SVG: “Pair Quinn against any player, at any rank up to Immortal Draft, and he’ll win without giving them a chance.”

In most cases, the teams that make it to The International’s Grand Finals do indeed have at least a core of veteran players. I would be extremely surprised if the opposite were true: winning TI without a single player older than, say, 22 seems like an almost impossible task. To imagine a roster of five 19-year-olds lifting the Aegis overhead is simply absurd.

Too much depends on experience: knowledge of the history of matchups, a deep understanding of the draft, and the ability to unerringly determine what matters at key moments—and what matters at all in those moments. It’s incredibly difficult to grasp this without having been in similar situations, without having made mistakes, and without having drawn conclusions. It took me many years to learn this myself.

I’ve known players like Sneyking for a long time, and having watched him over the years, I can see just how much his perception of what’s important at any given moment has changed since the beginning of his career. You can’t learn this from books or on your own—not until veterans join the team and you start absorbing their experience, or until you’ve walked that entire path yourself. There’s no other way. Abstract musings are useless here, because you simply don’t know what you don’t know. In Dota, there is a vast amount of “unseen” knowledge, and it is precisely this that likely elevates the value of veterans, coaches, and team chemistry far higher than in many other esports disciplines and even traditional sports, where one can get by with less.

In China, there was a group of incredibly influential veterans, and the attitude toward them was simple: “Putting together a roster without one of these guys means making a fool of yourself.” I think that’s exactly why Wings Gaming faced a certain amount of rejection. It stood apart from the mainstream old-school Chinese Dota scene—both in the eyes of fans and in the eyes of other players. Their roster didn’t include xiao8, rOtK, or BurNing—none of the figures around whom teams were built. And I remember how, before that TI… I don’t even know if it’s worth mentioning, but at several The Internationals, the Chinese teams did indeed exchange information on Western teams.

There were tournaments where, as far as I know, a physical folder containing summary data on matches against Western teams was passed around. They collected all of this to give China an overall advantage.

Can this be called cheating? It’s complicated. There’s certainly zero sportsmanship here—that’s obvious. But on the other hand, it’s hard to call it cheating in the formal sense, because there’s no set of rules governing this kind of nonsense. Plus, it’s practically impossible to monitor. However, no matter how you look at it, it looks suspicious and, to put it mildly, extremely unsavory.

The irony is that at TI6, while all this information was being actively shared, Wings turned out to be the only team that wasn’t part of this clique; even within the Chinese scene, they were an outcast. The attitude was something like this: “Oh, come on, those guys. Just some upstarts doing their own weird nonsense. We don’t like them.”

I generally believe that most Dota players fall into the same misconception. In my opinion, the draft hardly matters in public matches—at any level except the very highest. Somewhere around 10,000 MMR and above, picks really start to matter because people are capable of executing their strategies competently. But generally speaking, my main argument is simple: match Quinn against any player at any rank up to Immortal Draft, and he’ll win without giving them a chance.