syndereN on Enchanter’s Bauble: “I don’t like the concept of potentially infinite scaling.”

syndereN: Tundra has essentially disbanded the roster. As far as I recall, the official statement was along the lines of “it’s financially unsustainable.” This echoes our recent conversation about HEROIC: when they disbanded, they also couldn’t make ends meet. It’s the same story here. Tundra Esports is a top-tier team—they’ve won a ton of titles and millions of dollars in prize money—and yet the organization still shut down? This raises the question again: are they overpaying the players? And the answer is definitely yes. Will anything be done about this? I don’t know. But at least 1w Team now has a bunch of cool Rolexes.

syndereN: Overall, the final was pretty one-sided. A 3-1 score—based on my personal observations—is the most common outcome in professional Dota Grand Finals in recent years. Yandex simply knew how to beat them: they outplayed them in the draft and in-game, understood what LGD was going to do, and were just better.

Still, LGD Gaming took second place at a Tier 1 tournament—which I believe is perhaps the greatest achievement for South America in history. Except, of course, for HEROIC’s victory at PGL Wallachia Season 2, although that tournament seems to have been classified as Tier 2 due to the field of participants. In any case, this is a very good sign ahead of the TI qualifiers.

syndereN: It was a two-hour game: LGD picked Zeus mid for TaiLung, he got the level-four neutral item Enchanter’s Bauble and just kept upgrading it. He opted for cooldown reduction, and toward the end of the game, his ultimate cooldown was, I think, 40 or 35 seconds, and his Nimbus cooldown was very low. He just spammed the map all over the place. Aurora couldn’t mount any counterplay—her heroes were constantly exposed due to Thundergod’s Wrath and pushed lanes.

On top of all the absurdity surrounding this neutral item, TaiLung also broke the all-time record for hero damage. The old record was 222,000, and now it’s 276,000. If this neutral item is changed or removed, this record may never be broken. At least not until there’s a significant buff to everything, because this is one of those absurd instances where everything aligned perfectly: a two-hour game, the right hero, the right neutral item, and the right meta.

Mira wasn’t thrilled; he gave a post-match interview and felt as if they hadn’t even played Dota. I saw the community’s reaction—we weren’t casting that game at the time; I was watching on Twitch, and the general mood in the chat was, “What the hell is he talking about after a loss?” But I sat there thinking, “You know, he’s damn right.” It wasn’t really Dota. <...> It just has this endless scaling that can’t be achieved any other way. It’s ridiculous.

SUNSfan: I actually agree more with the opinion you were mocking. The game should have ended sooner; a two-hour game has to come to a close somehow.

syndereN: They definitely should have secured the win sooner—I won’t argue with that. I don’t like the concept of potentially endless scaling. Yes, the other team should win sooner, but it’s also uninteresting gameplay—to reach a point after the 60-minute mark where one team inevitably wins by default without doing anything. To me, that’s very poor design.

SUNSfan: I disagree, because it doesn’t happen all the time. It happened once—and it’s a huge story. It’s damn funny for the viewers; it’s extremely entertaining. If this happened once a week—yes, I’d agree with you 100%. But this madness happened just once, and I don’t think it’ll happen again, even with this patch. So I don’t have a problem with it.