Category: Dota2

I would like to start with thanking you all who have been cheering for us in the qualifier. It means a lot to us to see that we have such nice and dedicated fans and we always do our best to perform as good as possible to make you guys proud!

So, back to the qualifier where we started off with a wonderful score of 0-2! 😀 When you are playing this kind of qualifier it’s definitely not a score you want to start out with since it puts pressure on you in multiple ways. It’s never good to have the feeling that you “need” to win the next game because it could result in you trying to do too much in the game to win it or just be scared to make a mistake. I’m very happy we managed to leave those feelings behind and turn it around by winning the next 3 games finishing the day with 3-2. We did lose a couple of games that definitely was winnable for us but we tried to not think too much about it and just focus on the next games and try to not make the same mistakes twice.

The first game in the grand finals vs. Escape gaming was the most crazy one. I made the decision to go for an Aghs on Venge which I’ve actually never done before but it turned out to be a very good choice. Since they had Void together with all their damage from Invoker and Timber I knew that I would have to sacrifice myself every fight to save someone from the Chrono, so by getting the aghs I made sure I could still stay in the fights even after I died. The game looked quite grim for us since they got more and more of our base so when we managed to kill Qojqva without a buyback we saw an opportunity to go for the push and end the game!

After the first game I decided to reboot my computer because my computer froze for a second during one of the team fights. It turned out to be a big mistake though because there was some updates queued so in the end it took like 30 minutes for the computer to fully restart. Since we didn’t know how long it was gonna take, we just waited for it to restart and the admins didn’t say much about it. We constantly gave updates of what happened but then out of the blue the admins wrote “Penalty level 3 given to Alliance”. We were quite surprised because they didn’t give us any heads up at all so when we saw that we got a penalty we instantly switched to an old computer we had at the bootcamp. I understand they can’t wait forever but I think it was very poorly handled by the admins. If they would have written “Alliance you will receive a level 1 penalty in 5 minutes” or something like that we would have switched straight away because you never want to get a draft penalty (a level 3 penalty means that you only have 20 seconds bonus time instead of 130 so it’s quite a big difference) and on top of that we got the level 3 penalty out of the blue after not even receiving a level 1 or 2 penalty. I guess it might be in the rules about how long break you could have but a heads up by the admins would have been nice as well ^^.

In the second game, Escape Gaming went for a crazy push strat that we weren’t able to fend off so they got a rax very early. Khezu went for a shadow blade to be able to pick off s4’s Ember so he couldn’t really split push and delay the game in that way either and fighting them head on with all their heals was impossible so the game was pretty hard. We lost the game quite fast.

Third game was a battle against the clock for us. Compared to the second game where Escape Gaming wanted to push us, it was now the other way around. The problem for us was that they had a Tinker to defend their base with and also a Medusa for the late game. I can really see their lineup work – if they manage to defend the base and get strong enough on the Medusa it would be really hard for us to finish the game but even though we didn’t get any rax until quite late we stayed somewhat equal in farm. EGM even managed to get a aghs + refresher up on Shadow Shaman which made it a bit easier for us to break the base. I think the game was very even though – if they would be able to kill one of us with the Tinker’s aghs (which they almost did a couple of fights) they would probably be able to chase us down with the Night Stalker and take control of the map but we managed to survive their burst and heal up with Jugger’s healing ward and the heals from Dazzle.

Last game was also quite even but for me the one I felt we had the most control over. The one thing I was concerned about was if the game would come to the point where Necrophos would have aghs and be able to kill someone without the ability to buy back. Since they had Lone Druid they could easily go and take our whole base if they would get a pick off like that but luckily for us the game never reached that point! 🙂 We were able to shut down Khezu on Slardar in the early game because of Lich so even though Qojqva farmed a lot on Lone Druid we farmed a lot on all of our 3 cores as well. Loda played somewhat of a play maker this game on Void so Bulldog and S4 both had more farm than him but at the same time he got enough farm to be a threat in the fights.

After we won the series and qualified for TI I was both happy and relieved. It’s so stressful to play these qualifiers so I was happy that it was over and that we can continue and focus on TI instead! We are playing in an online tournament called “Global Grand Master” the upcoming two weeks. It’s a double elimination bracket and I think it’s nice for us to play some officials to stay in shape.

Cheers,
Akke

After a couple of days at home it was time for us to go to our next event, ESL One Frankfurt! We’ve been here competing twice before and I’m looking forward to our third time! I like how they have changed the structure of the event that there is a GSL group stage in the beginning that actually matters in the playoffs (only top 2 from the group stage advance to the playoffs). I think they had a playoff straight away that was single elimination at their first event here so you could get eliminated after just playing one bo3 but now everyone gets to play at least 2 series which is a bit better for the teams that travel far to get here. We are lucky though that there is a direct flight from Gothenburg to Frankfurt so it’s quite easy for us to get here! 🙂

The tournament starts on Friday so tomorrow will be media day which means that we (as usual) will take some pictures and someone will probably do an interview as well. We have gotten quite used to how every tournament wants to take the pictures so it usually goes quite fast.

Just got back to my room after dinner with the team and gym with s4. The dinner took ages because the hotel is quite new (the reception isn’t even finished) so the crew that worked at the restaurant wasn’t the fastest one so to speak. It was okay though because the staff were very polite and apologized for the delay and apart from that the hotel is good (Loda just said he only got cold water when he took a shower though so I will have to check that out.. ^^). The hotels at the latest events has been super good so I feel a bit spoiled. Sometimes I think back when we went to compete at Dreamhack in 2006 and we slept on the concrete floor at the event and when we won we got 800 dollars to split with the team. It was barely enough to cover for the expenses for the trip but I was still super happy but I guess that comes with being 18 years old and not having any responsibilities when it comes to earn enough money to make a living. If I would be able to go back and ask myself how I thought eSports would look like in 10 years from then I would never guess that there would be prize pools as big as there is today and that events would be played in arenas.

Time to watch some anime before I go to sleep. I started to watch “Guilty Crown” lately which is decent, not a master piece but enough interesting to want me to keep on watching. I don’t watch so much anime but there are some I really like, my all time favorite is by far Steins;Gate but I also really liked Code Geass, Death Note and newer ones like Attack on Titans etc. I like when there isn’t more than like 20-30 episodes or it’s often quite slow paced.

Good night! 🙂
Akke

Got back home earlier today after a very well handled event in Manila. It’s so great to see that everything got a lot more serious after the failure at the Shanghai Major so hopefully this will keep up for the future Majors as well. PGL, the Valve staff and everyone else involved did a really good job, props to you guys!

Our schedule is quite packed right now. We are having one day off now after we got back home but after that we are gonna continue to practice for ESL Frankfurt. It’s been a lot of practice and games the past weeks but with TI6 coming up it’s not that hard to be motivated to keep on practicing and playing.

This event was the first one in a long time where we had a coach with us (last one was during TI4 where Winter coached us) and even though we didn’t get so far in the tournament I’m very happy with what Synderen helped us with. He was very on-point with things that we needed to improve on and didn’t hesitate to speak up. We managed to get better with a lot of things during the bootcamp thanks to him but unfortunately it wasn’t enough for us this tournament. Only thing we can do from here is to look forward and do our best at ESL Frankfurt and then hopefully at TI6 as well.

Going back a bit to the games I was very happy with the win over Mineski. Their draft was quite good versus ours and at one point the game even looked a bit grim for us when they pushed our highground early. We came back though by taking good fights and defending our base until we were strong enough to pressure them. Was fun to play Keeper of The Light again, really like that hero!

Next series against Navi was very fun to play even though we lost. I read somewhere that the viewing numbers was insanely high even though the game were played on a weekday and it wasn’t even that far into the bracket. It’s fun to see that the Alliance/Navi hype is still there and I’m very grateful to be able to be a part of it. We could definitely have won game 2 against them. We had all the tools to be able to win it but in my opinion we didn’t play and take fights as we should have. We should have forced the fights a bit more when we were so much stronger than them but I think the problem was that we kept on playing as we have been doing a lot of other similar games (win it slowly) but the difference here was that since they had Huskar we either needed to win the game before he got all his items or we should have built items to counter him straight away. None of us really thought about this though (probably because as I wrote, we have been winning many games before by playing this way) and it’s probably very game-specific since they had Huskar and Oracle.

The photo session we had at the event was super fun. There were a lot of happy fans that wanted us to do poses with them so we had a couple of really good laughs. We did a ballerina pose in one of the pictures which probably looked quite fun ^^. It was all the people there who made it fun by being so happy and nice so a big thanks to everyone who was there and made our day! We heard there were many that requested a second photo session with us that we wanted to do but unfortunately there wasn’t any more time slots available so it wasn’t possible :(. Hopefully there will be more events in Manila!

Big congratulations to OG who just won their second major! It’s one of the teams that really deserves the win so I’m very happy for them!

Cheers,
Akke