but you can be certain that the game will turn around if there are more than a couple deaths on the leading side, no matter how far ahead they were.



Hero Balance Repercussions From a game-design perspective, these comeback mechanics make hero balance a nightmare. Take Alchemist: the hero is designed to get a lead and close it out. His free extra gold makes up for his awful stats, slow animations, and fat hero model. But with rubberbanding he is punished disproportionately hard for his strengths. I’ve fed over 3,500 gold as an Alch before in one death. You do that twice and your massive lead is barely a lead at all, given Alchemist’s inability to translate gold into power as efficiently as other heroes can.





As a result, the mantra of never ever die or takes risks is doubly true for Alchemist players because you cannot afford to feed away huge amounts of rubberband gold to your opponent’s stronger lategame to networth ratio. Not surprisingly, after 6.83 Alch was terrible. Rather than a fast-scaling carry, you instead have a walking ATM for the enemy team. He would take farm away from his team like any other carry but instead of paying his team back for the space, he’d donate inordinate wads of cash to the enemy team.





Icefrog’s solution in 6.85, which made Alch viable in the spirit of dota (the imbalanced strengths he has so brilliantly designed) was to buff Alch’s gold gain considerably (huge $ for bounty runes and extra from greevil’s greed). Thus Alch could achieve even more absurd item timings and close out games by 20 minutes. But this created two extremely binary outcomes, separated by a razor’s edge: if Alch doesn’t die more than once or so for each major teamfight victory, his team gets way too far ahead, and he is too much for the enemy to handle due to being 10,000-15,000 gold ahead of anybody else on the map. However, if Alch makes more than 1-2 mistakes per major victory, he feeds away so much gold that the enemy PPD-esque 6th position support is now as rich as your offlaner. Combined with Alch’s poor lategame scaling, comebacks are easy against Alch. Instead of an intricate game, filled with lots of room to outplay and allowance of mistakes for both sides, the game is reduced to a couple of key moments where Alch did or did not die.



The true picture is not quite this simple, but dota was far closer to this extreme than it has ever been. Naturally, Icefrog was forced to nerf Alch’s gold gain because if he didn’t die before a certain point he was unstoppable. Yet since the comeback mechanics remained, games with Alchemist are still disproportionately affected by a few key moments of whether Alch lives or dies. It is telling that rubberbanding murdered Alch’s hero advantages so badly that Icefrog was forced to buff him in such an extreme way to make him viable, which in turn created other inescapable problems.





Now take Spectre, who is the exact opposite. Spectre is the ultimate example of a hero unable to handle any pressure. Her laning phase against more than 1 hero is a nightmare, but Spectre is probably also the most powerful lategame hero. In the past, for Spectre to be good she needed some way to get ahead in the laning phase or at least not too far behind and then have her team create space in the midgame. But now as we’ve seen with rubberbanding, Spectre’s laning phase is almost completely irrelevant. The more she gets dominated in lane, the more she earns from kills with haunt in the midgame.





This is reflected in the popularity of Manta+Diffusal item builds, a historic change for Spectre. Radiance, always the go-to item on choice on Spectre, has never been as powerful as it is right now: it cuts the entire enemy team’s attack damage by 17%, as well as doing massive burn damage, accelerating Spectres farm massively, and disabling blinks. Yet all top spectres have been going Manta+Diffusal despite achieving very poor farm as a result since they lack the farming mechanic granted by Radiance. But with rubberbanding being so strong, is it really that important to farm creeps? After all, a couple of comeback hero kills is worth many dozens of creeps. In essence, Spectres now are going an inferior item build that does less except in a brief window, simply because the benefit of getting key midgame rubberband kills is so worth it that other considerations fade to insignificance.



In professional games there is more subtlety than in a pub where you can literally 5-man for the entire game with no repercussions, but the principle still holds. MVP.Phoenix vs Fnatic is a hilarious example to see in its extremity: MVP plays a patch-conscious lineup on the “hide in base with a spectre” plan, while Fnatic plays a low margin of error, map-wide domination draft that relies on outplaying the hell out of their opponents every second of the game. We say MVP has outdrafted Fnatic, but boy does Fnatic does outplay MVP. MVP is completely starved of space and lowers their ambitions to merely farming one hard camp a minute while spending the rest of the game huddled on the high ground in their base. Every time they leave that safety, they die. Fnatic get few kills but they completely own the map.



Then Fnatic make a game losing mistake. They try to push highground but Furion accidentally sprouts Ursa and Lion’s keyboard malfunctions. In a masterful display of skill, Spectre successfully presses the R button and is rewarded with a 5 man wipe. Oops. Forget about Fnatic’s total map dominance and great play so far. There goes a 12k lead. There goes the initiative and aegis. There goes the game, all in 10 seconds.











Fnatic drops 6k gold in one fight - ignore the horizontal line, it is a bug from a pause.

You might say, “They made a mistake, they should be punished.” Yes of course. But making one mistake should not override an entire game of excellent play. One of the great allures of Dota, unlike say Starcraft 2, is that due to the great complexity you get so many chances to gain an edge. One small mistake alone doesn’t undo all your hard work, unless your name is KyXy. Furthermore, MVP did less than nothing to “deserve” this victory. They simply sat in base and prayed. That type of play should never be rewarded; teams who make comebacks should have to work for it.



Here’s what’s worse: after this catastrophe, Fnatic win a decisive 4 for 1 fight with their last gasp. Well, it would have been decisive except they get very little for it.











Fnatic’s 4 man wipe of MVP merely nets them a little over 3k gold, half of what they dropped to Mvp (~600 gold from the Venge kill isn’t counted here).

Just from that Furion misclick, Spectre gets a free Yasha and acres of space to farm, which then allows him get 2 more kills later on plus lots of extra farm, which in turn nets him a Manta by the time of the next fight. Despite Fnatic dominating another fight, MVP’s 3rd-world country supports now are richer than Fnatic’s despite having done nothing but feed and cower near their throne all game. The gold graph becomes a vertical line downward and MVP steals a win.





Yeah, there's no "Ho ho, ha ha" trauma anymore, though I give my condolences to anyone suffering from Post Traumatic Sniper Disorder, but that 6.83 PTSD merely got replaced by a new PTSD - Post Traumatic Spectre Disorder. Even if Spectre gets nerfed, a new cancer will arise to take its place until these kill bounty mechanics are fixed. The hero isn't the problem, it's the system. Oh fine, just for good old times sake:





Welcome to another 30 minutes of Sniper's team hiding in their base because the dire tried to high ground with “only” a 20,000 gold lead. And to top it off, these are the heavily nerfed and reworked 6.86 rubberband values, not 6.83.



What We Lost There is a certain portion of the community that is always going to defend the status quo, no matter the situation. "Oh [6.84] techies is totally fine, everyone is just stupid and doesn't know how to play against it," etc. What these people rarely take into account is that to get the current status quo, something had to be given up. It’s easy to forget the past or recall a distorted version when 6.86 is right in front of us, but we’ve given up a lot since 6.83 that you may not realize.





Back in this 2013 season classic, Alliance takes an early lead with a brilliant level 1 Roshan strat, dominates the lanes, and pressures DK non-stop across the map. Unlike now where attacking the base prematurely against a superior lategame lineup is a death wish, Alliance repeatedly charged into the Great Wall of China to keep the pressure on. DK held brilliantly, and yes Alliance sometimes died, but their deaths didn’t cost them their entire lead, so the risks they took were worth it.









Did you spot MMY’s godlike Rubick play?



On the other side, instead of turtling in their base and maybe adventuring out to farm the hard camp as 5, DK repeatedly smokes out of their base to claw for the initiative, even using multiple early-midgame buybacks to contest Roshan, a technique that is also no longer feasible. Now the only time you can use buyback is to defend base. The overwhelming power of the Storm, Sniper, and Medusa buybacks in DAC forced a huge nerf to buybacks that effectively removed them as a tactical midgame option. But if rubberband gold had not been implemented or was even a fraction of what it currently is, the buyback tactics would have been uneconomical and the nerfs would have never been necessary.







Now we turn to the ultimate dream team: 2014 DK. The era in which DK excelled, 6.79-6.81, was probably the richest, most strategically diverse in Dota history. Even though TI4 had the most strategic diversity of all TI's by a large margin - the image of VG's deathball dismantling EG in 25 minutes and then losing to Newbee in a 90 minute grand finals is permanently cemented in people's minds. Outside of this quick succession of games, however, teams ran extremely diverse strategies and drafts; for example,



Though DK ran every type of strategy ever devised, their signature draft was a dispersed, map-wide domination with heroes who could initiate and win skirmishes. Here against iG, DK accomplished something that nowadays is absolutely impossible: they won against a top team without a teamfight. DK farmed the map in 5 different places, dodged most ganks, then rapidly grouped 2-3 heroes to win small skirmishes. Oftentimes DK would kill 2-3 heroes in completely different places across the map, when 15 seconds before they just had 5 heroes farming.

















Sometimes though, DK would be a teensy bit overaggressive or disperse a bit too much and get caught when they were spread all around the map. Frankly, this is inevitable. DK's strategy relied on them predicting every enemy movement, dodging ganks when their team was never together, keeping lanes constantly pushed, and always having the right number of heroes when the enemy split up to farm. If the most skilled team in dota history couldn't avoid some deaths here and there then nobody can.











Back then, it was okay that DK sometimes lost heroes or lost a fight, because overall they'd be farming so much of the map, getting more pickoffs, and heavily limiting the amount the enemy could safely farm. Dota's brilliant design allowed them run an extremely entertaining strategy of high-risk and high-reward. But if anyone tried to play this style nowadays, even with the same level of skill as the old DK, it simply would not be viable. Because DK's movements, oftentimes pushing deep into enemy territory in groups of 1-2 heroes, lead to inevitable deaths or even trades at times. Any team trying this now would find themselves getting a bunch of pickoffs and a big lead, but then giving away thousands of gold each time they made an even trade or got picked, as the examples earlier in the article clearly show.



Before 2015, if you gave up too much of the map in order to 5 man for long, you'd find yourself many thousands of gold down in just minutes. More gold was available from farming back then. Furthermore, you couldn't recover this lost gold by simply optimizing for static teamfights and winning one or two fights when behind. There was always some rubberbanding in dota from the death penalty, and that's totally fine, but it was much, much smaller back then. So teams were forced to contest the map or simply lose, leading to exciting skirmishes and map wide action.





Here was one of the best games of TI3, and a great example of what was required to make a comeback before 6.83. Due to their superior overall strategy, Alliance took a massive lead in the early game. With LGD so behind and Alliance so efficient, LGD couldn't just lock themselves in base, pray for 2 good RP's and win the game from 20k+ behind through massive kill bounties. Instead, LGD was forced to fight for the initiative and reclaim portions of the map through a series of brilliantly incisive Xiao8-led movements. Had they not done so, Alliance simply could have set 4-5 heroes loose farming and contested LGD anytime they tried to have more than 2 heroes farm. Even if LGD got lucky a few times, Alliance's map-wide domination would ensure their victory.









Xiao8 leaves Magnus and Alchemist visible mid, distracting Alliance from the possibility of a smoke. Then the supports and offlaner predict and kill s4, threaten mid, but actually dive deeper and kill Akke as well. These types of movements are very difficult to do, but back then, very rewarding.



Though this one movement would have cut Alliance's lead into shambles nowadays, LGD had to keep making movements like this throughout the game to recover. Alliance had played a great first 20 minutes, so they deservedly had some leeway. But eventually Alliance was able to stabilize, hold the map, and win in an epic base race. We don't really need hypotheticals of how this game would fare today, because there was actually a rather similar game played between these two teams at the recent Starladder, even with the same captains, that aptly illustrates the progression of Dota.











Unlike the Alliance vs DK game above, where Alliance could take risks early on and not lose all their momentum, one bad exchange erased almost their whole lead and all of their initiative.



Rather than Xiao8 having to divine Alliance's movements and repeatedly put his team in the right place to pick them off and regain the map, LGD adopted a far more simpler and easier strategy: take a nap in their base or 4-5 man outside of it. LGD only attempted one (failed) 3 man smoke, otherwise they sat in base, held highground twice with Ember and Invoker, and then bludgeoned Alliance to death in successive 5v5 clashes using their extra rubberband funds. Unlike the 2013 game, there was no subtlety to LGD's play, because they didn't need it.



Now you may talk about how Alliance was dumb to push and deserved to lose this, but that's the entire point! The game currently rewards teams for not taking risks when ahead and avoiding any chance of giving the other team rubberband gold/xp, which ends up limiting play and railroads teams into lineups that can teamfight well, since only 5v5 teamfights matter if the losing team is always waiting as 5 on the high ground and the winning team is always moving as 5 to farm. And if you are EG, you pick these teamfight lineups and bore your opponent to death.



A Call to Arms Let’s recap and bring all the evidence together. First, the gold and XP kill formula now gives vastly disproportionate results depending on relative networth and kill streaks, leading to situations where the payout from two kills can differ by a factor of ten. Alone, this would not be the end of the world.



The problem is exacerbated because in the past few years Icefrog has consistently nerfed all other sources of gold and experience gain in the game. Ancients were nerfed, the jungle is crippled from what it once was (thanks Alliance), and even lane creeps are noticeably lower in value, not to mention the gold gain from towers. So not only has the intangible value of kills been heavily diminished (extra farming potential), the reward of kills when behind has also been vastly inflated. This means that it takes players longer to build a lead by outfarming the enemy, while needing just seconds to lose huge chunks of that lead if a fight goes bad or the enemy gets a fortunate smoke pickoff. It also means that the losing team is punished far less for simply camping in their base while occasionally being so daring as to farm a hard camp with 5 heroes or randomly smoke as 5. Even if they give up the whole map and just farm waves, they don't fall far behind that quickly, and they can always erase the deficit instantly if they catch a stray hero or the enemy fails a high ground assault.



Teams are incentivized to value safety and moving as 5 if ever uncertain, because the costs of not doing so is so extreme. It limits playstyles and virtually removes quite a few interesting ways to play from the game. It's really not surprising that the team that won the most since 6.83 - EG - is the team that values lineups with lots of safety and high margin of error. Teams just get punished for taking risks very harshly nowadays.



It's easy to see that if dota keeps going in this direction, people will evolve more and more in ways that may not be nearly as fun to play or watch. One of the primary ways dota differs from its competitors is the amount an enormously skilled player can influence the game. There's simply thousands and thousands of small ways you can outplay your opponents. There are fewer variables for players to use in LoL/HotS than in dota, so that means the variables that remain, chiefly large teamfights, disproportionately influence the outcome.



And as the LGD/Alliance examples so aptly showed, that is becoming more and more true in dota as well. Teams don't have to resort to more subtle tactics to recover like LGD did against Alliance in TI3. They can simply park the bus and hope for a mistake, like MVP did against Fnatic. Or sit in their base, hold high ground, and attack move to victory as LGD did against Alliance at Starladder. These mistakes will happen, even at the highest levels of play. And that one mistake can often determine the game because it is so weighted. This system also punishes good players far harder than weaker ones, like the Miracle and Mikasa games demonstrated. Why does Dota need a Communist system that cuts down any blade of grass that grows too tall?



If this is the direction we want dota to go, then we can simply sit back and enjoy the ride. But if like me you think dota is better off without these extreme relative networth/XP difference kill bounties, then something more than isolated grumbling must be done. In 6.83 there was a massive outcry against these mechanics, but they were only slightly adjusted, even strengthened in some ways. As I hope to have shown, this was clearly insufficient, and much more drastic changes should be made.



Icefrog is synonymous with Dota. He is the brilliant game designer who transformed the Warcraft 3 mod from a mess of ideas from various contributors to an extraordinarily successful casual and competitive stand alone game. He is also the biggest mystery in Dota. Just who is Icefrog: Bruno? An ordinary Chinese gentleman? The butler next door?But more relevant to you, the gamers and the spectators; how do you know Icefrog is still in charge of patching Dota? What if he’s been fired? What if he tragically died in an accident but is still being used like big brother? What if the entire “James is an ass” incident was staged to prop up the illusion that “Icefrog” is still in charge? Or perhaps Icefrog has lost his autonomy and Dota is now subject to design by committee?“Why joke about such a crazy conspiracy theory?” you might ask. Simple: Dota is a-changing. The changes are as subtle as they have been consistent: for the past year and a half, Icefrog has quietly patched Dota in a new direction compared to the previous 9 or so years. That direction is clear: Dota is slowly moving from an extraordinarily intricate and complex game towards a simplistic hero brawler along the lines of League of Legends and worse, Heroes of the Storm. Games are becoming more static in nature compared to previous years, and players are encouraged to take less risks. No, this isn’t doomsday, but given the consistency of recent patches it’s unlikely the transformation will slow or stop unless we the community become more aware of it and do something about it.The clearest indication of all this is quite simple: the effort required to make a comeback is far too small compared to the difficulty of building a lead. This creates very damaging second and third order repercussions that are not always obvious. For players who began dota before 2015, the current comeback mechanics (where kills when at a net-worth disadvantage give much larger bounties than kills at an advantage) go against our hard-won instinct. We’ve reached an extreme where one hero kill 8 minutes into a game can match the gold swing of a tower.The comeback mechanics, which were originally implemented in response to the fast deathball pushes of TI4 Grand Finals, were never necessary in the first place. Those strong pushes were the result of a lot of already-strong deathball and pushing heroes being buffed at around the same time; there was no fundamental flaw with the game that minor glyph and tower changes could not fix. In fact, TI4 actually had enormous strategic diversity outside of the very last, yet highest profile two series.Most people know that rubberbanding exists, but aren’t aware of quite how powerful it is since it runs counter to all their instincts about dota. Let's look at an example. Here is a typical 6.86 Miracle pub game on EU servers: he’s blasting Russian-account-boosted players off the map. Not surprisingly, Miracle takes a large lead as Juggernaut in the laning phase, going 9-0-5 and giving his team an 8000 gold lead. Then he kills an isolated Witch Doctor, but dies as the enemy rotates all 4 other heroes in a desperate attempt to get that juicy, undeserved rubberband gold. What were the results?Miracle earned 271 gold for the kill on the WD (271+40 for track=the stated 311). The enemy team earned 1943 gold for the counter-kill. Miracle is 10-0. It would take him 8 kills (yeah they were all around the same value) to surpass the same income as 1 kill on him. Why should good players have to outplay their foes with an 8:1 ratio? Yes Miracle does earn more overall since he gets gold earlier, which he can translate into faster farm, and loses less gold to deaths overall, but the point still holds. The penalty for dying just once is absurd.Now how does it factor overall? Miracle’s team worked hard to get their 8k lead, having to repeatedly hide and kill the enemy on over a dozen occasions over many minutes. The enemy team chipped off 25% of that lead in a few seconds by rotating every hero to kill a single juggernaut because he went in a bit too far.But still, justice prevails. 6 minutes later, Miracle’s team continues to outplay their account-boosted foes and get a 4 for 1 trade. How much do they earn (ignoring track)?Miracle’s team, discounting the 840 gold from track, earns 1400 gold. Subtracting the Dire's 62 gold earned, that makes a net positive of 1338 gold for their dominating 4 for 1 victory. But wait, you may ask: something’s wrong, isn’t that way less than the enemy got for killing Miracle earlier? Absolutely, just compare the values: the net value of the even 1 for 1 on Miracle earlier was 1943-271=1672 gold, while here the radiant’s much more lopsided 4 for 1 victory was only worth 1338g, a net difference of 334g to the dire's 1 for 1 trade.Experience wise, note that the enemy team, at an earlier point in the game (less XP to give), earned 1201 XP net for the 1 for 1 trade on Miracle. Now the trade is a 4 for 1, later in the game, where the experience rewards should be higher as everyone is higher level, and Miracle’s team earns 1688 XP net; just 487 XP more after a 4 for 1 trade versus a 1 for 1. One of those is a lot harder than the other, yet the rewards do not match.In summary, for each of his 10 kills Miracle earned approximately 1/8th of the gold that the enemy got from his 1 death. In the same game, Miracle’s team earned less gold and barely more XP for winning a 4 for 1, despite higher levels overall, than the enemy got for trading a 1 for 1. This is nothing more than a tax on being good. Only one thing needs to be said.Though not everything, your kill score is often a barometer; a reasonable approximation for how things are going. What is a good score to have in dota? 15-3? Most people would consider that an excellent score, the mark of a high impact player who got large amounts of gold for himself and gave away little to his foes. This, however, is an illusion. Our intuitions have not adjusted properly to the current realities of the game. Kill score, unless it is a two digit number along with 0 deaths, is a virtually meaningless indicator of success or failure. Everything depends on the rubberband values of each kill and death.At the recent Starladder i-League Invitational tournament VG.R demolished Na`Vi 3-1 in the Grand Finals. During game 3, after a disastrous 0-3 opening Mikasa’s Queen of Pain turned it around with 15 kills and only 3 more deaths in the midgame . After such a dominating midgame recovery, everyone called him the mvp of the game, almost speechless that a coach could recover from such a deficit so effectively. Given this compelling narrative, the gold swings of the game did not seem to make sense. Na`Vi managed to stay in the game for far longer than they should have been able to, so I analyzed what VG.R got from Mikasa’s kills, and what the enemy got from his deaths.No, your eyes do not deceive you. Mikasa’s brilliant 15-3 midgame performance, with a kill-to-death ratio of 5 to 1 which by any reasonable metric is a score of total domination, gives him only a slight advantage. It isn’t hard to extrapolate that if he was 15-4 he would have barely broken even, and at 15-5 he would have given away more gold to Navi than VG.R earned from his kills, despite having 3 times the kills. Let’s not even get into what would happen if his team had had a real lead; VG.R spent the midgame with a lead ranging from 0 to 10,000 gold, which is almost nothing these days. The worst part is, had Mikasa not began the game at such a deficit and benefited from extra rubberband gold in his early kills, this disparity likely would have been even worse.Obviously, kills provide many intangible benefits on top of simply rewarding the killing team with gold and costing the dying hero some amount of unreliable gold. When a hero is dead their team loses initiative around the map, which can compound into less vision, less control,and a greater farm advantage for the enemy. More kills will give you more intangible benefits than less kills, often linearly, excepting that if you are doing well and die, your death penalty will be much harsher in both cost and time.Before 2015, kills really never gave that much XP or gold: their worth came mostly from the intangibles stated above. You might only get a small amount from a kill directly, but the enemy would lose a lot of ground and your team would similarly gain extra farming space. Now, kills at the right moments provide ungodly amounts of gold, enough to make the intangibles virtually trivial in comparison. While farming efficiency is still important, high-networth or streak kills occupy a very disproportionate amount of networth relative to the effort involved. People look at networth charts and praise players for their farming efficiency, but what they should be really praising them for are difficult plays like Sumail pump faking the hell out of Fear to "secure" a kill. Who's the carry now Spectre?When the gain from 15 kills can be mostly neutralized by 3 deaths and almost completely offset by 4 deaths, something is very very wrong with the game.The tricky thing about balancing a game as complicated as dota is that seemingly innocent changes have significant 2nd and 3rd order ramifications, especially in the professional matches. With rubberbanding, things aren’t so simple as the (assumed) intended goal of reducing snowballing and changing the cancerous pub mentality of giving up after first blood. If teams must struggle for 20-30 minutes to build up a lead that they can very easily lose in 1-2 minutes, they will naturally adjust. If the losing team can also knock off huge chunks instantly from a large deficit if they counter an aggressive solo kill attempt or risky farming play, players will adopt in ways to maximize their chance of this. Unfortunately as we will see, these adaptations aren’t better for the spectator or the player.From a pub standpoint, the biggest effect of heavily punishing cores for taking risks is that sticking together as 5 becomes an epidemic. The logical response to the tax currently in place on being ahead is to take far fewer risks to ensure that tax won't be collected. After all, rubberband only takes effect if you die. Cores have always balanced the reward from farming a bit further against the chance that they are caught and killed. With the penalties of dying being so astronomically high, the risk of you getting caught has to be virtually zero to make it worth farming an extra wave or hard camp.If you would give away 1.5-3k gold & XP for getting picked off (a normal amount when you have a sizable lead), you are incentivized to farm an area with 0% chance of death or for your team to position in such a way that you would come away with a lopsided victory in any possible engagement - such as by camping 4 heroes behind a carry. In the past, top carry players would skirt the line between being ganked and pushing out lanes deep into enemy territory to increase the pressure and create more space. Oftentimes they’d even try to make a solo kill or 2 man gank behind enemy lines. It was this type of risky play that made the old DK so exciting to watch, as we will see later on. Now if you do that when ahead, you risk losing a huge chunk of your lead in the blink of an eye. People still do it, but boy do they pay when they guess wrong.Think about this: if you are behind and can trade 2 for 2, or 1 for 1 as in the Miracle example earlier, and remove a quarter of your deficit, you are going to put yourself in that situation whenever possible. Why bother taking a risk pushing 3 towers when you can get the same rewards by hiding behind one of your farming heroes and looking for even trades? In the past if you were behind you had to take risks to get back into the game, but now all you do is 4 or 5 man, hide heroes behind 1 or 2 farmers, and jump out if anyone tries to kill them. This isn't taking a risk; this is playing extremely safe and it works. Because even the very best pros can be baited into taking risks and by sticking together as 5 you punish them obscenely hard. This is why high mmr 5 stack games are simply not fun to play anymore. The moment a team falls behind, they'll just 5 man for eternity praying that the enemy tries to gank, get a kill, or (god forbid) do anything other than fight 5v5. This 5 man strategy is not difficult to beat. It just requires extreme patience to sit around and farm the map for 20 minutes after acquiring a lead. Let's see how the masters do it.Some pro teams are hot blooded and will take crazy risks regardless of the patch, but at the very highest level there has been a gradual shift in the direction of safer play when ahead. Amidst all the fanfare about Sumail’s flashy plays and thrown games, Aui’s cancer heroes and PPD’s nonexistent networth, 2015 EG innovated in a way that few ever noticed. Beginning with DAC, EG perfected the safest way of using an advantage to close out a game: afk farming in the jungle for 20+ minutes. The problem that other teams would run into is that after they built a massive lead over 30-40 minutes, they would try to breach high ground and lose half that lead within 2 minutes. All the buildup was for nothing because they were too impatient with a 20,000+ lead.Sadly, the only thing that lead meant was that their deaths were worth 1,500-2,000 gold each. The more of a lead you build, the more you give back. Instead of the previous status quo where the bigger your lead, the more allowances you had to screw up, now you get roughly the same amount of screwups allowed no matter how far ahead you are. It’s unintuitive, but that’s how it is. Naturally, the best teams adapted. Here’s how:Even back in early 2015, ppd knew better than everyone else: it was wiser to never attempt to go high ground and rather play safely. Taking it to the logical conclusion, the optimal way to play was to never take any risks, assert control around the map, and to farm, and farm, and farm some more until the enemy got bored and left their base. If EG ever dropped their guard and the enemy scored a pickoff, they farmed another 5 minutes to make up for it. Unfortunately for spectators, it meant EG games were regularly snoozefests. If the other team decided to play ball, great, EG would crush them outside the base. If the enemy utilized the highly effective tactic of hiding in base and waiting for EG to make an egregious error, they were out of luck. EG were the paragon of patience and farmed to a 30k lead for multiple hexes before taking barracks’ off of kills when the enemy finally had to leave their base after an eternity of EG’s slow suffocating farm strategy. But that meant we got to “enjoy” some games which averaged 1 kill per team every 10 minutes in the midgame.At TI5 LGD copied this approach to be extra sure that they beat Empire. The game was effectively over at 20 minutes: 3-19, total map control, and a 15,000 gold lead thanks to Bounty Hunter. But Empire had a nasty high-ground defense with Magnus, Dazzle, and Tusk, and LGD didn’t want to risk any chance of losing what was an assured win. LGD did what they had to in order to cement the win they had justly earned: farm the jungle tightly as a team until their lead was big enough that Empire couldn’t possibly hold. Fans and likely players as well hated it, as it meant 27 minutes of patient boredom for everyone, but this is the optimal way to play. Just as optimal as it was for Secret, oppositely, to ride their way to a Frankfurt Major 2nd place by picking Ember/Magnus and cowering in their base except to use smokes whenever they fell behind.The bigger the lead you have, the less risks you can afford to take, when logically it should be the opposite. Otherwise what is your reward for playing well early? Obviously all strategy is lineup dependent, and this type of play isn't always possible, but it is disturbingly effective and often necessary. Note that not every team follows this formula EG and LGD set. Sometimes they get away with it, but many teams have paid a very harrowing price for straying from the EG formula.This "afk farm as a team for 20 minutes" works, but it is absolutely not fun to play or to watch. And good luck trying to emulate it in a solo pub game. Some clown on your team will walk out of position and feed away several minutes of a farming advantage in several seconds. Of course, this cuts both ways, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to huddle as 5 in your base than it is to farm the entire map without ever overextending when you have a lead. And it doesn’t matter much if the trailing team feeds a little, since their kills give disproportionately small amounts, but you can be certain that the game will turn around if there are more than a couple deaths on the leading side, no matter how far ahead they were.From a game-design perspective, these comeback mechanics make hero balance a nightmare. Take Alchemist: the hero is designed to get a lead and close it out. His free extra gold makes up for his awful stats, slow animations, and fat hero model. But with rubberbanding he is punished disproportionately hard for his strengths. I’ve fed over 3,500 gold as an Alch before in one death. You do that twice and your massive lead is barely a lead at all, given Alchemist’s inability to translate gold into power as efficiently as other heroes can.As a result, the mantra of never ever die or takes risks is doubly true for Alchemist players because you cannot afford to feed away huge amounts of rubberband gold to your opponent’s stronger lategame to networth ratio. Not surprisingly, after 6.83 Alch was terrible. Rather than a fast-scaling carry, you instead have a walking ATM for the enemy team. He would take farm away from his team like any other carry but instead of paying his team back for the space, he’d donate inordinate wads of cash to the enemy team.Icefrog’s solution in 6.85, which made Alch viable in the spirit of dota (the imbalanced strengths he has so brilliantly designed) was to buff Alch’s gold gain considerably (huge $ for bounty runes and extra from greevil’s greed). Thus Alch could achieve even more absurd item timings and close out games by 20 minutes. But this created two extremely binary outcomes, separated by a razor’s edge: if Alch doesn’t die more than once or so for each major teamfight victory, his team gets way too far ahead, and he is too much for the enemy to handle due to being 10,000-15,000 gold ahead of anybody else on the map. However, if Alch makes more than 1-2 mistakes per major victory, he feeds away so much gold that the enemy PPD-esque 6th position support is now as rich as your offlaner. Combined with Alch’s poor lategame scaling, comebacks are easy against Alch. Instead of an intricate game, filled with lots of room to outplay and allowance of mistakes for both sides, the game is reduced to a couple of key moments where Alch did or did not die.The true picture is not quite this simple, but dota was far closer to this extreme than it has ever been. Naturally, Icefrog was forced to nerf Alch’s gold gain because if he didn’t die before a certain point he was unstoppable. Yet since the comeback mechanics remained, games with Alchemist are still disproportionately affected by a few key moments of whether Alch lives or dies. It is telling that rubberbanding murdered Alch’s hero advantages so badly that Icefrog was forced to buff him in such an extreme way to make him viable, which in turn created other inescapable problems.Now take Spectre, who is the exact opposite. Spectre is the ultimate example of a hero unable to handle any pressure. Her laning phase against more than 1 hero is a nightmare, but Spectre is probably also the most powerful lategame hero. In the past, for Spectre to be good she needed some way to get ahead in the laning phase or at least not too far behind and then have her team create space in the midgame. But now as we’ve seen with rubberbanding, Spectre’s laning phase is almost completely irrelevant. The more she gets dominated in lane, the more she earns from kills with haunt in the midgame.This is reflected in the popularity of Manta+Diffusal item builds, a historic change for Spectre. Radiance, always the go-to item on choice on Spectre, has never been as powerful as it is right now: it cuts the entire enemy team’s attack damage by 17%, as well as doing massive burn damage, accelerating Spectres farm massively, and disabling blinks. Yet all top spectres have been going Manta+Diffusal despite achieving very poor farm as a result since they lack the farming mechanic granted by Radiance. But with rubberbanding being so strong, is it really that important to farm creeps? After all, a couple of comeback hero kills is worth many dozens of creeps. In essence, Spectres now are going an inferior item build that does less except in a brief window, simply because the benefit of getting key midgame rubberband kills is so worth it that other considerations fade to insignificance.In professional games there is more subtlety than in a pub where you can literally 5-man for the entire game with no repercussions, but the principle still holds. MVP.Phoenix vs Fnatic is a hilarious example to see in its extremity: MVP plays a patch-conscious lineup on the “hide in base with a spectre” plan, while Fnatic plays a low margin of error, map-wide domination draft that relies on outplaying the hell out of their opponents every second of the game. We say MVP has outdrafted Fnatic, but boy does Fnatic does outplay MVP. MVP is completely starved of space and lowers their ambitions to merely farming one hard camp a minute while spending the rest of the game huddled on the high ground in their base. Every time they leave that safety, they die. Fnatic get few kills but they completely own the map.Then Fnatic make a game losing mistake. They try to push highground but Furion accidentally sprouts Ursa and Lion’s keyboard malfunctions. In a masterful display of skill, Spectre successfully presses the R button and is rewarded with a 5 man wipe. Oops. Forget about Fnatic’s total map dominance and great play so far. There goes a 12k lead. There goes the initiative and aegis. There goes the game, all in 10 seconds.You might say, “They made a mistake, they should be punished.” Yes of course. But making one mistake should not override an entire game of excellent play. One of the great allures of Dota, unlike say Starcraft 2, is that due to the great complexity you get so many chances to gain an edge. One small mistake alone doesn’t undo all your hard work, unless your name is KyXy. Furthermore, MVP did less than nothing to “deserve” this victory. They simply sat in base and prayed. That type of play should never be rewarded; teams who make comebacks should have to work for it.Here’s what’s worse: after this catastrophe, Fnatic win a decisive 4 for 1 fight with their last gasp. Well, it would have been decisive except they get very little for it.Just from that Furion misclick, Spectre gets a free Yasha and acres of space to farm, which then allows him get 2 more kills later on plus lots of extra farm, which in turn nets him a Manta by the time of the next fight. Despite Fnatic dominating another fight, MVP’s 3rd-world country supports now are richer than Fnatic’s despite having done nothing but feed and cower near their throne all game. The gold graph becomes a vertical line downward and MVP steals a win.Yeah, there's no "Ho ho, ha ha" trauma anymore, though I give my condolences to anyone suffering from Post Traumatic Sniper Disorder, but that 6.83 PTSD merely got replaced by a new PTSD - Post Traumatic Spectre Disorder. Even if Spectre gets nerfed, a new cancer will arise to take its place until these kill bounty mechanics are fixed. The hero isn't the problem, it's the system. Oh fine, just for good old times sake:Welcome to another 30 minutes of Sniper's team hiding in their base because the dire tried to high ground with “only” a 20,000 gold lead. And to top it off, these are the heavily nerfed and reworked 6.86 rubberband values, not 6.83.There is a certain portion of the community that is always going to defend the status quo, no matter the situation. "Oh [6.84] techies is totally fine, everyone is just stupid and doesn't know how to play against it," etc. What these people rarely take into account is that to get the current status quo, something had to be given up. It’s easy to forget the past or recall a distorted version when 6.86 is right in front of us, but we’ve given up a lot since 6.83 that you may not realize.Back in this 2013 season classic, Alliance takes an early lead with a brilliant level 1 Roshan strat, dominates the lanes, and pressures DK non-stop across the map. Unlike now where attacking the base prematurely against a superior lategame lineup is a death wish, Alliance repeatedly charged into the Great Wall of China to keep the pressure on. DK held brilliantly, and yes Alliance sometimes died, but their deaths didn’t cost them their entire lead, so the risks they took were worth it.Did you spot MMY’s godlike Rubick play?On the other side, instead of turtling in their base and maybe adventuring out to farm the hard camp as 5, DK repeatedly smokes out of their base to claw for the initiative, even using multiple early-midgame buybacks to contest Roshan, a technique that is also no longer feasible. Now the only time you can use buyback is to defend base. The overwhelming power of the Storm, Sniper, and Medusa buybacks in DAC forced a huge nerf to buybacks that effectively removed them as a tactical midgame option. But if rubberband gold had not been implemented or was even a fraction of what it currently is, the buyback tactics would have been uneconomical and the nerfs would have never been necessary.Now we turn to the ultimate dream team: 2014 DK. The era in which DK excelled, 6.79-6.81, was probably the richest, most strategically diverse in Dota history. Even though TI4 had the most strategic diversity of all TI's by a large margin - the image of VG's deathball dismantling EG in 25 minutes and then losing to Newbee in a 90 minute grand finals is permanently cemented in people's minds. Outside of this quick succession of games, however, teams ran extremely diverse strategies and drafts; for example, C9's Meepo+Blink Bounty strat and DK's 5 Blink Dagger global initiators vs Tinker/Void . Even VG won a lot of games off of great movement around Sylar's Morphling, not just early deathballs.Though DK ran every type of strategy ever devised, their signature draft was a dispersed, map-wide domination with heroes who could initiate and win skirmishes. Here against iG, DK accomplished something that nowadays is absolutely impossible: they won against a top team without a teamfight. DK farmed the map in 5 different places, dodged most ganks, then rapidly grouped 2-3 heroes to win small skirmishes. Oftentimes DK would kill 2-3 heroes in completely different places across the map, when 15 seconds before they just had 5 heroes farming.Sometimes though, DK would be a teensy bit overaggressive or disperse a bit too much and get caught when they were spread all around the map. Frankly, this is inevitable. DK's strategy relied on them predicting every enemy movement, dodging ganks when their team was never together, keeping lanes constantly pushed, and always having the right number of heroes when the enemy split up to farm. If the most skilled team in dota history couldn't avoid some deaths here and there then nobody can.Back then, it was okay that DK sometimes lost heroes or lost a fight, because overall they'd be farming so much of the map, getting more pickoffs, and heavily limiting the amount the enemy could safely farm. Dota's brilliant design allowed them run an extremely entertaining strategy of high-risk and high-reward. But if anyone tried to play this style nowadays, even with the same level of skill as the old DK, it simply would not be viable. Because DK's movements, oftentimes pushing deep into enemy territory in groups of 1-2 heroes, lead to inevitable deaths or even trades at times. Any team trying this now would find themselves getting a bunch of pickoffs and a big lead, but then giving away thousands of gold each time they made an even trade or got picked, as the examples earlier in the article clearly show.Before 2015, if you gave up too much of the map in order to 5 man for long, you'd find yourself many thousands of gold down in just minutes. More gold was available from farming back then. Furthermore, you couldn't recover this lost gold by simply optimizing for static teamfights and winning one or two fights when behind. There was always some rubberbanding in dota from the death penalty, and that's totally fine, but it was much, much smaller back then. So teams were forced to contest the map or simply lose, leading to exciting skirmishes and map wide action.Here was one of the best games of TI3, and a great example of what was required to make a comeback before 6.83. Due to their superior overall strategy, Alliance took a massive lead in the early game. With LGD so behind and Alliance so efficient, LGD couldn't just lock themselves in base, pray for 2 good RP's and win the game from 20k+ behind through massive kill bounties. Instead, LGD was forced to fight for the initiative and reclaim portions of the map through a series of brilliantly incisive Xiao8-led movements. Had they not done so, Alliance simply could have set 4-5 heroes loose farming and contested LGD anytime they tried to have more than 2 heroes farm. Even if LGD got lucky a few times, Alliance's map-wide domination would ensure their victory.Xiao8 leaves Magnus and Alchemist visible mid, distracting Alliance from the possibility of a smoke. Then the supports and offlaner predict and kill s4, threaten mid, but actually dive deeper and kill Akke as well. These types of movements are very difficult to do, but back then, very rewarding.Though this one movement would have cut Alliance's lead into shambles nowadays, LGD had to keep making movements like this throughout the game to recover. Alliance had played a great first 20 minutes, so they deservedly had some leeway. But eventually Alliance was able to stabilize, hold the map, and win in an epic base race. We don't really need hypotheticals of how this game would fare today, because there was actually a rather similar game played between these two teams at the recent Starladder, even with the same captains, that aptly illustrates the progression of Dota.Unlike the Alliance vs DK game above, where Alliance could take risks early on and not lose all their momentum, one bad exchange erased almost their whole lead and all of their initiative.Rather than Xiao8 having to divine Alliance's movements and repeatedly put his team in the right place to pick them off and regain the map, LGD adopted a far more simpler and easier strategy: take a nap in their base or 4-5 man outside of it. LGD only attempted one (failed) 3 man smoke, otherwise they sat in base, held highground twice with Ember and Invoker, and then bludgeoned Alliance to death in successive 5v5 clashes using their extra rubberband funds. Unlike the 2013 game, there was no subtlety to LGD's play, because they didn't need it.Now you may talk about how Alliance was dumb to push and deserved to lose this, but that's the entire point! The game currently rewards teams for not taking risks when ahead and avoiding any chance of giving the other team rubberband gold/xp, which ends up limiting play and railroads teams into lineups that can teamfight well, since only 5v5 teamfights matter if the losing team is always waiting as 5 on the high ground and the winning team is always moving as 5 to farm. And if you are EG, you pick these teamfight lineups and bore your opponent to death.Let’s recap and bring all the evidence together. First, the gold and XP kill formula now gives vastly disproportionate results depending on relative networth and kill streaks, leading to situations where the payout from two kills can differ by a factor of ten. Alone, this would not be the end of the world.The problem is exacerbated because in the past few years Icefrog has consistently nerfed all other sources of gold and experience gain in the game. Ancients were nerfed, the jungle is crippled from what it once was (thanks Alliance), and even lane creeps are noticeably lower in value, not to mention the gold gain from towers. So not only has the intangible value of kills been heavily diminished (extra farming potential), the reward of kills when behind has also been vastly inflated. This means that it takes players longer to build a lead by outfarming the enemy, while needing just seconds to lose huge chunks of that lead if a fight goes bad or the enemy gets a fortunate smoke pickoff. It also means that the losing team is punished far less for simply camping in their base while occasionally being so daring as to farm a hard camp with 5 heroes or randomly smoke as 5. Even if they give up the whole map and just farm waves, they don't fall far behind that quickly, and they can always erase the deficit instantly if they catch a stray hero or the enemy fails a high ground assault.Teams are incentivized to value safety and moving as 5 if ever uncertain, because the costs of not doing so is so extreme. It limits playstyles and virtually removes quite a few interesting ways to play from the game. It's really not surprising that the team that won the most since 6.83 - EG - is the team that values lineups with lots of safety and high margin of error. Teams just get punished for taking risks very harshly nowadays.It's easy to see that if dota keeps going in this direction, people will evolve more and more in ways that may not be nearly as fun to play or watch. One of the primary ways dota differs from its competitors is the amount an enormously skilled player can influence the game. There's simply thousands and thousands of small ways you can outplay your opponents. There are fewer variables for players to use in LoL/HotS than in dota, so that means the variables that remain, chiefly large teamfights, disproportionately influence the outcome.And as the LGD/Alliance examples so aptly showed, that is becoming more and more true in dota as well. Teams don't have to resort to more subtle tactics to recover like LGD did against Alliance in TI3. They can simply park the bus and hope for a mistake, like MVP did against Fnatic. Or sit in their base, hold high ground, and attack move to victory as LGD did against Alliance at Starladder. These mistakes will happen, even at the highest levels of play. And that one mistake can often determine the game because it is so weighted. This system also punishes good players far harder than weaker ones, like the Miracle and Mikasa games demonstrated. Why does Dota need a Communist system that cuts down any blade of grass that grows too tall?If this is the direction we want dota to go, then we can simply sit back and enjoy the ride. But if like me you think dota is better off without these extreme relative networth/XP difference kill bounties, then something more than isolated grumbling must be done. In 6.83 there was a massive outcry against these mechanics, but they were only slightly adjusted, even strengthened in some ways. As I hope to have shown, this was clearly insufficient, and much more drastic changes should be made. Writer