To Make a Dragon Bleed June 20th, 2014 13:17 GMT Text by Sunfish

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To Make a Dragon Bleed:

Or, How the West was Won



For all the variation that exists between the many games commonly grouped under the term “esports,” nearly all share a rivalry, however implicit or contrived, between progamers from Europe and the Americas and those who hail from the Far East. The contours of the story are familiar to any fan of competitive gaming: the cold rationality of the East is typically (even if unfairly) pitted against the fallible yet fecund spontaneity of the West.



Nowhere is this more clear than in StarCraft II. It’s not that the Koreans who have dominated the game are accused of lacking passion -- they are accused of lacking humanity. That is, they play like machines -- faster, more efficient, but vulnerable to unexpected bursts of foreign creativity. Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri’s rivalry with the Koreans was compelling not because he played equally well (though he did, at least when he wanted to) but because he played so differently. He was a wild card, his style unaccounted for by the regimented routines and strategies born in institutional Korean training facilities.



In Dota 2, of course, we Westerners have an similar foe: China. The comparison between the games, naturally, isn’t one to one, yet many of its conventions are familiar. Even if we still make jokes about Chinese DotA as being too restrained, mechanical, and averse to unnecessary risk, the game and its players don’t share the brute mechanicity of Blizzard’s fading RTS. Yet the rivalry serves much the same purpose as it does in StarCraft II: it constructs the fantasy of an ongoing narrative that passes from tournament to tournament, one that builds over the twelve months between each International.



Still, I say “fantasy” because, unlike StarCraft II, in which Koreans and foreigners have met in virtually every premier tournament outside of Korea, the East-West rivalry in Dota 2 has often been relegated to our collective imaginations and comment threads chock-full of hypothetical clashes. Between TI1 and TI2, the top Eastern and Western Dota 2 teams clashed in person only once, at the Electronic Sports World Cup 2011 in Paris. There, in a rematch of inaugural International, Na’Vi handily defeated E-Home 2-0 in the grand finals. Two trans-national online tournaments saw Chinese teams fall again, with no Chinese team reaching the podium in the ProDota 2 Pro League and iG losing to CLG in the finals of the BTS World Tour.



Even from this small sample size, one might have concluded from the mediocre Chinese showing in the months leading up to TI2 that the tournament would be another chance for Western teams to prove that they could finally tangle with the best of the East. Yet it was not to be. One by one, Western teams were methodically broken down by Chinese players, who always seemed to be one step ahead.



For years, the Chinese metagame among top teams had been centered on safe, consistent play that exploited the inevitable mistakes inferior lineups would make. In the laning phase, mechanically superior players would methodically out-CS and zone-out their opponents, slowly, but safely, building a gold and experience lead. Then, bolstered by superior items and levels, teams could take teamfights at will, and, eventually, break the base. As a means of handling less disciplined teams, the strategy was without parallel. The Chinese metagame relied not on beating down one’s opponent, so much as on waiting for one’s opponent to defeat themselves.



For the Chinese, The International 2, then, was business as usual. In game after game, Chinese teams out-farmed and out-played their Western opponents with a cold precision that not even the most dedicated Western teams could match. When the dust had settled, only one foreign team, Na’Vi, managed to place in the top eight. Astrologically and DotA-wise, it was the year of the dragon. China assumed its place atop the DotA throne.



In the months after TI2, Eastern and Western teams largely stuck to their own scenes. The Chinese competed in G-League, The Asia, and ACE, while the Westerners battled in The Defense, StarLadder, and D2L. No Chinese teams attended ESWC in 2012 and only Mousesports attended the World Cyber Games, in which the Dominik “Black” Reitmeier-led German squad was duly eliminated in the group stages.



Yet the scene was nevertheless changing in ways that were not always apparent. As institutional support for professional DotA grew in the West, with better training facilities, stable salaries, and profitable sponsorships, teams began to improve as a result of more and better practice. Farming patterns became more efficient and players began to push the limits of aggressive, opportunistic play, while simultaneously managing risk. New tactics were discovered, and rat DotA was born anew. From the outside, this change was not self-evident, given that Western teams rose in skill in concert with each other. Opportunities to compare the Western DotA to that of the “superior” East were few and far between. All the while, Chinese DotA continued to stagnate as teams fell back on the low-risk style that had served them so well for years.



The winds of change finally turned against the Chinese in March of 2013, when Alliance arrived in Shanghai for G-1 League 2013. In a pre-tournament interview, iG’s captain Wong Hock “Chuan” confidently told reporters that, “I can only say that if we don’t completely make fools out of [Alliance], then their strategies must be decades ahead of ours." Yet decades ahead their strategies were, for Alliance utterly decimated a Chinese scene whose teams had failed to evolve in the months since TI2. A no-risk approach to DotA might have carried iG, DK, and LGD to the top of the Chinese scene, but its day had passed.





Alliance certainly looked like they were decades ahead of the Chinese at G-1 Season 5. Alliance certainly looked like they were decades ahead of the Chinese at G-1 Season 5.

The new Western meta exemplified by Alliance was built on calculated aggression and more efficient farming. Against the stagnating brand of DotA practiced in the East, the new, more efficient Western metagame was a silver bullet. Perhaps the Chinese could have changed, but whether they were in shock or denial, they charged ahead with the ailing style that paved Alliance’s path to an easy championship in the G-1 League. In both mentality and meta, Chine seemed ill-equipped to handle a fell Western wind. When Na’Vi repeated the same feat three months later at the Alienware Cup, it was increasingly evident that Chinese DotA was in serious trouble.



In hindsight, Na’Vi’s and Alliance’s successes in China in the first half of 2013 make the subsequent Swedish triumph in Seattle seems practically inevitable. Alliance’s flawless victory at G-League and Na’Vi’s tour-de-force run from the lower bracket in the Alienware Cup bore witness to a Chinese scene that had suddenly become weak to Western teams. The Year of the Dragon, it seemed, had finally passed.



If anything, the Chinese dominance at TI2 and the rout that followed at TI3 point towards an essential feature of insular, regional metagames. No matter how good one team is at their own style, that metagame may yet be weak to another metagame. In such cases, the deck is stacked against one team. At The International 3, Chinese teams arrived in Seattle only to realize that they’d brought a knife to a gunfight. Isolated regions produce isolated strategies. Without disrespecting the titanic skill and dedication of the men of Alliance, we can still acknowledge that their ascent to greatness was aided by the fact that the Western meta of mid-2013 matched up favorably against the Eastern metagame. Victory, in many ways, was assured long before the horn was even blown.





Seattle Bound

So what of The International 4?



Permit me a major claim: The International 4 will be, with respect to the relative strength of Eastern and Western metagames, the most balanced international LAN in Dota 2 history. The reason? Between an uptick in sponsorship, bulging prize pools, and increasing governmental recognition of esports athletes as athletes, Chinese teams have ventured out from Pacific shores with more frequency than ever before. If the rivalry once produced questions of “what if?”, these days, it’s more of a “what now?” Chinese and Western teams have met more times since The International 3 than between The International 2011 and TI3 combined, and clashes between respective teams and metas are no longer hypothetical.



From RaidCall EMS Fall, to D2L4, to MLG Columbus, to G-League 2013, to StarLadder Season 9, to WPC 2014, to The Summit, to ESL Frankfurt 2014, Eastern and Western teams have more experience with each other’s respectives styles. Indeed, as if to emphasize this point, the Eastern and Western metagames have in many ways converged somewhat in the last six months. While Chinese drafts at MLG were distinctly different than those of the Western teams in attendance, the drafts from Chinese teams at The Summit did not look all that different than those produced by Western teams. That’s not to say that differences don’t exist between the Western and Eastern metagames -- Chinese teams are still the masters of safe, stable play and are loathe to experiment with, say, farming Dazzle or Venomancer -- but that the Chinese teams invited to The International secured their seed by breaking away from the stagnant play that cursed them in 2013.





DK dominated Starladder S9 but haven't done as well since then. DK dominated Starladder S9 but haven't done as well since then.

Unlike last summer, no respective scene seems to hold a huge advantage going into the final weeks before TI4. Of the tournaments listed above that were held outside of China, three were won by Eastern teams and two by Western teams. DK dominated StarLadder Season 9 in late April, but Evil Geniuses topped DK last weekend at The Summit. Cloud9 (as Speed Gaming) shocked the world with a victory at MLG Columbus, but couldn’t hold up to the pressure in China at the WPC in April. So too did Alliance find themselves defeated at the very tournament where they first usurped the Chinese on their throne. At ESL Frankfurt, in two weeks, neither the West nor the East seem more favored to win the final LAN before The International 4.



These are exciting times to be a fan of Dota 2. To think that it may yet be the teams, and not the metagames they play, that will compete against each other, is its own kind of reward.



No one knows what kind of stories will find their voice in Keynote Arena. It may yet be that DK aces the group stages on their way to a crushing victory in the finals, hurling Western DotA into a new dark age. And no one knows how beautifully Evil Geniuses, Alliance, Cloud9, Na’Vi, or Team Empire will play -- or how badly. A prediction is one future’s memory of its past; a plan is the unknown unfolding the way we wish it would. But to live in uncertainty, to rush into the night with our eyes open, that is a blessing indeed.



The future is dark, but that is the best thing the future can be.



See you in Seattle.







Credits:

Writer: Sunfish

Editors: Firebolt145, riptide

For all the variation that exists between the many games commonly grouped under the term “esports,” nearly all share a rivalry, however implicit or contrived, between progamers from Europe and the Americas and those who hail from the Far East. The contours of the story are familiar to any fan of competitive gaming: the cold rationality of the East is typically (even if unfairly) pitted against the fallible yet fecund spontaneity of the West.Nowhere is this more clear than in StarCraft II. It’s not that the Koreans who have dominated the game are accused of lacking passion -- they are accused of lacking humanity. That is, they play like machines -- faster, more efficient, but vulnerable to unexpected bursts of foreign creativity. Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri’s rivalry with the Koreans was compelling not because he played equally well (though he did, at least when he wanted to) but because he played so differently. He was a wild card, his style unaccounted for by the regimented routines and strategies born in institutional Korean training facilities.In Dota 2, of course, we Westerners have an similar foe: China. The comparison between the games, naturally, isn’t one to one, yet many of its conventions are familiar. Even if we still make jokes about Chinese DotA as being too restrained, mechanical, and averse to unnecessary risk, the game and its players don’t share the brute mechanicity of Blizzard’s fading RTS. Yet the rivalry serves much the same purpose as it does in StarCraft II: it constructs the fantasy of an ongoing narrative that passes from tournament to tournament, one that builds over the twelve months between each International.Still, I say “fantasy” because, unlike StarCraft II, in which Koreans and foreigners have met in virtually every premier tournament outside of Korea, the East-West rivalry in Dota 2 has often been relegated to our collective imaginations and comment threads chock-full of hypothetical clashes. Between TI1 and TI2, the top Eastern and Western Dota 2 teams clashed in person only once, at the Electronic Sports World Cup 2011 in Paris. There, in a rematch of inaugural International, Na’Vi handily defeated E-Home 2-0 in the grand finals. Two trans-national online tournaments saw Chinese teams fall again, with no Chinese team reaching the podium in the ProDota 2 Pro League and iG losing to CLG in the finals of the BTS World Tour.Even from this small sample size, one might have concluded from the mediocre Chinese showing in the months leading up to TI2 that the tournament would be another chance for Western teams to prove that they could finally tangle with the best of the East. Yet it was not to be. One by one, Western teams were methodically broken down by Chinese players, who always seemed to be one step ahead.For years, the Chinese metagame among top teams had been centered on safe, consistent play that exploited the inevitable mistakes inferior lineups would make. In the laning phase, mechanically superior players would methodically out-CS and zone-out their opponents, slowly, but safely, building a gold and experience lead. Then, bolstered by superior items and levels, teams could take teamfights at will, and, eventually, break the base. As a means of handling less disciplined teams, the strategy was without parallel. The Chinese metagame relied not on beating down one’s opponent, so much as on waiting for one’s opponent to defeat themselves.For the Chinese, The International 2, then, was business as usual. In game after game, Chinese teams out-farmed and out-played their Western opponents with a cold precision that not even the most dedicated Western teams could match. When the dust had settled, only one foreign team, Na’Vi, managed to place in the top eight. Astrologically and DotA-wise, it was the year of the dragon. China assumed its place atop the DotA throne.In the months after TI2, Eastern and Western teams largely stuck to their own scenes. The Chinese competed in G-League, The Asia, and ACE, while the Westerners battled in The Defense, StarLadder, and D2L. No Chinese teams attended ESWC in 2012 and only Mousesports attended the World Cyber Games, in which the Dominik “Black” Reitmeier-led German squad was duly eliminated in the group stages.Yet the scene was nevertheless changing in ways that were not always apparent. As institutional support for professional DotA grew in the West, with better training facilities, stable salaries, and profitable sponsorships, teams began to improve as a result of more and better practice. Farming patterns became more efficient and players began to push the limits of aggressive, opportunistic play, while simultaneously managing risk. New tactics were discovered, and rat DotA was born anew. From the outside, this change was not self-evident, given that Western teams rose in skill in concert with each other. Opportunities to compare the Western DotA to that of the “superior” East were few and far between. All the while, Chinese DotA continued to stagnate as teams fell back on the low-risk style that had served them so well for years.The winds of change finally turned against the Chinese in March of 2013, when Alliance arrived in Shanghai for G-1 League 2013. In a pre-tournament interview, iG’s captain Wong Hock “Chuan” confidently told reporters that, “I can only say that if we don’t completely make fools out of [Alliance], then their strategies must be decades ahead of ours." Yet decades ahead their strategies were, for Alliance utterly decimated a Chinese scene whose teams had failed to evolve in the months since TI2. A no-risk approach to DotA might have carried iG, DK, and LGD to the top of the Chinese scene, but its day had passed.The new Western meta exemplified by Alliance was built on calculated aggression and more efficient farming. Against the stagnating brand of DotA practiced in the East, the new, more efficient Western metagame was a silver bullet. Perhaps the Chinese could have changed, but whether they were in shock or denial, they charged ahead with the ailing style that paved Alliance’s path to an easy championship in the G-1 League. In both mentality and meta, Chine seemed ill-equipped to handle a fell Western wind. When Na’Vi repeated the same feat three months later at the Alienware Cup, it was increasingly evident that Chinese DotA was in serious trouble.In hindsight, Na’Vi’s and Alliance’s successes in China in the first half of 2013 make the subsequent Swedish triumph in Seattle seems practically inevitable. Alliance’s flawless victory at G-League and Na’Vi’s tour-de-force run from the lower bracket in the Alienware Cup bore witness to a Chinese scene that had suddenly become weak to Western teams. The Year of the Dragon, it seemed, had finally passed.If anything, the Chinese dominance at TI2 and the rout that followed at TI3 point towards an essential feature of insular, regional metagames. No matter how good one team is at their own style, that metagame may yet be weak to another metagame. In such cases, the deck is stacked against one team. At The International 3, Chinese teams arrived in Seattle only to realize that they’d brought a knife to a gunfight. Isolated regions produce isolated strategies. Without disrespecting the titanic skill and dedication of the men of Alliance, we can still acknowledge that their ascent to greatness was aided by the fact that the Western meta of mid-2013 matched up favorably against the Eastern metagame. Victory, in many ways, was assured long before the horn was even blown.So what of The International 4?Permit me a major claim: The International 4 will be, with respect to the relative strength of Eastern and Western metagames, the most balanced international LAN in Dota 2 history. The reason? Between an uptick in sponsorship, bulging prize pools, and increasing governmental recognition of esports athletes as athletes, Chinese teams have ventured out from Pacific shores with more frequency than ever before. If the rivalry once produced questions of “what if?”, these days, it’s more of a “what now?” Chinese and Western teams have met more times since The International 3 than between The International 2011 and TI3 combined, and clashes between respective teams and metas are no longer hypothetical.From RaidCall EMS Fall, to D2L4, to MLG Columbus, to G-League 2013, to StarLadder Season 9, to WPC 2014, to The Summit, to ESL Frankfurt 2014, Eastern and Western teams have more experience with each other’s respectives styles. Indeed, as if to emphasize this point, the Eastern and Western metagames have in many ways converged somewhat in the last six months. While Chinese drafts at MLG were distinctly different than those of the Western teams in attendance, the drafts from Chinese teams at The Summit did not look all that different than those produced by Western teams. That’s not to say that differences don’t exist between the Western and Eastern metagames -- Chinese teams are still the masters of safe, stable play and are loathe to experiment with, say, farming Dazzle or Venomancer -- but that the Chinese teams invited to The International secured their seed by breaking away from the stagnant play that cursed them in 2013.Unlike last summer, no respective scene seems to hold a huge advantage going into the final weeks before TI4. Of the tournaments listed above that were held outside of China, three were won by Eastern teams and two by Western teams. DK dominated StarLadder Season 9 in late April, but Evil Geniuses topped DK last weekend at The Summit. Cloud9 (as Speed Gaming) shocked the world with a victory at MLG Columbus, but couldn’t hold up to the pressure in China at the WPC in April. So too did Alliance find themselves defeated at the very tournament where they first usurped the Chinese on their throne. At ESL Frankfurt, in two weeks, neither the West nor the East seem more favored to win the final LAN before The International 4.These are exciting times to be a fan of Dota 2. To think that it may yet be the teams, and not the metagames they play, that will compete against each other, is its own kind of reward.No one knows what kind of stories will find their voice in Keynote Arena. It may yet be that DK aces the group stages on their way to a crushing victory in the finals, hurling Western DotA into a new dark age. And no one knows how beautifully Evil Geniuses, Alliance, Cloud9, Na’Vi, or Team Empire will play -- or how badly. A prediction is one future’s memory of its past; a plan is the unknown unfolding the way we wish it would. But to live in uncertainty, to rush into the night with our eyes open, that is a blessing indeed.The future is dark, but that is the best thing the future can be.See you in Seattle. retired from goodgame agency and now freelancing fucking everywhere -- come follow me at @william_partin