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Oh yeah, sorry looks like I mispoke in my post. The article is about the first woman to make it to the LCS tournament.

I have had a number of friends do the all hero challenge, and personally I wouldn't recommend it. There are certain heroes that they had a miserable time with, and would lose like 14 games in a row with. I think the trick was basically eventually they would lose enough games that their MMR was low enough that they'd end up in a game with people good enough to carry them. So I think if you are rigid about it it's gonna make DOTA less fun for you, and it isn't the best way to learn new heroes. I prefer to just watch matches of really good players, and if I get excited by something they do with a particular hero that I feel like I can replicate in some capacity, then I try that out. You can go to the dotabuff website and find players or matches with heroes you are interested in, find a match id number, and then watch the game in the client (as long as it happened within the last week). I do that a lot to learn about how to play heroes I'm unfamiliar with, or when I feel like I'm ready to learn new things. Whether you queue solo or with a stack is more of a personal preference I think. When I queue with friends I tend to play mid or support since that's what my friends typically need, so if I want to play a different carry or some other role I usually need to solo queue.

My tickets for the International arrived today, so excited!

So Theeban who was the coach for Team Secret was streaming, and had this to say about the status of Secret in light of the news of RTZ's move to EG: -Secret is not disbanding, they are being remade or whatever. Puppey will be remaking the team. -Kuro is forming his own team, with Fata it sounds like. -Theeban is stepping down as coach and forming his own team -Zai will act as a sub for the team while he finishes up school. He'll be back for the next TI. -S4 possibly to stay on board I like Puppey and S4 the most, so this is all sounding pretty good to me. If they manage to pick up Aui that will be the dream!

Well now I feel even better about the fact that I was never rooting for EG. Aui was the best part of that team IMO. Don't really think they could have beaten LGD or CDEC but for Aui's Techies and Naga Siren. Screw those guys!

Speaking of women in the pro scene, Kotaku just wrote a piece about the first woman pro in League of Legends. Big ups to team Renegades! Although unfortunately it will come as no surprise that this story isn't all sunshine and love, and a lot of dudes are terrible human beings. http://kotaku.com/the-league-of-legends-championship-series-has-its-first-1724136651

I think it also helps with traditional sports that you have a huge base of people following it already, so it is a lot easier to get answers to questions you might have when you don't understand something. That's not something people can reliably count on with e-sports!

Yup. In League there are women casting games, but in the English speaking DOTA world it seems like you just have Sheever at TI, and she keeps getting a more marginalized role at TI each year so the problem is actually getting worse.

My perception is that DOTA is especially bad in terms of representation of women involved with the pro scene, although I'm sure it is pretty bad in every game.

I think the rationale is that you actually do need the newbie stream to act as a primer going into the regular casters because it is the regular casters that will break down the kind of strategy components you're seeking to understand, but it will be difficult to understand if you're not familiar with the basic roles of the game or like what a MKB stands for, etc. There's also the economic component to all this. There was an interview with Purge, one of the newbie casters, where he said something to the effect that Valve found that the newbie stream last year wasn't a good value proposition to them relative to the resources they put into it, so they decided to pare it back this year and only run it for the first match of the day. So it also sounds like providing that kind of accessibility doesn't necessarily translate into a meaningful increase in the player base.

I'd say I can't follow the majority of what American football casters are talking about, but I'm still able to follow the game at my basic level. So I agree with Henroid that I'm not sure being able to understand what the casters are talking about is all that important. I also don't understand Starcraft 2, but can follow that enough even if I don't understand the casters. Even just knowing when they are getting excited is enough to sustain interest even if it is confusing from an outsider perspective. Also I only started playing DOTA a year ago when I was coincidentally sick while the International was happening, so I just spent a couple of days laying on the couch watching these games. I didn't understand a lot of it, but it made me curious to learn more about the game, so I think sometimes that seeming opaqueness can sometimes work in a game's favor. If it was immediately comprehensible I might not have cared!

I just wanted to make a quick note about Jake's reference to Team Secret, the team that wore the golden sunglasses going into the match versus EHOME, who proceeded to knock Secret into the lower bracket. I think it is widely presumed by a lot of people that this was a super arrogant move on Team Secret's part. I suppose there was maybe some arrogance in the move, but I also know from going to the International something about that that everyone at home missed because of the camera shot. Everyone on Team Secret took off their sunglasses as they shook the hands of the opposing team. But when it came to Puppey, he took off his sunglasses to reveal a second pair of sunglasses. But when I watched the twitch replay of that the camera switched to a bird's eye shot of the two teams shaking hands, so basically nearly everyone missed the punchline.

I agree with what benjerry said about how difficult multitasking is for like 95% of us. I love watching competitive SC2 matches, but actually playing the multiplayer game is totally unappealing to me. DOTA may involve a steep learning curve, but the fact is that even if I'm never even as close to as good a player as any pro DOTA player I know I can pull off some epic move in a game that changes the tide of a game similar to what you see in the pro games. And that's a really powerful moment that makes up for how awful the community might be or whatever. And when I sit down and try to play SC2 it seems impossible for me to envision doing anything remotely similar to what I see in pro games. Without those similar moments at a lower skilled game the capacity for enjoyment diminishes.

If Team Secret had gone farther you might have seen some more jungling roles. Puppey plays most of the heroes that can act as a dedicated jungler. But you're right, it is much more rare to see a dedicated jungler in DOTA compared to LoL. That's because there's more gold to be earned in lane compared to in the jungle, so it's typically more efficient to have a support player stack camps and have the players farm the area up at a later time (if you have a hero that can farm stacked ancient camps that is especially valuable). When players do start farming the jungle a lot, it is often out of a desire to not reveal their location on the minimap.

What is even happening? I like the way you put this about learning DOTA. If you aren't enjoying yourself in the learning and self-improvement process I can't imagine sticking with DOTA.

Got it, thanks!

I like spamming "nice shot" when someone scores an own goal.

Was this the final episode of the season? i.e. If I want to listen to the season 1 rewatch is now the right time to subscribe to TDW?

Yeah I generally prefer to keep voice chat off for most games if it is an option, but the directional pad responses are too useful for me to want to play without text chat.

Good discussion about TI, but I don't think CDEC was given their proper dues by anyone other than Sean. They played extraordinary DOTA, and despite having a disadvantage in the drafts, I thought the games were surprisingly close except for game 4 where EG just stomped. Andrew said he didn't feel like CDEC were respecting Fear's Gyrocopter at all, but I don't think that's correct. All of CDEC bans were respect bans for EG players. They knew Aui's Techies and Naga were hard counters to their play style, so they prioritized banning those heroes. I'm sure they would have loved to ban Gyro or take it themselves, but you only get to ban two heroes initially, and playing VS Gyro would mean they had a shot at winning (like in game 2) whereas playing against Naga made that chance remote, and against Techies their chances were non-existent. They won against Aui's Naga in game 2 of the upper bracket finals, but PPD made sure they weren't allowed to have heroes that would allow CDEC to recreate those conditions. Note how PPD consistently banned the Bounty Hunter, and Dark Seer or Tusk every game. As jennegatron pointed out, CDEC's mid player wasn't really much of a Leshrac player which is another interesting thing about them, that they went so far without really playing a bunch of heroes that are considered OP this patch. But they also knew they couldn't give the Leshrac to Sumail. Andrew claimed that perhaps Leshrac wasn't that scary, but I think it has more to do with the fact that he's a terrifying hero in the right hands. The changes made to Leshrac made in 6.84 mean that after Leshrac picks up his blooodstone he can farm faster than any other hero in DOTA. That's exactly the type of hero you don't want to give to Sumail, who can farm a bloodstone in under 15 minutes. We saw this play out when EG played against LGD. LGD gave away the Leshrac pick, and it wasn't pretty. CDEC tried a few different approaches to running an OP hero that their mid player couldn't really play. First they ran Leshrac as a support. Leshrac is a perfectly respectable support in a sense, but he isn't terrifying since he will never have enough farm to pick up a bloodstone. In game 2 they pulled a brilliant switch and ran a surprise Broodmother pick mid, and ran their Leshrac as a carry. That worked out great, but of course it was a one time event, ppd was sure to ban the Brood in the 2nd round of bans in subsequent games. Finally they tried Leshrac mid in game 3, but having a mid player playing a hero they're relatively unfamiliar with against Sumail was predictably miserable. Finally in game 4 they banned Leshrac instead of Naga, and that proved to be their worst match. Ppd is an excellent drafter, but I think sometimes people take that too far talking about how much of a genius he is. He has an important advantage in how many heroes his teammates can play extraordinarily well. This was mentioned by Sean, saying how unlike other teams ppd just picks whatever for his teammates. Well, you only get to do that when you know your team can play those heroes! That gives EG a serious edge when it comes to drafting. But I would say CDEC only got moderately outdrafted. The real problem was EG had just figured out how to deal with those smoke ganks. And they were able to do that because they consistently won the warding and counter-warding game against CDEC which I don't think I saw any other team really pull off against them. It's such a simple and unflashy thing, but wards and vision really do win DOTA. Anyway, great episode, just thought I would offer my own perspective about the grand finals!

A close read of Utopia suggests that is in fact the social blueprint for Chris' vault.

Yeah I will often play in the most defensive position on my team, but I don't necessarily stay near the goal the entire time. It's entirely possible to score shots from halfway up the field so I'm comfortable sitting fairly far back for strong defense without sacrificing the opportunities for counterattacks.

Danielle's point about FMV production brought to mind this recent blog post from Kevin Drum about how incomprehensible the plots are for Hollywood movies these days: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/its-not-just-you-blockbuster-movies-really-have-gotten-incomprehensible-lately Basically it is about the way these blockbusters are produced is to film all these expensive spectacles, and then they expect the writers to sort of quickly find ways to tie all these disparate events together into a narrative. The result is movies that don't always make a ton of sense because the film has been created in a piecemeal fashion. That was a similar problem with FMV games in the 90s where the game and the FMV movies weren't really working well together, and the quality of both would often suffer since resources were then expended sub-optimally. If the template for Her Story is to become a genre, I hope it is for VR. It would be cool to play a version of this game where you use a PC just to access a database, but then you have to go to a filing cabinet to dig up files and piece together information, and you have legal notepads you can write stuff down on. Maybe there are videos and audio tapes you can consult, etc. All within the confines of an office space. I think that would be cool, and would be the sort of thing would allow me (at least) to get stoked on VR.

Yeah there were direct invites, there were teams from different regions that had to qualify in regional qualifiers, and then there was the free for all competition to make it into one of the two wild card slots. Which was all cool, but the downside is I think there were too many teams this year. Especially when some of the games had significant delays this resulted in pretty brutal 13 or 14 hr days sometimes.

As someone at Key Arena, yeah, I definitely could not get behind the USA chants. And before people claim that it was ironic (I've seen a lot of people claim that), my observation is that plenty of EG fans looked like frat bro dawgs. If it was all an ironic pose it sure fooled me! As such, as much as I enjoy watching EG play, and I like most of the players, I will never be able to root for them. That being said, there were sections of the crowd waving Chinese flags, so the patriotism cut the other way too (they would chant the names of the teams though).