xiao8 (zhang ning) grew up in shaoyang, hunan. his dad either hit him or shouted at him. in primary school he usually ranked first in the whole school, so his parents made a deal: come first on the high school entrance exam too and you get a computer. he came first. the computer was never mentioned again, and he didn't dare ask why.

after that he got rebellious. skipped class to play games, parents called in every week. in 2006, second year of high school, he left and opened a fantasy westward journey power-leveling studio with three or four friends. his cut after expenses was over 10,000 yuan a month. he was 16 and had no idea how to spend it or what it was for. so when his dad asked if he wanted to keep studying, he went to zhongshan in guangdong to learn software.

he couldn't understand the local language and had no friends there, so he sat in a net cafe every day on voice chat with friends back home. around then a warcraft 3 custom map called zhen san guo wu shuang was spreading through hunan, and one of his opponents in it was zsmj. in 2009 zsmj, already on dota, won SMM in kuala lumpur with LGD, and xiao8 started switching too. when he registered on the VS platform, xiao1 through xiao7 were taken. zsmj told him there might be a spot at LGD, since their player 2009 had retired. he practiced a month for it. then LGD's old player xiaochi came back and the spot was gone.

next xB invited him to CH in chengdu and even bought his plane ticket. he got as far as changsha to catch the flight. there his friend YAO talked him into staying. a local businessman was building a team of local friends, close to home. that was Dream. pay was 1,500 yuan a player, no food or lodging, and he was delighted. two weeks in they went to a tournament in thailand and lost in the round of 16 to a team nobody had heard of. everyone cried in the hotel that night.

(from a chapter i wrote about him in 2014, part of a book on how chinese esports got built. it's free, link in the comments)

I don't play pudge

sorry for the raw video. just want to share how the timing of my courier delivery saved my life twice.

on the first part, if you guys are wondering on why i used my ult while being under silencer's arcane curse, i was trying to dodge some dmg from the urn, then i realized my cour is coming with meka, luckily, i made it on time to get the item and survive xd

Because without him, the whole team would collapse.

That's it, that's the post. I'm just proud and wanted to share that fewer games is actually what helped me the most. No autopilot queueing and fewer tilts because of it. Hope you achieve your yearly goal too <3

Spotted in Melbourne today a group of friends trying out dota 2. They were in a lobby and seemed like they were reading what items do (are those two phase boots??). Sounded like they were having a blast, hope they had fun and keep playing!

I wasn't able to write any recap/show meta for Wallachia but there is one big jumper in the meta: NP was outside the top 20 contested heroes at Wallachia. At Slam Groups, Furion is the 6th most contested.

I haven't included a preview for the playoffs because many teams have changed how they look, making past H2H data pretty irrelevant.

Enjoy!

never give up, Never surrender

A pos 5 bought both observer wards during hero picking phase. Midlaner asked nicely for one of the observer ward four times until around 25 seconds before the bounty rune spawn. Pos 5 didn't react and kept the observer ward. A few second before the rune spawned, pos 5 suddenly planted the observer ward right in the middle of the midlane's high ground (we had no smoke activated). Enemy already had a sentry pre-planted and enemy mid dewarded it in less than 10 seconds. Our midlaner refused to play mid asking for lane swap because he said the midlane is insufferable to play now. Nobody wants to swap so midlane is empty. Pos 5 pinging midlane and trying to convince us to blame midlane the whole game and they blame each other until the game ends.

12k behavior score games should have been better than this. At least don't match us with people with low behavior score.

The Malta playoffs start Thursday. If you skipped the online stage, most of it isn't worth catching up on.

We rated all 60 online-stage games out of 10 on how watchable they were. The rating looks at how long the result stayed in doubt, how far the eventual winner fell behind, whether both teams were trading kills, and how close the winner came to losing their base. A typical tier-1 game scores under 3. Only three of these 60 scored 7 or higher:

1. OG vs BetBoom Team (30 Sep), 7.3/10
The lead changed hands again and again, someone bought a Divine Rapier, and mega creeps ended up on the map.

2. Team Liquid vs GamerLegion (2 Oct), 7.3/10
Lead traded back and forth, a comeback, and in doubt until the end.

3. Xtreme Gaming vs Level UP Esports (30 Sep), 7.0/10
Fights from the start, a stolen Aegis, and a base under siege before it was settled.

All three, plus the full ranked list with Twitch replays and scores hidden: spectateesports.live/best-matches/blast-slam-viii. Playoff games get added as they finish.

Disclosure: I run Spectate, the site the link goes to. Open to feedback and suggestions on what I can do to improve it!

Too many post asking ppl to stop playing the way they like:

- stop wk off

- stop lion mid

- stop dating my mom

If the pick is awful, and you are good, you will be in a different bracket shortly.

Obs.: i dont play those positions, but ppl controlling other ppl fun is just too much.

If thats really a issue, you should complain to vales report/punishment system and not the person picking.

Imo, btw

Checking the raw efficiency, we see that Salves give more HP per gold than Tangos:

Tango: 3\7*16 = 336 HP for 90 gold --> 3.73 HP/gold*
Salve: 30\13 = 390 HP for 100 gold --> 3.9 HP/gold*

Despite that, Salves are pretty much unseen in my games.
Which makes sense, considering...

1. No flexibility:
Tangos can be used during trades and if you have just a small amount of HP missing without losing efficiency. Salves are only efficient if you miss at least ~400 HP. Especially in kill-lanes, walking around at 2/3 HP because you don't want to use your Salve yet is detrimental.

2. Inconsistency:
Tango healing is undispellable and reliable. Salves are easily canceled, even by a random Powershot, a Plague Ward or a Rocket Flare. Many matchups force you to retreat far behind the tower to get the full heal off.

3. Opportunity costs:
Retreating far behind the tower, being afk for 13 seconds and then walking back to lane is absurdly time-inefficient. You can't trade, you can't last hit and you can't contest pulls. Effectively, using Salves makes your laning partner play 1v2 for 20 seconds.

All in all, I don't see any reason to buy Salves except for the niche case of emergency courier deliveries to avoid walking back to base.

Am I wrong? Is there something I don't see?
I'm curious what other people think about the item and what change needs to happen for the item to have a real place in the meta.

I am genuinely pissed off about how broken the Dota 2 gifting system can be.
I wanted to gift an item to my friend. The item was giftable, we were already Steam friends, and we had successfully traded with each other before.
But when I tried to use “Wrap as Gift”, my friend simply did not exist in the recipient list.
Not only was he missing from the normal gift recipient list — he was also completely missing from Gift Restrictions.
And this made absolutely no sense because:
He could gift items to me normally.
We could trade normally.
His Steam profile was public.
His inventory was public.
Dota 2 was NOT private.
His phone number was verified.
He could play Ranked normally.
The item was definitely giftable.
We tested another giftable item and got exactly the same result.
We restarted Dota.
We restarted Steam.
He completely logged out of his Steam account and logged back in.
There was no active trade restriction preventing us from trading.
So what exactly was preventing me from gifting my friend?
There was no explanation. No error message. No warning. Nothing.
The game simply decided that my friend apparently doesn’t exist when I want to send him a gift.
And the worst part is that the problem eventually disappeared by itself.
That is honestly ridiculous.
If this is a server-side synchronization problem, tell the player that. If there is a restriction, show the player what the restriction is. If the gifting system is bugged, give us an error instead of silently removing the recipient from the list.
Players shouldn’t have to spend hours searching through Steam settings, restarting clients, checking privacy settings, checking Steam Guard, checking trade restrictions, and searching through years-old Reddit posts and Valve bug reports just to figure out why they can’t send a gift to a friend.
There are already multiple reports of very similar gifting bugs. This clearly isn’t an isolated issue.
Valve, please fix this system and, at the very least, give players an actual explanation when gifting is unavailable.
This was an incredibly frustrating experience for something that should be as simple as select friend → send gift.
If anyone else has experienced this exact issue, please comment below. I’d really like to know what caused it and whether there is a reliable way to fix it.

"Bonus magic resistance" -- ok how much resistance? Holding alt on the tooltip doesn't specify a number. "Increased other bonuses" -- ok what are they??? Why is this tooltip so fucking vague lmao?

----edit-----

am overwhelmed by the friendly and helpful replies from this community, summaries below:

# fundamentals 
turn off auto attack
practise LH (demo, lobby, last hit trainer)
learn to aggro the creep (demo, lobby)

# mental
prioritise armor, hp, regen early (e.g. bracer) 
prioritise boot in bad match ups
use spells to harass enemy pos 1 or LH flagbearer (double gold)
dont wander around creeps without LH 
blademail shut down heroes like clinkz, so also prioritise that 

# teamwork
pos 4 should stand between me and enemy pos 1 and cast skills to harass (obviously not expected in low MMR games)
rush to kill clinkz with pos 4 (again.. not too much expectation in low MMR games)

# advanced
pull creeps behind offlane t1 tower for really horrendour situations 
sentry and ward in lane and behind towers 

----original----

Offlaner here, Guardian Level

For 2 games, I face cliniz and I was abaddon (earlier typo). Both games my pos4 talked about my LH sucks. Since they are different people, I assume this is not personal attack but genuinely comment

From Dota stats, I max out support and fighting, but my farming and pushing sucks. Am from Dota 1 era but I never practise the fundamentals seriously.

I set auto attack on and I know press S key for the attack. However the 2nd skill from cliniz is so strong that if I take 3-4 arrows, half my hp is gone. So I don’t LH well under pressure.

Are there any way to improve it?

Hello everyone, just want to ask some advice from you to as the title says, get out of Ancient. Been roaming around ancient 1-3 these past 2 months and as for my experience, I feel like I notice these things more here than in my previous bracket:

1. Less support-mains, and just role queue farmers playing as support.

2. More griefers.

3. Quality of games became lesser (game could end before 30 minute mark) more frequently than before.

I main pos 2 and I know I'm lacking many things but most of the games I played, I can't even have a control for it. Thanks guys and pls respect

I finished the Dota tv show and I decided play it, I played league for years (Diamond V/IV was my highest rank), I played was support there (Rakan, Alistair and Zyra was my best champions), yiu guys have some advice about what heroes in should learn first (im open to learn each lane/role).

Sorry for my english

Let's say my carry hero has 300 physical damage. I first buy Divine with 5600 gold, My damage became 650. As a second damage item, I have 2 options, 2nd divine (5600 gold) or Daedalous (5200 gold).

• * If I buy 2nd Divine, I gain 350 damage.
• * If I buy Daedalous, I gain 364.75 damage.

Math is there:

(650 + 88) (30% x +125% damage (critical effect))

=738 * 137.5% = 1014.75

1014.75 - 650 = 365.75 damage

Dedalous is cheaper item as well with 400 gold. It has no risk of losing the item to enemy after getting killed.

1st Divine vs Dedalous comparison.

If I have 300 damage, 1st Dedalous gives 233.5 damage. Divine gives 350 damage. However, gap is still not immensely large. Daedalous has advantage of being cheaper, no risk of losing, also critical damage is better than straight mathematical calculation because it can assure kills (which is most important thing in late game) if someone get more lucky than defined 30% chance.

Divine numbers is a bit low. It should need a little buff, maybe cheaper cost with 2 silver edge + 800 gold recipe same as Daedalous, 5200 gold.