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The original was posted on /r/dota2 by /u/eagle2120 on 2024-12-23 23:49:13+00:00.
Hi All - I wanted to take some time to talk about NA Dota, and our path to qualifying for Fissure Belgarade.
Man. This means so much to me. I am the owner and creator of Apex Genesis.
I know I'm a bit late to the party here so not many will see it, but I wanted to write a bit.
I am an individual sponsor; I'm not affiliated with any brands or teams or anything else. I started the team based on my experience from PPD's NADCL semi-pro league. I owned a team during that league, and really enjoyed the experience. So I reached out to a few pro's, bought some coaching time with them, but ultimately ended up using that time to discuss ideas for the pro scene and how I could use my meager resources to help NA Dota at the professional level.
At that time, around February 2024, SR was, well, SR. Nouns were awesome. Seeing their TI run(s) were part of the reason that inspired me to go down this road. But, now they are just one more headstone in the grim history that is NA Dota.
ImmortalFaith helped me scout players, and gave me a ton of advice/feedback at the start - I am forever grateful for his help. I'd like to take some time to reflect on the journey.
I initially started this team with Fayde - I knew I wanted him to play on my team after watching him in NADCL; he was far and away the best player in that league, and was consistently owning every game. He was quiet, but I knew he could be a very very good player if given some time and coaching. And now, he's consistently in the top 100, if not top 50 EU leaderboards; he's grinded extremely hard for the 9 months+ to make it to where he is today. This is the third LAN he's qualified for, and the first with this new roster.
After that, I needed a coach; I had a few different names, talked with a few coaches, but ultimately decided on just9th. Just9th, Seb, is a great coach and a better person; he previously coached in Europe, and had success there. He was coming off a stint coaching BammySoy (Sammyboy, Mobei, Moo, Blincc, ZFreek. The team had some success in NA qualifiers, but broke apart for out-of-game reasons outside of their control. Lucky enough, we found eachother, and started to build out the roster. I wanted the majority, if not all NA players, so we started looking at NA players.
To be honest, this was my rude awakening. There was a shocking lack of qualified NA players. There were several younger NA players (Pingu, Bgod, etc.) but they had partially moved on from professional Dota to do other things in life. I don't blame them, it's a bleak outlook; there is an extreme lack of sponsors or paying teams in NA Dota. You have to prove yourself and qualify to multiple LAN's out of NA, and even then the pay is meagre, so it's extremely hard to break through unless you make your way to an EU team (playing on ping) and grind your way up. It's an extremely extremely tough path, and you can make more money doing anything else and moving on from Dota. At some point, you just have to move on with your life.
And, I did not have a ton of money compared to organizations. So I'm able to offer just enough for players to maybe cover rent, but it's scraping by every single month to chase the Dota dream. So I cannot compete with any other serious organization if they come in; I could not compete with even T2 orgs, such as Leviatan, Infinity, Hokori, etc. I had to find the right mix of players who would dedicate themselves to the dream.
We ultimately landed on: Lowskill, Red2 (Nico), Fayde, Blincc, and Yamsun. I was quite thrilled with the team we put together; Red2 is somewhat of an unknown player, but he had an extremely high ceiling (still does). We performed quite well the first few qualifiers, relative to expectations. But ultimately, we weren't beating Nouns/SR, and that was the bar we needed to make LAN's. That was our goal; to beat out whichever of Nouns/SR weren't auto-invited, and make LAN's.
The team had some chemistry issues, we started losing scrims, which exacerbated our issues, and ultimately we needed a change. None of the particular players were at fault, but we felt like we needed to change things because we didn't have the right environment to continue improving as a team. This decision was extremely hard, and I still question if we made the right choice. It's never easy to make a shuffle, and that's what I didn't understand as a fan; it's not just about the player, it's about the person. But, we did, and we needed to move on. None of these players were kicked, I would say; they were just in an unfortunate place at an unfortunate time. We knew we needed to make a change, and there were other available players at their positions. So, to lowskill, red2, and Blincc, I will be forever grateful for helping me start the team. It wasn't your fault the way things ended up, so I am sorry that circumstances dictated the way they did.
As for our changes, we were pretty certain what direction we wanted to go. We wanted talented, experienced players. Ideally from NA, but we would look elsewhere if there were no good NA options.
For the carry position, we landed on Sammyboy. I/Coach (Just9th) initially recruited him as part of the team, but he wanted to take a chance on Leviatan. He moved on from Leviatan around the time we made our changes, so it was a natural fit.
As for the mid position, I had wanted W1sh for a long time. I've watched W1sh since Wind and Rain, and he's been in the EU pro scene for a long time. He's a very talented, experienced, consistent player.
And for the four position; we moved Blincc to assistance coach/analyst role. He was very receptive to the change, and while not excited to move off of an active player, he made the switch and dove right in. We looked at a few options for NA, but none of them were a good fit for us. We either didn't have the money they were looking for, or we felt like there was a personality mismatch in the team.
This is one of the primary reasons that fans miss in teambuilding, and roster changes. Even if the players are great, sometimes the personalities don't fit. Sometimes the people don't mesh together; and chemistry is an incredibly important thing, more important for team performance than any one player's individual skill. We saw that illustrated recently with BetBoom and their disagreements within the team. So we needed to be very careful with these changes, and we decided to weight who they were are a person (and their personality) just as much, if not more than their skill. Ultimately, I think we made the best changes we could at that time, given the situation and who was available and what we can pay.
So, the boys dedicated every single day to practice, scrims and getting better. 2, or 3 series each day (BO2s), and then analyzing each one for hours upon hours. Then practice and discussing each one, and rinse and repeat. You REALLY have to love Dota to do this every single day, for weeks or months on end. Barely making ends meet to chase the dream.
With this roster, we reached TWO LAN's. PGL Wallchia S2, and Elite League S2. We weren't very successful at either one, but we made it to two. That was 200% of what I expected when I formed this team, so I view this roster as over-performing my expectations. Speeed was also a fantastic help during this time, he was effectively our second analyst and priority stand-in at any position if anyone couldn't practice that day. He did all of this for no pay, so we are extremely grateful for all of his help during this time period. However, our second LAN, PGL Wallachia, went quite poorly. We did not win a game during the entire tournament. We went 0-6 in the round robin and busted out. This result was incredibly frustrating because we were doing well in scrims; we had beaten several teams in scrims we ended up facing in tournament, but they adjusted to what we showed them in scrims and we couldn't adapt. So we bounced out.
Again, I knew some changes were necessary. We just can't continue as an organization if we don't win a game on LAN. Something has to change.
These changes were some of the hardest of my life, and I still think about them. As the owner, I messed up the execution on the roster changes quite a bit, and misjudged how I should go about them. I want to hold myself accountable. We (mainly, me) made this decision at the LAN (after we were out, but the players were still there), but I did not have those conversations AT the LAN itself. I thought I was doing the right thing by players by letting them enjoy the LAN without worrying about changes, but reflecting back on it, I should have told them so they had a chance to network and find new teams. This was truly my own mistake and no one else's, and it was a painful learning lesson for me. I have apologized privately to the players affected, and to this day regret how everything happened. I won't go into more detail for privacy reasons, but ultimately, we also made a change in the coaching staff. I am still close to Seb, just9th, and I consider him a friend. I cannot recommend him enough as a player and a person. If you get the chance to work with him in the future, I cannot recommend him enough.
But we wanted to go in a different direction as a team, so we did; again this was incredibly challenging for me, as I was close to Seb, and I thought (and still do) think he is a great coach, but we needed to change.
So, we went with Blincc as our coach, we moved Yamsun to 1, we brought in Speeed as a p...
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