After TI7 a lot of people expected Liquid’s performance to fall off (as was the case for most previous TI champions, i.e. the TI winner curse). There are two main reasons for this trend:



Psychology: First, lack of motivation. After having achieved your goal, it’s hard to make yourself work as hard as before. Liquid described it as a feeling of emptiness, but even if this affected them at the beginning of the season, they most certainly got over it quite quickly and found their motivation again.

Strategy: Second, a shift of the metagame. Generally speaking, after TI a balance patch comes out which nerfs the most popular picks and strategies, which in turn shifts the meta. Logically, the winning team is usually the one to suffer the most from the changes.

To win TI you need to be at the top of the meta at the tournament. To stay dominant, however, you have to change your game plan in order to stay relevant, which is very hard to do. Many teams, most notably Alliance (as well as Royce in our MMA example), weren’t able to do this well enough, which quickly led to their decline.

Even if the patch doesn’t nerf the strategies you like to play, other teams will most certainly study you and imitate and counter what you are doing.

A good example of this is the cheese picks – Liquid was one of few teams who drafted Brood (and Huskar) very often at TI7. At TI8, however, most teams had a good Brood player and some teams even picked Brood from the early stages of the draft, which meant that Liquid was not unique in using those "cheese" strategies anymore. Many teams even integrated Meepo into their cheese picks (most notably Secret with Ace) – something Liquid didn't do.

You need to constantly change and stay ahead of the curve to stay on top.

So how did Liquid adapt?

Quite well – they had a strong season, won the Super Major before TI and managed to place high at TI8. So, what did they change in their playstyle?

They kept certain aspects of their game plan which are not as meta-game reliant, but they had to ditch other things they did often and to adopt a new playstyle: