Surviving Matchmaking: Positioning, or, How to Shut Me Up

 

It’s not often I’m left without words in a game of Dota. I consider myself to be right up there with the best when it comes to coming up with the witty retort or pointing out blatant stupidity in my teammates. It’s not a good thing, I understand, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself (see: every game). It gets off some steam, allows you to laugh at a clearly unfunny situation, and loosens the ever-tightening fist forming to be slammed upon your keyboard. But recently, I was so overcome with dismay after a loss, so completely and utterly incapable of understanding a train of thought, I could think of not one utterance to make light of the situation (holy crap I take this game seriously). But it did provide me with a moment of clarity, an epiphany revealing of the very essence of what makes Dota so complex and difficult to crack. It’s a necessity of realizing and executing a simple task that has long evaded even the best players ever since the game began. Knowing where to stand.

It’s a completely foreign concept to try to teach someone; understanding the complexities between when to be aggressive and when to be passive, when to harass the opponent out of lane and when to prevent being harassed yourself, where to place yourself in a team fight. It’s bloody complicated and situational, and it requires game after game of seeing scenario after scenario to have the slightest inkling of an idea as to where you’re supposed to be. But as hindsight is 20/20, I took a look back on that fated game and saw who stood their ground when they should’ve given way, and who acted like a scared child when they should’ve been asserting dominance;-

And determined who was truly responsible for bringing a grown man to tears.

First off, in the laning phase, we ran a safe lane tri-lane as Dire, consisting of a Gyrocopter, Bane, and Keeper of the Light. I was the Keeper. We successfully kept the suicide laning Dark Seer out of lane early, but he got a little bit of experience at the tower before I got the creep stack and pull off to deny a creep wave. During my pull, the Dark Seer came through our woods and started trying to disrupt the stack with Ion Shell. At this point, our Bane had set up camp under our tower and decided it was in his best interest to help our Gyrocopter last hit. As a result of Keeper’s inability to successfully 1v1 with a Dark Seer to keep him off of the neutrals, their solo hard lane hero was getting the levels required to have a strong impact on the mid game. We needed that Bane to be standing his ground in the jungle to scare off that pesky purple hedgehog, either through right-clicks or the nasty Nightmare into Illuminate combo we had set up in the draft. But this isn’t why we lost.

"You hold the cannon while I push the trigger, ok?"

Our mid lane matchup, Batrider vs. the opposing Magnus, should’ve been an easy win for us. But again faulty positioning came back to bite our team in the ass. At level 2 our Batrider saw an opportunity to go for a solo first blood, getting 3 stacks (not enough) up on the Magnus, and used Firefly to start bringing the Magnus down. But seeing as this guy had apparently heard that Skewer was a good ability, he used it to try to get away from the Bat. Since the Batrider had positioned himself in front of, or rather on top of, the Magnus, he went for a ride right along with him back to the Radiant tier 1. You can imagine how that ended for the Batrider. You have to understand how much an opposing hero’s skill set can impact your attempts on diving kills, especially as a mid player. This gave the Magnus a huge boost towards his level 6, as well as his eventual blink/arcane boots. But this isn’t why we lost, either.

Both of these did put us rather far behind. We handily lost the laning phase, and in turn, struggled to get any of our footing back as we went into the midgame. Somehow, they couldn’t finish us off, and we slowly crawled to a respectable deficit and our Gyrocopter had enough farm to actually become a tad scary. We took a big teamfight as they tried to push into our base, and made a teamwide decision that going for a Divine Rapier on Gyrocopter was our best chance at taking this game. We decided to swing top and take their last remaining outer tower. Our Gyrocopter had gotten his gold for Satanic (without enough for buyback) and decided to move ahead into THEIR secret shop while we pushed the lane to pick up the Reaver and get even scarier. Without vision. Without support. Without a single shred of logic. Right into the entirety of their team. He was dead before he could BKB.

 "Fancy meeting you gentleman here on this fine evening."

Speechless.

I don’t think anyone can argue that that single out of position maneuver is why the game ended; but it’s not all on the Gyrocopter. Mistake after mistake added up into pushing him into the position of requiring an inherently risky item in order to succeed, and as a result made every move he made magnified beyond typical scope. It’s obvious that dropping that Rapier gave them the lethality they needed to push into our base, but the fact that the single Rapier was even on the field is a product of bad play from the whole team. The only thing we can do is learn from these positioning errors and use them to know where we are supposed to be standing the next time around. And that the Rapier-holder is standing way, way back.

Disclaimer: Even though I don’t point out any of my specific mistakes, it’s because they don’t transfer well to the topic discussed here, as it’s obvious I shouldn’t be standing alone in the river with zero enemies on the minimap.