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TychoCelchuuu

Dota Today 7: Sean/Nick Miss

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um so i wanted to talk about this episode

The reader mail intrigued me - as someone who watches a ton of strategy games and who also casts strategy games, including one (Natural Selection 2) that is also a first person shooter, the question of what makes something compelling to watch was really interesting to me. I think the thing Sean brought up (I think it was Sean - actually now that I write this maybe it was Nick) about there always being more to learn because of the depth of Dota 2 is really key. It's true that players controlling an individual avatar, having the goals on either end of the thing, having heroes that players are known for playing, and the stuff the reader mail mentioned are all helpful, but I think the fact that someone watching Dota 2 is always going to be seeing more than they can understand at any given time, but is also always being bombarded with new opportunities to learn stuff and whittle away at the vast number of facts that they don't know, makes watching Dota 2 more enticing that watching almost anything else. Learning something about the mechanics of a game is something that keeps viewers coming back, I think, and Dota 2 just has SO MANY FUCKING MECHANICS that fly at you fast and furious every second of a match (plus casters who aren't afraid to call out every single mechanic as it happens) that you can't help but learn.

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For me at least, it's mainly just enjoying the spectacle of mastery in a domain that interests me. I've never even toyed with the idea trying to play Starcraft versus people seriously but I still loved watching cast matches and Day9's dailies, just because seeing people do something difficult so skillfully is enjoyable. I'm the same with watching stuff like gymnastics.

 

So, I wouldn't attribute my enjoyment of watching things to their complexity so much as to their depth, ie. how much better a very skilled person looks doing it than a newbie.

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Calling XBOCT (hvost) "Jubeau" really broke my mind for a bit there. Had to rewind a couple times to figure out what you were referring to.

 

The Chinese Dota trend was definitely something you could attribute to most chinese teams, but I felt iG was the main team that was reluctant to press an advantage early. One of the reasons I'm a fan of DK is because when I saw them play last year they'd always push a tower after a fight, pretty much regardless of how it went. Then I saw Burning's anti-mage be super agressive in his safe lane trilane and was enamoured with their playstyle. I felt what iG wanted to do was to let the game go past all the towers going down and then use their superior map sense to out farm the opponent. It ended up working in a lot of cases. However I know they have a lot of individual skill to make things happen, but they seemed apprehensive to risk that. LGD.cn was basically letting themselves get outpushed, knowing that they have the best base defense in the entirety of dota. They often tried to get a magnus and a strong carry so that they could comeback. I'm fine with that style of match, but I also enjoyed seeing more aggressive attempts to defeat that style.

 

Alliance, interestingly enough, ended up playing 2 farm heavy style games against DK, and DK is the only team that was able to take a game off of them outside of the grand finals in the second one. 

 

Anyway, glad to see DOTA TODAY! is back. c:

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Question- was your comment about the meta shifting a comment that you think the Chinese meta will become more prevalent, or the Alliance style win at level 1 always ready to fight continuous assault style? I couldn't tell.

Curious, because the LoL meta has seen some shifts to and away from both those styles and it would be interesting if the trends mirrored or reflected each other in any way.

I think one of the simplest ways to explain what makes lomas more interesting and watchable than possibly other competitive games is that it's always a team game. 5 people have to work together at all times to win. In CoD there's the potential that 1 person could win against 5, but that potential doesn't exist here. Even if one person takes over the game, they were fed farm or got ganks or someone babysat for them or there was a great team fight to snowball. Alchemist looked like a freight train in some games, but knowing that the team's blessing is behind that is incredibly alluring and you don't need to know the names of any abilities or items to get excited to see a huge dude cleaving the hell out of everyone.

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There are also a lot of highs and lows in any given game of Dota 2 and a very real sense of gradual progression. 

 

The different phases of the game all offer different flavours of drama. Laning has the micro-intensive parry and thrust of last hitting / denying / pushing and the occasional touche / reposte when someone gets out of position. Ganking gives you those feelings of building tension you get when you see a play developing in soccer; supports roaming in, the target blissfully unawares, suddenly they get a bad feeling and BOOM shit goes down. And of course there's the laser light show of big engagements and base racing in 5-man doto. And all that comes AFTER the cerebral mind games of drafting (which are admittedly pretty boring until you have a fairly deep knowledge of the game and the teams playing). 

 

The tension rises, releases, falls and rises again while the towers are destroyed one by one, making for a lot of little stories over 45 minutes. Contrast that with the typical build-build-poke-build-drop-build-harass-build-build-CLASH-gg you get from a lot of pro StarCraft 2 games; even though you can have a whole Bo5 series in the time it takes to have a single game of Dota 2, it feels like less happens and that less CAN happen. 

 

ALSO also, things like this: 

 

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Did anyone else feel the audio levels in this episode were a bit off?

Sometimes I could barely hear the guys and the next they would either laugh or something so loud that my ears hurt. :/ 

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Because of the broken leg we were recording it in my apartment -- it wasn't the best and didn't get normalized when we edited it. We'll be back in the Thumbs studio from here on out.

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Glad to hear Sean is recovering, fun episode. 

 

I'd love to hear about Natural Selection 2 casting, always intrigued about games that I play casually and how they are played at their optimal competitive best. I think that's one of the great things about the International.

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You can always hit up my YouTube channel for NS2 casts. One thing about NS2 and about most video games other than something like Dota 2/SC2/LoL/Call of Duty/etc. is that even the competitive players aren't all at their optimal best - unless there's enough money in the scene to attract really good people and make dedicating tons of time worth it on a level beyond just "it's fun to be good," you tend to get teams composed of people who aren't all superhumans. The good NS2 clanners are a million times better than anyone else and have clocked way more hours (many can get ~72 kills for every death on a public server, for instance) but the vast majority are far from what the "best" NS2 player looks like. The community is just so small and the game is so niche that to be one of the best in the world doesn't require bionic reflexes. Competitive NS2 is much more like what the ideal of the Olympics used to be: non-professional people competing in something they are good at but that they don't devote their life to.

 

I have to admit it's slightly less interesting than something like Dota 2 or SC2 where the people playing are basically superhuman, but on the other hand it's nice to be able to understand what's going on and picture doing it yourself, rather than to have to just sit back and imagine what kind of gods are playing, as is the case when I watch SC2 or Dota 2 generally.

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