Everyday We're Shuffling September 25th, 2013 17:57 GMT Text by SirJolt Graphics by fusefuse

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The International 2, at the behest of other TeamLiquid writers who were kind enough to act as a sort of living Liquipedia for a man who would prove either too confused or too lazy to effectively follow games. As I sank deeper into the game, I gained an appreciation for certain heroes and, before long, I was noticing the players who did spectacularly well with those heroes. Figuring out how those players fit into their teams’ lineups, signature heroes and all, was another mental challenge layered on top of understanding the game itself.









When I tried to explain my appreciation for the shuffle to Heyoka, he opined that the greatest downside to the post-International team swapping was that it left little space for new players to break into the professional scene. Why, after all, would any team feel the need to take a risk on an inexperienced and unproven talent when it could simply wait a while and pick up one of any number of free agents after the Seattle tournament?



That this creates a barrier to entry for would-be progamers is an unfortunate consequence, and certainly one that people might feel strongly about, but the concept of there being a sort of soft limit on the number of professional players in the scene precipitated a further realisation. Let’s assume for a few moments that there is, as that statement suggests, a closed pool of professional players from which a team might draw its members.



That limited selection is further reduced by the number of players already on teams, as well as the number of players that you know won’t work well with the team you already have in place. You must also account for the relative value placed on players, which will be based both on their performance in the past and their current form. Moreover, you need to be aware that there are other teams that may well be vying for the same players to complement their own existing lineups.



If all of this is beginning to sound a little familiar, that’s no coincidence. The truth is that we watch a variation of this shuffle play out on another scale every time we watch a professional match. You take your limited pool of a hundred or so heroes, then you begin to subtract those heroes that don’t make sense for your team, those that the other team has picked or banned are denied to you, those your players dislike, and so on down the list. You look to those heroes that synergise best with one another, as well as having complementary playstyles. You figure out your lanes, how the game will look, and then you attempt to execute.



Usually, we see that first few minutes determine the shape of the game to come, but in the analogous case of team construction outside the game, the timeline is stretched. Instead of watching the picks and bans unfold in minutes, we attempt to make deductions as the flames posted by players light up sites like Weibo and QQ, or we wait for organisations like MLG give us the first impressions of team lineups in



The period of adjustment immediately after TI3 might feel interminable, but the teams that come out of this in good shape will have been built to last another year, until the race-to-the-throne that is The International 4.











As a new fan, the question I was left with as teams made their way through the shuffle this time last year was, “Where do I stand now?” It’s easy to be a fan of a team when you’ve just started to watch and teams feels more constant. You can appreciate a team’s players and how they operate as a unit, but when some proportion of the players that had constituted your favourite team is suddenly dispersed and scattered across other teams, the team you cheered on can begin to seem stilted and strange.



Since I first started watching Dota, I have found myself in the somehow uncomfortable position of being a fan of teams whose makeups have changed substantially since I first started saw them. Now, through longer exposure to their play across multiple teams, there are players who I will cheer for no matter where they land. What I have come to relish most in these cases is that we have an opportunity to watch those players interact in their new contexts. We are given the chance to see the fresh interplay between players whose styles we have grown familiar with over time.



What is strange about this is that, over years watching Brood War and Starcraft 2, I was never one of those people who simply appreciated players across all teams. I was a man with limited time; I supported a single team and watched all of their games that I could. Now though, I find myself watching games between teams I’ve never followed before. I want to see where old favourites have ended up, and how they fit in their new lineups.



There was certainly a time when I thought, “Ah, but my favourite team is being broken up. Will I like what they are now? Should I follow wherever they happen to land individually, or do I just keep supporting the same team?” The truth is that my favourite teams persist, but the frame of reference is incorrect. As long as the shuffle is maintained, I feel as though those of us who have watched Dota for a while are as likely to respond, “Na`Vi 2011,” “Liquid 2013,” or “Dignitas 2012” as anything else.



Without doubt, there was a time when this sense of flux seemed a dreadful prospect to me, but I have come to relish it. If you follow the game long enough, you see wonderful plays from every quarter. Over time, I’ve gained seen enough staggering plays from so very many players that every team becomes a dream team, every new combination something I look forward to seeing.



When I think about my old attitude to the instability of Dota teams, I will always be brought back to Nazgul’s post when Liquid first acquired a Dota team. I remember reading it after hearing of the team announcement and thinking, “Yes, this is someone who understands where I’m coming from, this is why Dota is tricky for me to follow.” In among his



Both Liquid as well as all the players are keen on changing the dynamics of the scene, in the sense that teams can't continue to constantly switch players all the time if they want to keep up with the teams in the Chinese scene. It is time to make clear choices based on players’ potential and personality, and then stick with them through hard periods and eventually become the best a team can be.



There was a time, not long ago, when I would have agreed with that sentiment with conviction, but as another International slipped by, I began to question my own stance. In the end though, it was watching Dota itself that once more provided me with the direction I sought.



Those of us who have only been following Dota a while will already be familiar with the stories that longer-term Dota fans tell about hero combinations that were once so dominant, but have since fallen out of fashion. Are there certain player combinations that simply grow stale over time in the same way, the extent of their interplay somehow “figured out” by other teams in the scene or left behind by an evolving metagame? Given the results of this year’s international, are we to believe that courting a certain amount of volatility the strongest tactic in the harsh environs of competitive Dota play?



Whenever I’m curious about an off-the-wall hypothesis like this, I turn to K-poptosis, our resident statistician, and ask him, as though it required no effort at all on his part, whether or not there are numbers that back up the theory. In this case, I dropped him a line to ask if there was any hard evidence that we should believe in stability as a factor in a team’s success. If there’s one thing the man hates, it’s not being able to give a straight answer and support it with some healthy figures. After a few days, he shot me a message that read,



Okay, sorry to take this long and give you bad news, but it doesn't look like there's a real correlation between stability and winning. There is a positive correlation between the two, sure, but I feel as if it's due to a feedback loop (successful teams won't be as pressed to make a change).



He went on to explain that part of the issue was that it is difficult to filter the extraneous variables that might exist in that context, but at that point I was already looking back over the anecdotal evidence, those cases right under our noses in which the most stable of teams were failing to achieve.



Last year’s winner, Invictus Gaming, was among the most stable teams heading into The International 3 with a roster unchanged since it claimed the Aegis last year. This year, iG only made it to a joint fifth/sixth finish with Team DK. As much as there is to be said for stability, there comes a point where the case for mutation makes itself. Just as the combinations of heroes that enjoy the most success change over time, we see different permutations of player combinations enjoy their own successes.



Into this context of a professional scene that seems to so closely mimic the game itself, you inject the few new players that do appear over the course of any year, the EternalEnvys and Admiral Bulldogs of the scene. As we’ve said above, that these new players rise so infrequently is, doubtless, a source of ire for those who hope to be professional players, but it does help to round out the analogy between the state of the professional scene and the state of the game itself, with new heroes being so infrequently added to the Captains Mode roster. When players like these first begin to emerge, it is often as stand-ins, rather than as a recurring addition to a more stable lineup. There is a certain resonance with those offhand picks that become an important portion of the competitive metagame over time, a minor novelty that becomes a constant over time.



Similarly, players like Loda who come out of retirement have the feeling of those heroes that were once at the core of the metagame, but have since become vanishingly rare. When these players come out of retirement, we tend to see events that mirror the picking of an out-of-fashion hero. They bring a style and a flavour to games that has long been missing, whether we’ve noticed it or not.



Layered on top of that we have the strange tendency for long-standing figures in the scene who work well together to break away from one another; in spite of strong friendships, they find themselves suited to different roles on different teams. When players like Loda and Akke, or Puppey and Kuroky are brought together by the shifting sands of the competitive scene, we are afforded the opportunity to see how their styles, augmented by months or even years on different teams, interact and complement one another. These confluences and reunions give us one more thing to cheer for in a context that is already well loaded with reasons to cheer.









Of course, I’m not an authority on these things. I’m neither team owner nor professional player, I’m just some guy who likes to watch the game. So maybe I’m wrong and the annual shuffle is terrible for the competitive scene at large, but as someone who has been a fan of a few different teams over the years, I feel lucky to have seen the cross pollenation that brought some of my favourite players from one team to another. As someone who loves his play, it’s been a joy to see Funn1k play with Na`Vi, and to see how that’s coloured the team’s play.



At the same time, there is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that nothing in Dota is fixed, a player might provide a certain flavour to a team’s play, but there’s no guarantee that next year’s vintage will boast that particular flavour as part of its bouquet. Whatever sense of permanence there might have been when I first started to watch these teams has long since been eroded.



We live in a world in which players are not fixed points. They might very well gravitate towards certain teams in the long and short term, but there are no guarantees. In that context, Captains Mode becomes a metonym for the professional scene as a whole, for the skillful arrangement of the players we’ve come to cheer for into teams that can succeed the furnace of competitive play.



There was a time that I dreaded this quiet period and the manifold uncertainties of the next year of competitive play. Over the last twelve months, just as I came to appreciate and attempt to understand the deeper strategy of the Pick/Ban phase of the games I watched, I have found myself coming to appreciate these moments of uncertainty.



There may be very little real stability, but what has begun to emerge is a pattern; after The International, there comes a period of downtime, a pause to meditate on the results and dissect play, but the players are already pairing off, and the next game is already beginning.





I first started watching Dota in the run up to, at the behest of other TeamLiquid writers who were kind enough to act as a sort of living Liquipedia for a man who would prove either too confused or too lazy to effectively follow games. As I sank deeper into the game, I gained an appreciation for certain heroes and, before long, I was noticing the players who did spectacularly well with those heroes. Figuring out how those players fit into their teams’ lineups, signature heroes and all, was another mental challenge layered on top of understanding the game itself.When I tried to explain my appreciation for the shuffle to Heyoka, he opined that the greatest downside to the post-team swapping was that it left little space for new players to break into the professional scene. Why, after all, would any team feel the need to take a risk on an inexperienced and unproven talent when it could simply wait a while and pick up one of any number of free agents after the Seattle tournament?That this creates a barrier to entry for would-be progamers is an unfortunate consequence, and certainly one that people might feel strongly about, but the concept of there being a sort of soft limit on the number of professional players in the scene precipitated a further realisation. Let’s assume for a few moments that there is, as that statement suggests, a closed pool of professional players from which a team might draw its members.That limited selection is further reduced by the number of players already on teams, as well as the number of players that you know won’t work well with the team you already have in place. You must also account for the relative value placed on players, which will be based both on their performance in the past and their current form. Moreover, you need to be aware that there are other teams that may well be vying for the same players to complement their own existing lineups.If all of this is beginning to sound a little familiar, that’s no coincidence. The truth is that we watch a variation of this shuffle play out on another scale every time we watch a professional match. You take your limited pool of a hundred or so heroes, then you begin to subtract those heroes that don’t make sense for your team, those that the other team has picked or banned are denied to you, those your players dislike, and so on down the list. You look to those heroes that synergise best with one another, as well as having complementary playstyles. You figure out your lanes, how the game will look, and then you attempt to execute.Usually, we see that first few minutes determine the shape of the game to come, but in the analogous case of team construction outside the game, the timeline is stretched. Instead of watching the picks and bans unfold in minutes, we attempt to make deductions as the flames posted by players light up sites like Weibo and QQ, or we wait for organisations like MLG give us the first impressions of team lineups in strange Reddit posts . We now sit somewhere in toward the end of that uncomfortable period, with some players’ futures hovering in a world of speculation and uncertainty, while quiet rumours and idle chatter suggest that damned near anyone could end up just about anywhere.The period of adjustment immediately after TI3 might feel interminable, but the teams that come out of this in good shape will have been built to last another year, until the race-to-the-throne that isAs a new fan, the question I was left with as teams made their way through the shuffle this time last year was, “Where do I stand now?” It’s easy to be a fan of a team when you’ve just started to watch and teams feels more constant. You can appreciate a team’s players and how they operate as a unit, but when some proportion of the players that had constituted your favourite team is suddenly dispersed and scattered across other teams, the team you cheered on can begin to seem stilted and strange.Since I first started watching Dota, I have found myself in the somehow uncomfortable position of being a fan of teams whose makeups have changed substantially since I first started saw them. Now, through longer exposure to their play across multiple teams, there are players who I will cheer for no matter where they land. What I have come to relish most in these cases is that we have an opportunity to watch those players interact in their new contexts. We are given the chance to see the fresh interplay between players whose styles we have grown familiar with over time.What is strange about this is that, over years watching Brood War and Starcraft 2, I was never one of those people who simply appreciated players across all teams. I was a man with limited time; I supported a single team and watched all of their games that I could. Now though, I find myself watching games between teams I’ve never followed before. I want to see where old favourites have ended up, and how they fit in their new lineups.There was certainly a time when I thought, “Ah, but my favourite team is being broken up. Will I like what they are now? Should I follow wherever they happen to land individually, or do I just keep supporting the same team?” The truth is that my favourite teams persist, but the frame of reference is incorrect. As long asis maintained, I feel as though those of us who have watched Dota for a while are as likely to respond, “Na`Vi 2011,” “Liquid 2013,” or “Dignitas 2012” as anything else.Without doubt, there was a time when this sense of flux seemed a dreadful prospect to me, but I have come to relish it. If you follow the game long enough, you see wonderful plays from every quarter. Over time, I’ve gained seen enough staggering plays from so very many players that every team becomes a dream team, every new combination something I look forward to seeing.When I think about my old attitude to the instability of Dota teams, I will always be brought back to Nazgul’s post when Liquid first acquired a Dota team. I remember reading it after hearing of the team announcement and thinking, “Yes, this is someone who understands where I’m coming from, this is why Dota is tricky for me to follow.” In among his notes on the structure of the scene then was,There was a time, not long ago, when I would have agreed with that sentiment with conviction, but as another International slipped by, I began to question my own stance. In the end though, it was watching Dota itself that once more provided me with the direction I sought.Those of us who have only been following Dota a while will already be familiar with the stories that longer-term Dota fans tell about hero combinations that were once so dominant, but have since fallen out of fashion. Are there certain player combinations that simply grow stale over time in the same way, the extent of their interplay somehow “figured out” by other teams in the scene or left behind by an evolving metagame? Given the results of this year’s international, are we to believe that courting a certain amount of volatility the strongest tactic in the harsh environs of competitive Dota play?Whenever I’m curious about an off-the-wall hypothesis like this, I turn to K-poptosis, our resident statistician, and ask him, as though it required no effort at all on his part, whether or not there are numbers that back up the theory. In this case, I dropped him a line to ask if there was any hard evidence that we should believe in stability as a factor in a team’s success. If there’s one thing the man hates, it’s not being able to give a straight answer and support it with some healthy figures. After a few days, he shot me a message that read,He went on to explain that part of the issue was that it is difficult to filter the extraneous variables that might exist in that context, but at that point I was already looking back over the anecdotal evidence, those cases right under our noses in which the most stable of teams were failing to achieve.Last year’s winner, Invictus Gaming, was among the most stable teams heading intowith a roster unchanged since it claimed the Aegis last year. This year, iG only made it to a joint fifth/sixth finish with Team DK. As much as there is to be said for stability, there comes a point where the case for mutation makes itself. Just as the combinations of heroes that enjoy the most success change over time, we see different permutations of player combinations enjoy their own successes.Into this context of a professional scene that seems to so closely mimic the game itself, you inject the few new players that do appear over the course of any year, the EternalEnvys and Admiral Bulldogs of the scene. As we’ve said above, that these new players rise so infrequently is, doubtless, a source of ire for those who hope to be professional players, but it does help to round out the analogy between the state of the professional scene and the state of the game itself, with new heroes being so infrequently added to the Captains Mode roster. When players like these first begin to emerge, it is often as stand-ins, rather than as a recurring addition to a more stable lineup. There is a certain resonance with those offhand picks that become an important portion of the competitive metagame over time, a minor novelty that becomes a constant over time.Similarly, players like Loda who come out of retirement have the feeling of those heroes that were once at the core of the metagame, but have since become vanishingly rare. When these players come out of retirement, we tend to see events that mirror the picking of an out-of-fashion hero. They bring a style and a flavour to games that has long been missing, whether we’ve noticed it or not.Layered on top of that we have the strange tendency for long-standing figures in the scene who work well together to break away from one another; in spite of strong friendships, they find themselves suited to different roles on different teams. When players like Loda and Akke, or Puppey and Kuroky are brought together by the shifting sands of the competitive scene, we are afforded the opportunity to see how their styles, augmented by months or even years on different teams, interact and complement one another. These confluences and reunions give us one more thing to cheer for in a context that is already well loaded with reasons to cheer.Of course, I’m not an authority on these things. I’m neither team owner nor professional player, I’m just some guy who likes to watch the game. So maybe I’m wrong and the annual shuffle is terrible for the competitive scene at large, but as someone who has been a fan of a few different teams over the years, I feel lucky to have seen the cross pollenation that brought some of my favourite players from one team to another. As someone who loves his play, it’s been a joy to see Funn1k play with Na`Vi, and to see how that’s coloured the team’s play.At the same time, there is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that nothing in Dota is fixed, a player might provide a certain flavour to a team’s play, but there’s no guarantee that next year’s vintage will boast that particular flavour as part of its bouquet. Whatever sense of permanence there might have been when I first started to watch these teams has long since been eroded.We live in a world in which players are not fixed points. They might very well gravitate towards certain teams in the long and short term, but there are no guarantees. In that context,becomes a metonym for the professional scene as a whole, for the skillful arrangement of the players we’ve come to cheer for into teams that can succeed the furnace of competitive play.There was a time that I dreaded this quiet period and the manifold uncertainties of the next year of competitive play. Over the last twelve months, just as I came to appreciate and attempt to understand the deeper strategy of the Pick/Ban phase of the games I watched, I have found myself coming to appreciate these moments of uncertainty.There may be very little real stability, but what has begun to emerge is a pattern; after The International, there comes a period of downtime, a pause to meditate on the results and dissect play, but the players are already pairing off, and the next game is already beginning.



Staff @SirJolt