Entropy 1.0

How Team Entropy in our first season became the 2018–2019 Boston Celtics with all the star power in the world, but with a fatal flaw.

So I’ve been playing MD2L for 6(?) seasons now. I’ve made the climb from the worst MMR player in the league, to someone who was viewed as the biggest value in the league for MMR — I know, pretty hard to believe if you’ve seen me the last two seasons most games. I also went from the worst team in the league to being lucky enough to land on a perennial contender under the best captain in the league — Pretty Good and TShear. We made some awesome runs on Pretty Good, I made some incredible friends, and learned boat loads.

However, as someone who’s dream is to be a filmmaker, I recognize that I need reps on leading people. I manage my co-workers at work and have always grown up in positions of leadership, so I had faith in my ability to manage my teammates and friends. So I departed from PG and reconnected with my high-school friend and two time teammate Naratheen to make a PG-like team of our own with a brand that would stick and players looking to build something a little more long-term than most teams. So with that Entropy 1.0 began to take form.

After getting trounced in the grand finals three seasons ago by the Plupo stack, featuring the god himself, Staples; the villain and I reached out to him to form a 3 man trio that we felt extremely comfortable on and fit stylistically. We went through a couple of different player variations before we finally were able to round out the squad with a high ceiling player coming off a rough rookie season in Legacy, and we managed to convince my partner-in-screaming SickNasty to come play with us.

In theory, this was the most stacked team I had ever played with. The PG team that made it to the grand finals was absurdly talented, but the raw skill was lower than this Entropy team. In honesty, the roster was so talented that this season was a top 3, or this season has been a failure situation. Spoiler alert, we fuckin lost and it was a pretty massive failure and a quasi public spectacle, but with how the 5 of us failed to grow, bond, and trust, we absolutely deserved it.

SickNasty-5

Alright, I’m going to start with Joey, our Al Horford of the team. A vet who amplifies good vibes, but doesn’t mitigate bad vibes. Joey is a veteran who I trust to show up on tournament weekend, but he’s done this enough times that he works his way into the season. Joey wasn’t really fully engaged in the regular season until things got dire. I don’t blame him at all, the team was not an atmosphere that made it fun or easy to engage into. This isn’t a secret and it’s where the quasi-public part of this comes into play.

Joey streamed his POV on twitch just about every series, I don’t mind this, I minded when the draft talk wasn’t muted for the first half of the season, because it gave out way too much info to other teams for the second half of the season. Joey ended up finding a good way of streaming, but by the time he found that, the team atmosphere was so toxic that he just didn’t stream.

Joey is someone that I will always team with if the opportunity arises and I can’t wait to see him in person. I feel a great amount of regret and disappointment that I wasted a season of his on another stressful ride through MD2L.

I’m not gonna put a number value on these players cause that’s just odd to me, but I would absolutely team with Joey again and while Joey wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t the source of our problems this season, outside of when I picked you Ogre, never play that hero Joey.

Staples-4/2

First off, I fucking love Sam and even more so than Joey, I beat myself up the most over the season Staples had to endure. Staples was brought in to be our p4 and he was the only reason I was even thinking of playing offlane anymore. He does so much as a p4, it’s actually unfair at times. But while Sam would provide me with the space and farm to do what I needed to do, I made too many mistakes dealing with an anti-offlane patch against 10K+ safelane combos. At p4, Staples had an incredibly difficult job: he not only had to carry my ass in lane, but he also had to make up for a severe lack of playmaking from our tempo dictating player — more on that later. Staples had the lowest KDA of our team through the first 5 weeks, but had largely carried us through a slew of very sloppy games.

Staples filled the role of Jaylen Brown for our team. He has the ceiling of a star player who knows what he can do when his team is playing the right way, but clashed badly with the player who was supposed to be the major playmaker — i.e. Kyrie. Sam tried his absolute best and sacrificed a ton of his game all season long to try and push us forwards even if it drove him insane at the same time.

As it is known, Staples can tilt, and teams play to try and force that. And that was absolutely an issue at times, but Sam has shown maturity in that area, still not perfect, but there has been growth and he actively tries to fight it. It’s human, and this season was maybe the hardest test on his patience he’s ever experienced.

We’re going to take a break from this breakdown of Sam to explain the major thing that occurred for our team this season, a role swap before the final week of the regular season moving me from 3–4, Staples from 4–2, Naratheen from 1–3, and Legacy from 2–1. This happened for a few simple reasons,

1. After getting 2–0ed by Aro, all trust our midlaner Legacy had in the team was gone. He did not trust Naratheen to carry, he did not trust me at offlane or captain, he didn’t trust Sam’s mental state, and he was generally passive aggressive towards Joey.
2. The four players on the team outside of Legacy were so exhausted mentally by the non-stop arguments with Legacy that we wanted to preserve any mental sanity we had left by putting him in a role where he would naturally talk less and we could at least play in a positive mindset with us 4.
3. I hated playing offlane this season as things went on and I was underwhelming on it basically every game, there’s a ton of reasons for that, but I felt like I was dragging the team down quite significantly and wasting the lane advantages Staples was providing us.

These were the three reasons we swapped roles. At the end of the day, the role swap did accomplish what I wanted, which was to keep us from exploding, but it also just delayed our death as a 5-man group. The honest truth of it is, if you don’t trust your teammates, it’s absurdly difficult to win at any team based game, especially dota.

Okay now back to our regularly scheduled Staples breakdown. Staples agreed to move to mid, a move I know he didn’t want to make, nor did I really want to ask him to do it, but it was our best shot to not have someone say something that was unrepairable. Staples tried his best and came in with the right mental state for the first 3 games. Then game 3 windrunner hit, and he had a really tough game. We ended up winning, but I believe that’s when Legacy went from trusting Staples mid as the last player on our team he trusted, to the moment where he truly felt he needed to 1v5 every game we played.

We tried to play 4 protect 1 around the tempo of Sam, but once teams started just realizing they would always have a 4v5 advantage then we just started crumbling.

Would I play with Staples again? Yes absolutely, I still think he has one of if not the highest ceilings in MD2L and if we can just get a stable core of good vibes around him, he can win us a title.

Spagheti Jesus-3/4

Alright, well time for the roast of Pierce ladies and gents. In my first season captaining, I made an unbelievable amount of mistakes, far too many to list here. I learned a ton, but this season was really tough. My laptop shit the bed and died during week 1 of the season. Didn’t have a PC for a month. Got my PC and immediately things got worse with the team. I lost a lot of confidence in myself during the season as a player. I hated the last patch and I didn’t have a core to play with when my blink initiation heroes came online.

I was both the Gordon Hayward and Brad Stevens of Entropy. I tried my best to manage all the personalities and conflicts, but I could never really get through to my best player. As a player, I like Hayward felt the need to sacrifice my game to amplify Staples and Legacy as a p3, and I threw my own games to try and give them one.

We found success with me on alch p3, but then I realized it’s really hard for us to play as 4 like that because they’re playing without direction as I’m trying to just dodge ganks and farm like a madman. If I was a better player I would’ve recognized this, and done more, but as a rookie captain and lower tier player I fucked up and it led us to ditch the strong alch 3 drafts we had.

I fucked up a lot as p4, my laning up until the final 2 games of the tournament was very strong thanks to Staples. I actually started feeling good on p4 as we got to the end of the season, but I’m excited to finally go fuck off to p5.

Ultimately a massive amount of blame for our spectacular failure falls on my shoulders. At the beginning of the season, I saw 4 high IQ players who are all extremely skilled, and me, the stable mind who can deal with anything thrown at us. I didn’t want to be a dictator, I wanted a more democratic environment for the team where everyone’s ideas were heard and considered. Ultimately that was the wrong approach for this team, and I needed to intervene sooner. I had 4 players I knew desperately wanted to win this tournament, so at all times I knew we had a good enough record that we should be guaranteed a tournament day appearance — yikes — and if we just got to tournament day people would drop all the bullshit and just play dota. That was too optimistic and relied upon people doing things they weren’t prepared to do.

I believe in terms of captains duties I consistently put us in position to win, outside of the occasional games later in the season where I just threw our safelane combo out the window to make Nara’s game harder. But there’s only so much heavy preparation can do. At some point the 5 players have to just play as a team and execute, and I never found the right way to get that accomplished.

Would I play with me again? I mean I guess?

Legacy-2/1

And this was our Kyrie of the team. I had faith and trust in Legacy all the way up until game 2 of the Bobby series. Even through the clear total lack of trust and belief he had in me, I trusted him to play great dota and at times he absolutely did. His bristle play from mid and willingness to play the strength heroes mid gave us a very nice advantage in drafting, but as the season went on he started playing these heroes less pscyho and a lot more safe. This led to him occupying the part of the map that Naratheen was supposed to, which then fucked up his game, which then fucked up the whole game.

Legacy is a very talented dota player, but he’s also one of the most passive players I’ve ever played with, and he’s certainly the most combative teammate I’ve ever played with. It is the opposite of how the core of our team wants to play dota, and it was ultimately a gap so wide that we couldn’t find a middle ground consistently.

Legacy always came in ready to play officials, regular season he was locked in, warmed up, and excited to play. But pre-game mentality isn’t everything and in-game he was the largest form of agitation and confrontation we dealt with. Passive aggressiveness started and grew and grew until it was uncontrollable. I don’t have a ton to say besides this and what I’ve already said, you can watch any of the SickNasty streams to understand our team very well.

Would I play with Legacy again? Not a chance. I don’t mind him as a person to hang out with in discord and see at a LAN, but he was the worst teammate I’ve had in MD2L. If you think on the same wave length as him, there may be room for a perfect fit, but ultimately Legacy was a very talented dota player who wanted to play his own game on a team trying to play dota as a team. Trust is a two-way street, and whether we fit his standards or not, the lack of trust given was frankly insulting with the trust given to him.

(p.s. Legacy I’m being harsh, but I’m being honest and I should’ve stepped in to fix our problems with you much earlier than let it stew. All problems with you are dropped as a person though, you’re still my guy and will now play some banjoball with you if you want still)

Naratheen-1/3

Our Jayson Tatum, quietly going back and forth between consistency and lack of impact who got largely shafted by Brad Stevens. I fucked Nara’s game up so many times this season. In the draft, in the lane, with a poorly timed, not cancelled Rubick lift, the list goes on. But the mans still deals with me and wants to grow something with me and I appreciate that greatly. I love that guy and he gave a lot to this team, with very little gains in return. Nara had a lot of real life shit happening this season that drew his attention a lot and cost us his focus in a few series. Again, I can’t blame him for it, and I told him not to worry at the time. I will always prioritize real life shit for people over this when stuff comes up.

Nara had to deal with all of the previous stuff mentioned as well as me picking him into a losing lane on a consistent basis to give Legacy a better game. I’m surprised he didn’t yell at me after picking him Lycan against Aro because it was maybe the biggest grief I’ve ever done to him. I tried to balance the desires of Legacy and Nara, and I gave Nara the shaft because I knew he would go with it for the sake of the team, but it didn’t pay off.

Nara-3 I actually enjoyed a lot, and we started to find more of our footing as we played more, but at the end of the day, Nara 1 will always be where my heart lies. There’s too many hero matchup stuff to build up for him to have made the easy switch to 3. He held his own, and almost all of our lane losses were due to my own negligence.

Nara spent a lot of time quiet this season and it was supposed to operate like that until late game where he at p-1 dictates our aggressiveness. But that never occurred like I wanted it to. Maybe next season, we’ll see. And yes, we’re playing together so that answers that.

In honesty, the roster was so talented that this season was a top 3, or this season has been a failure situation.

In terms of captaining, I’d give myself a light C/strong C- to take a bit from the Melon. Not having a PC really fucked everything I wanted to do and I was always in recovery mode. Corey clearly thinks I’m a dogshit player and captain, and maybe I am, but we’ll find out next season for Entropy 2.0

Thanks to all four of you for at least trusting me enough at the start of the season to agree to join, and thanks for all the work done through the season to try and make it work. We did have some good times along the way, it just so happened to be a lot more bad ones. Good luck to everybody that isn’t playing with us next season, can’t wait to see you at LAN.

-Pierce “Spagheti Jesus” Trahan