Hello dotaters, I’m Phoenix, your new DS Blogger. I was given the blogging rights today and thought, what better way to tell the world and celebrate than by writing a post.

About SGNFDT’09

SGNFDT’09 stands for Sendi Mutiara Multimedia Grand National Final Dota Tournament 2009 held in Malaysia from 27th-29th November. It was the biggest offline Dota Tournament ever with a total prize money of US $26,000 (approx). I’ll address the tournament as SMM in the rest of my post.

What happened before SMM?

The Tournament was highly hyped due to the gigantic prize pool and a number of top Dota teams participating in the tournament. The tournament was also labeled “Asian vs European Dota” due to the participation of European rank 1 rank 1 European team MYM. Here is the list of most known International teams that participated in the event.

MCiTY (Australia)
PokerIdols (Canada)
CityHunter (China)
**CommeDieu (China)
**EHome (China)
sGty or FtD (China)
**MeetYourMakers (Denmark)
Avava (Indonesia)
Digi Easy (Indonesia)
Digi Resurrection (Indonesia)
XT Reborn (Indonesia)
Mineski (Phillipines)
**Aeon.Dota (Singapore)
PMS|Asterisk (Singapore)
Xtreme Chaotix (Singapore)
XtC.Nyx (Singapore)
XGN (Thailand)
StarsBoba (Vietnam)
DTS.Chatrix (Ukraine)
**Cybertime (Malaysia)
**Ks.Int (Malaysia)
Inc’Excello (Malaysia)

**For those who don’t follow competitive Dota, I’ve marked the teams which were expected to win the tourni (These were professinals’ prediction not just my opinion)

What happened in SMM?

As expected, we got to witness some totally unexpected developments in Competitive Dota. Team For the Dream(FtD/sGty) emerged as the champions which you can see was nowhere on the prediction list. But of course, the most shocking event of the tournament was MYM getting out of the tourni in the qualifier rounds (top 40). MYM leader Kuroky says he played with Asian teams during the practice matches and realised that turtle farming is a way more secure strategy than their usual ganking stuff in the current meta. In fact, he even said that their ganking strategy would not work against the Asians. This was also widely accepted by all the participating teams in the tournament. But then, MYM fail to execute a good turtling strategy, did some bad hero picking and ended up out of the tournament. It’s no wonder the game deciding MYM’s fate, MYM vs Ftz.Asia became the most discussed match of the tournament online.

Spectators, who were expecting some entertaining matches like MYM vs Fnatic played a few weeks back were pretty disappointed from the event as the only dominant strategy was passive farming. This aspect of the meta-game was truly shown in the most spectated match of the event (offline), FTD vs Kingsurf where FTD won the game even after Phantom lancer lost his Sacred Relic once and FTD played with two lane barracks down! The match truly shows how well team FtD had studied the game.

Though no-one can defy the fact that turtling is the most secure strategy in the current meta, I refuse to accept it as the only game winning strategy. Other strategies like ganking and pushing were not tried to their best a decent number of times during the tournament. Though we cannot blame the teams for trying out the best available strategy, many spectators (including me) were not happy with the match strategies.

One good thing noticed in the tournament was the usage of a large pool of heroes particularly those who had pushing and late game tanking powers. UTDC.Justin comments…

There is a huge focus on heroes, I guess the closest type of characterization would be “heavy hybrid” - it includes Visage, Spectre, Medusa, Razor, and to a small extent Necrolyte, SF, Bristleback, amongst some more. Basically these heroes are special at the moment because they have the ability to win games. They don’t do it by being especially powerful as carries in terms of damage output, but their ability to take damage and draw focus fire and survive temporarily makes them extremely effective.

The winning 3 teams of the event were…

1st: FtD (China)
2nd: cD (China)
3rd: Ehome (China)

All in all, though the tournament was not exactly a treat for the eyes of spectators, but it did bring out the most effective strategy in current DotA i.e. defensive farming. What all teams cared about the most in this tournament was the huge prize stash.  Congratulating FTD for their epic win (well deserved) and thanking all organizers & sponsors for conducting such a huge event in DotA. Now I’m waiting to see how Icefrog reacts to the outcome of this tournament.

What happened after SMM?

There were some crucial developments after the event. The major news revolves around star player Kuroky, who left MYM saying he had made up his mind already…

Btw, I decided to leave MYM. It was my decision, most of you probably won’t believe it but I decided to leave MYM 2 weeks ago, but I didn’t tell them since I didn’t want to bring the team down.

Mania gave his statement on this matter…

I didn’t like the fact that he said he already knew he was leaving the team before SMM, since he had shown no sign of this opinion until we failed in the groupstage. I actually genuinely felt like the team was doing so well before SMM, and when we talked with him he seemed really excited to go do his best at SMM. If I had known he felt so strong for leaving the team before SMM, I really wouldn’t have brought him on the trip. It was a twofaced action setting us up to fail like that.

Kuroky also mentions his views over Asian and European Dota…

I always thought asian DotA is better than european dota, but I never knew that asian dota is SO MUCH better.

Misery (Team Fnatic) couldn’t stay quiet after reading that…

That’s the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard, so since you decided to pick like a retard and play like morons the asians are supergood?
By watching the replays of the games at SMM it’s obvious to me, that the asian playstyle isn’t flawless or better at all if you just play and pick right versus it.
The individual skill level is as i see it higher in europe than in asia, but maybe the asians are more patient due to their playstyle and ofcourse the general discipline in asia is greater than europeans.

Meanwhile, team EG.Dota disbanded and a new star studded team “Ben’s Friendly Buddies” has been formed. Ben’s Friendly Buddies (BFB) comprises of 7 big names in the Competitive DotA: Puppey, Merlini, Kuroky, Demon, Pajkatt, Fear & amartnt.

Icefrog on the other hand is planning to remake Visage after his overuse in SMM! You can give your suggestions about the remake to Ice here.

There’s much more that happened after SMM but the post is going wayyy long.

What does the future hold for us?

In the speech of ending ceremony by SMM’s President & CEO, Dato’ Dr. Ricky Lim Mok Guan, stated there will be SMM 2010 and the 1st prize is going to be MYR 50,000 (US $14,663.83). Also, a large number of European teams seem to be interested in the tournament after the tantalizing defeat of MYM. I’m expecting an actual European vs Asian Dota next year.

Credits

UTDC.Justin and Owl Owl for shaping my thoughts over the tournament.
Counter Force[X] and Orochi for the DS Blog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 2:01 am and is filed under DotA Allstars, Tournaments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.