Anybody who isn't into Dota watching the international?

I watched a few matches i had no idea how anything works. That noobs stream was a great idea but i still couldn't fully grasp what was going on.

I would love to learn Dota but I have other games that i practice and Dota would eat up a ton of time.

Heh, I actually got flashbacks to the last League of Legends World Championship where Korea's SK Telecom cut through all of the international competition like a hot knife through butter (They didn't drop a single game to a non-Korean team through the whole tournament, iirc)

Stomp finals are always disappointing, but it happens in every game/sport.

i dropped in when they had it on this site for a while, there was a surprising amount of inside lingo and abbreviations, i could not tell at all what was going on, i know there is the newb stream which would be more my speed. im sure its awesome for people who are already in deep, but i will just respect it from afar. the presentation is very professional award show grammy type shit.

Not often, but it does happen frequently. If a team gets that far behind that early, they'd have to drag it out to at least an hour to have any semblance of hope for coming back, and generally that won't happen because the team that's ahead can dominate the map and win all the skirmishes and teamfights (thereby pulling ahead even more). The more you play, the more you can tell when a snowball is simply out of control. I won't say that comebacks from a situation like that don't ever happen, but they're very rare and miraculous, and the team trying to make the comeback has to be up for it (which Vici probably wasn't after the stomps).

I've been just skimming over the Grand Finals games listening to the newbie stream to see what it sounded like. Those guys did a nice job explaining things. So nice job on them.

Just the one thing that made me laugh now after the fact is after Game 3, they said while VG gave it up early, they just know when it's over, but if this was an elimination game, they would of gone to the bitter end to fight this thing.

I tried watching some, but pretending to care isn't that easy.

@cloudyimpulse: Many people think Vici was on tilt, meaning, their morale was shattered after losing 2 in a row so badly. You can see this in their even worse performance in game 4. Hell, they called gg on the final game. Would you call gg on the final game if you were playing for $5 million? They must have been in a terrible place to do that.

@ttthrasher: No I understand that. I just laughed when the announcers said that in game 3, now knowing what happened in game 4.

I guess the weird part to me is listening to the announcers as they were making their picks for game 4, they all were questioning this wondering why they just didn't try something radically different. And I know some people are probably bummed out or annoyed when your final game is you giving up 15 minutes into the game. No fighting to the bitter end. Just looks like another pub game. Hopefully next years Grand Finals ends up better.

Also just want to throw in my WWE / Giantbomb favorite line. Two China teams in the Grand finals?

I'm just bummed that Na'Vi didn't make it. Them being middle of the pack during the groups stages was expected since Puppey has a tendency to experiment and feel out the other teams, but that draft really hurt them during the series with Cloud9. It was really Na'Vi not playing Na'Vi dota during the third match that really, really hurt them. Mass push isn't Na'Vi's style; they've always been a team that takes teamfights then towers then the game. Putting Dendi on DP and Xboct on a carry Brew made me groan out loud because it's essentially wasting Dendi's potential on a one-trick-pony kind of hero. If Na'Vi was to go out I wanted them to do it with a bang. Not like this, not like this...

Boring finals expected since it's two tier two Chinese teams who lucked out. Much rather it be DK and IG.

Also just to add though other people might have already explained this, what Ajamafalous said about dragging out games in order to make a comeback is more applicable if the losing team has a "hard carry" character of sorts that could potentially match up to the enemy team's heroes late game, meaning a character that gets stronger due to the accumulation of items+stats from leveling up plus team combos being executed properly and a bunch of other things happening.

The heroes that the losing team, Vici Gaming, drafted in the Grand finals had characters like that but it would have even be more disastrous if they dragged it out because of the winning team's draft picks. Newbee, the winning team, virtually had that game won the moment Vici went for a line up that needs to dominate early and to finish it early since it was a team virtually made to push and is able to push hard early but that plan also had a time limit due to Newbee's hero picks. The moment Newbee was able to get kills early, and Vici needed to be able to at least get kills to even things up but at that point Newbee wasn't letting them get farm or let it drag out and we're being relentless.

No, the grand finals for TI4 were a bit of a bummer for everybody. Watch the past grand finals for the previous TI's and you'll see games being surprisingly back and forth, and not a 3-1 stomp.

Tier 2? You realise Newbee have been beating out every Chinese team other than DK since their inception right? Only a month or so ago there were 3 Bo3 finals in one day that were just Newbee vs DK. To call Newbee (and VG tbh, although they're probably the Fnatic of China) a tier 2 team is like calling Germany a Tier 2 Football team.

@alexw00d: You realize this is patently untrue, right? I don't know what DotA you're watching because it sounds like you're talking about a different reality here. What's this about unable to consistently beat DK? They have a 60% win rate against DK and have consistently given DK a run for their money every time during competition, hence the moniker "DK slayers" by Chinese fans. Beating out every other Chinese team? Please. They're 50-50 against IG and VG all time, and those stats are skewed because they've only played a handful of games against one another. Hao and Banana were IG members before the formation of Newbee, and even with that kind of insider info they couldn't take more games off of IG (this is an IG with a fresh ChuaN and newcomer Luo, mind you). In fact, they didn't even take a single series from IG until June. If by "every Chinese team" you mean LGD, CIS, DT, and other small teams, sure, I guess you would be right, but who isn't beating those team on a regular basis? They started doing a lot better after recruiting Sansheng (a great addition) in April and finally started winning a major tournament and two. Xiao8 also began drafting better by then. Do I feel like they have the potential to be tier one? Sure, but the skill difference between Newbee and IG and DK is very apparent if one watches how they play. This TI saw a lot of uncharacteristic poor performances out of top teams ([A] immediately comes to mind), and Newbee and VG benefited a lot from that.

VG is a tier two team right now mostly because they're pretty unstable. There's no better proof of this than TI4. They were absolutely crushing during the group stages, only to see a significant performance drop later once teams had the time to carefully study their game. They're not particularly flexible, often sticking to a predefined strategy and when things don't work out they stubbornly continue on rather than switch gears (rotk is infamous for his feeding in many Chinese league games). I felt they were still a tier one team a few months ago (did really well last year, in fact) but they've been very inconsistent lately.

EDIT: I should also mention that the current Newbee is essentially the old TongFu from last year's TI. Watch any of their TI3 games and tell me they didn't play better back then. The caliber of play is noticeably different. Whenever they can play like that again, they'll truly be a tier one team.