Shanghai Major: Understanding Metagame Forces

The discussing a metagame can be a very contentious subject and yet it's a term that is always tossed about at each and every event because, for some reason, one always shakes out in some form or another. The Shanghai Major is no exception to this idea. I'm sure I'll need to write an indepth tournament metagame primer at some point, but today isn't that day because we have excellent DOTA going on in China. Instead I'll offer up metagame forces (MGF) as a small substitute.

These forces, much like market forces, drive hero picks at each event. These forces are: current patch, previous strategies, and wins. Initially, captains and coaches spend copious time theorycrafting how games are going to go, taking the current patch and teams at the event (previous strategies) into consideration. As the theories are put to the test, the third force driving the meta takes over: wins. This is the point we find ourselves at for the Shanghai Major.

Alliance, MVP.Phoenix, OG, and EG all won their group and they all did it handedly. Alliance and MVP didn't drop a game and EG and OG only lost once. MVP Phoenix has an insane 8.6 KDA and mostly sub-30 minute game times. This is a testament to their aggressive play style and drafting heroes that can constantly fight. They abused Nature's Prophet's ability to apply map pressure and teleport into any part of the map (drafting it 3 of 4 games only because it was banned for a game) and used fighting carries that aren't cool-down dependant like PL, Slark, and Ember.

Alliance is back and everyone know that this is their patch to lose. Admiral Bulldog is such a force that team Spirit and Fnatic both respect banned both Lone Druid and Nature's Prophet. These two heroes typify the Alliance play style: exert tons of map pressure to maximally leverage opponents mistakes and minimize their own. They chose global heroes in 3 out of 4 games and a pushing line up in the 4th to secure their 4-0 record.

OG is the previous major winner, using their unwieldy picks to keep teams off balance. They grabbed Doom(!) twice against LGD, using it to great effect (although Cr!t gave away way too many dooms in game two, which probably cost them the win).  In their five games they grabbed the Bat Ridder 5 times, relying on it to create space for their generally fighting cores. Beware the fish and Moon's ability to play some of the most disruptive heroes in the game currently.

EG also showed diversity in their drafting and creating in all but one game a solid team from start to finish. They prioritized the Lion and Nature's Prophet but gave Arteezy and Fear different heroes all but once and Sumail a different hero every game. Game 1 against Complexity was a bit of an outdraft by Swindle however the following 4 games looked polished and demonstrated the team's commitment to the strategy of their captain, PPD.

There are a few lessons we can tease out from these team's wins:

1. NP is the real deal in this patch because his flexibility lines up with all of the (winning) strategies being used (all in rush, deathball, and AOE team fight)
2. Lion is the best support. Finger provides the right amount of burst damage because when it's paired with another spell, like Lasso, is the best disable because it's permanent.
3. Fighting and farming carries are still battling it out for who's the top dog, but the fighting carries seem to be winning because of Miracle's performances on the Slark and team's inability to effectively deal with the PL.
4. The offlane position is where games are being won and lost. Nature's Prophet, Lone Druid, and Tidehunter are almost winning teams games single handedly because if the support(s) has (have) to protect their position 1 hero, they fall very far behind. Lion has had so much success because he can run around the map and make plays happen.
5. AOE team fight beats death ball which beats all in rush which beats AOE team fight... etc. 
6. Greed is the name of the game. The team that can get away with the greediest lineup win because they just out economy their opponent...
7. Unless the opponent just starts fighting from minute 1 and the game digresses into a feeding frenzy.
8. If you safe lane tri-lane or 4 protect 1, like Virtus.Pro tried to do against EG with their Sven, you're going to lose because the other team will just of farm you like EG did that very game. 
9. Passive supports are out of style for the reasons listed above and as evidence by the success of Lion and, to a lesser extent, Venge. 
10. Enchantress is great right now, despite being risky. She comes online before all the other greedy junglers, allowing teams to put the pressure on right away. 
11. Look for more Shadow Shaman and Crystal Maiden pick-ups as teams look to solidify strategies and try to pull out picks which an opponent may not be expecting. 

There are a few liberties we need to take into consideration. First is that the sample size is small which means that the metagame is still volatile. It will be interesting to see what happens when Alliance bumps into MVP. While OG and EG have some history, their styles are more similar than Alliance and MVP. Hopefully this will mean more fireworks and fun games for us the viewers. Regardless of how the bracket pans out, everyone is going to keep their eyes on who's winning and either jump on the band wagon or try to adapt their strategy to it. 

Surviving 3k: just counterpick them already

The pub meta is driven by the most popular heroes. While win rates generally correlate to popularity, Pudge is super popular but his win rate is about 50% so there isn't necessarily a general causation there; some people just have favorite heroes they like to play alot. Surviving 3k MMR has a lot to do with using picks to compensate for the wide range in skill. A lot of people resist the idea of picking hero flavors of the month and counterpicking those flavors because, again, some people just have favorite heroes they like to play alot. Well that needs to change. Stop picking your favorite heroes and counterpick your opponent already.

If your goal is to get better at DOTA and improve your MMR, then counterpicking offers a direct path to do this. Counterpicking nudges who has the advantage in your favor. Even though Wraithking may not be your jam, he gives Bloodseeker the third lowest win rating so picking a WK into BS is going to give your team a few percentage points in your favor. This is crucial. Games are generally close and the higher you get in MMR, the closer they become. The closer games become, the more important your hero decision becomes because it offers a way to gain an advantage.

How do you counterpick properly? I usually just go to dotabuff heroes section, find the hero I keep losing too, and see which heroes are recommended against them and which heroes give them a lower win rate. It's that easy. It's also useful to know how they generally itemize. Items like black king bar or butterfly can swing in their favor if you aren't prepared.

Personally, I have been having trouble with Bloodseeker. He's everywhere and has a really high win percentage. Having explored different strategies, Ursa has worked well for me because of damage mitigation and the burst damage Ursa offers. Plus he's aggressive around the same time that Bloodseeker is. You don't play Ursa in the jungle against the BS.

What heroes are you having trouble with? How are you trying to deal with them? Let me know in the comments.

Death Ball so hard

The past international saw Newbee dominate with the 5 man death ball. Get a pushing hero to 6, group up, take towers, get ahead, push more, get further ahead, and win. This is the death ball way. It became so prevalent that it pushed other strategies out of the meta and wrapped how people played the game leading to a structural change for the tower glyph and gold and hero balancing (sorry, DP.) Re-balancing the game in this way reduced the incentive to employ this strategy, but it's still powerful.

The poster heroes for taking towers are Pugna, Death Prophet (DP), Shadow Shaman (SS), Nature's Prophet (NP) and the big bad wolf (Lycan). Since the nerf stick hit the DP and Lycan directly, they haven't been first pick/first ban in pro games like they were during The International 2014 but are making appearances in the hands of capable teams and players, like EG's Arteezy and Cloud 9's Eternal Envy. Pugna and the SS have fallen out of favor as a direct result of the meta shift even though they are still viable picks although more niche. The NP is a bit of an oddity here because he's picked to globally gank and fight early, evident by the popularity of the Null Talisman and Blademail build.

The strategy was too oppressive, limiting the number of viable strategies and heroes. Teams with a death ball could take two towers in quick succession by winning a team fight at a tower, executing a successful gank, or slow sieging a tower with a counter initiation edge (think Dark Seer) giving them a huge lead. This lead gave more map control the the death ball leading to Roshan, more towers, securing the enemy jungle, et al. While the lead wasn't always insurmountable, it gave significant percentage points to teams who could reliably leverage it into a win.

Why doesn't the death ball bring all the boys to the yard like it used to? Mostly it's the nerf stick, let's say 50% can be attributed to direct nerfing; Lycan, DP, and NP see play, but NP has evolved so he only counts as half leading to 2.5 out of my 5 poster children.. What about the remaining 50%? I have a few theories, and they go as such:

1. Team theory - certain teams do better at certain strategies because of their competent hero pool (who they pick and can play at a professional level) and decision making processes (why they pick certain heroes and how they use them). For tier 1 teams, on an average day, they are all within a few percentage points of each other and a few more percentage points above tier 1.5 and more yet over tier 2 teams. As the meta shifts, these percentages also shift in favor of the team which can leverage those shifts into wins. The examples of this are Alliance and Navi who were so dominant up to the last International, but derailed and haven't found much success since. Thus, because there are narrow margins separating pro teams, shifts in the meta create an environment for teams to capitalize on them based on who they are, dooming teams who relied on strategies which have been pushed out. 
2. Power Curve theory - with each update and introduction of new heroes, it shifts the aggregate power of all heroes and re-balances the relative power level of all heroes. All you have to do is watch the Beyond the Summit 2 game between Team Tinker and C9 where Lifestealer went up against Terrorblase and it was ugly. TB raised the power curve, pushing comparable heroes out - sorry, naix -  and raising the stock of counter picks. A similar phenomena happens with an update, but the aggregate power level may not grow or might even shrink. Since the international, the updates and introduction of more heroes lowered the stock of most death balling heroes or pushed them out of the meta completely; Pugna, Dragon Knight, SS, Enchatress, Chen, Clockwerk, and Lone Druid see basically no play as attributed to the Powe Curve. As one commentator put it, Chen creeps run toward TB and die before they get there.

Whatever the case may be, the death ball is gone for now. Teams have turned toward line ups oriented toward team fighting or brute forcing their way to victory. They no longer pressure the map in terms of towers but take an active approach toward securing an advantage through directly pressuring key heroes. This is where the current meta sits.