Kataomi on The International: “If you become The International champion, then your life as a Dota player hasn’t been in vain.”

MieRo: Well, as expected, a great hotel, good organization—the media day was good too, fast-paced, and everything went smoothly. I don’t think there are any issues here at all, except that it can get a little hot at times.

gpk: I like everything.

[Question: “What about the Chinese servers and the Chinese internet?”]

Yeah, it’s fine. Everything’s working for me. I’m not sure, but I watch Twitch on my phone, and other than that—everything works.

gpk: On the contrary, it was kind of too easy, I guess. It’s like we’re playing in a tournament, but they didn’t put
up much of a fight against us. We just steamrolled right over them. Well, it was just easy to play. We beat them without any trouble at the last tournament.

[Question: “Maybe it’s because they’re a really easy opponent for us?”]

Well, yeah, yeah. They’ve kind of slacked off, compared to the start of the season.
They have a new player, but they’ve really let up.

[Question: “Kiritych plays a ‘physical’ Wisp, while Vanok [Pure] plays a ‘magical’ one. What’s the main difference between these two Wisp builds, and which one do you think is stronger?”]

I think there’s a place for both. The main thing is to choose wisely. Roughly speaking, it’s like Lina: you can win with either build. It all depends on the draft.

MieRo: In the first game, we just couldn’t pull off our main, key timings. And, basically, the draft was a little shaky, but we were still able to play Dota—we just made a critical mistake at one point, and that was it. So far, our drafts have been allowing only one mistake.

It was the same in the second game: we made two really big mistakes there, and because of that, the game also became tough and dragged on. Our opponents had already figured out how to reach their win condition—namely, through Juggernaut. Otherwise, in principle, we could have played well and won with Pango’s Basher. If he’d managed to buy it, we would have killed Juggernaut once there, and it would have been fine. We need to pick our heroes better, play better, and make fewer mistakes.

Kataomi: It’s such a huge relief not to have to get eliminated from the group stage and end up in a total slump. In short, we’re super happy to have made it to the playoffs; we’ll be playing at The International and fighting for the championship.

Oh, sure, everything went haywire. We started off strong, 2–0. Actually, there was this vibe that we could even go 4–1 there, or 4–0 without a problem. Well, okay, 4-0 would probably have been tougher. 4-1 for sure.
But for some reason, we just started throwing games all the time. We’re controlling the game, everything’s going well—we even have an advantage early on in most games. Well, in most games. And then somehow we just start getting wiped out while outnumbered; they just take out more of our heroes; sometimes we just don’t stack up, and our heroes just get fed. And so we gave away a bunch of games just like that, even though it’s very hard to throw games like that. We’d have a 10,000-lead, a 20,000-lead. In short, a lot of games were thrown away.

Well, and some games were simply lost because of the draft. I’d also like to note that we learned a lot about the heroes. We adjusted some picks and added some heroes to the pool. And now we’ll be adding to that for the playoffs as well. Those are probably the two main factors that caused us to falter and why we finished 2–3. Well, 3–3.

[Question: “We didn’t have the easiest bracket, but we need challenges to toughen up. Would you say that describes us?”]

Tough groups—that’s always us; I won’t argue with that. Things are always tougher for us in the group stages than in the tournament playoffs. At Wallachia, which we won, we also just barely scraped by into the playoffs—and then in the tiebreakers—and that ultimately led to winning the tournament. It’s actually even more of an advantage: you might play poorly in the group stage, but you still get more games, more practice, and more insights, and you go into the playoffs with a huge wealth of those insights—the main thing is just to make it through the group stage. Then there’s that decisive match, and once you’re in the playoffs, you effectively have everything you need to win—all that’s left is to play well.

[Question: “Who was the toughest opponent in the group stage?”]

Well, probably PARI[VISION], but they’re a strong team right now. Well, one of the strongest, and we actually gave
away the first game against “Pari” ourselves. We had a solid lead from the laning phase and so on. Then we just gave away the first game; in the second one, we got outdrafted, I think, and it ended 2-0.

Kataomi: We’re so pumped to head to this arena. We came to this tournament to play in the arena.
Well, you could tell from the group stage. We didn’t come here just to play in the group stage—we just don’t care about the group stage. Man, this is so cool. I don’t even remember the last time I felt this way. A victory on the main stage—the game feels so far away and so close at the same time. This elimination round—it’s a ton of pressure for all the teams. You’ve been working toward this all year.

Even Riyadh—we finished in the top 2 in Riyadh, but I didn’t feel anything from it. You came in second? Yeah, nobody cares that you came in second. Only the champion matters. We’re all putting our lives on the line— devote our entire lives to this game, and that’s exactly what we’ve been working toward all year—to play right there in the arena and experience those emotions, to show everything we’ve got, give everything we’ve got, and try to climb as high as possible to become champions.

If you become the Inta champion, then your life as a Dota player hasn’t been in vain. You’ll feel completely different about life in general. I’ve been working toward this for almost my entire life, and I’ve finally achieved something. I didn’t just play and make some money or win a few tournaments—I won the most important tournament of all. That’s why some people might as well just call it quits after that, because you’ve achieved it.