AWKWARD ZOMBIE

because im sure someone will ask and i dont really care saying

i told multiple people all of the following:

- s4 is overrated. I could elaborate on this but to put it concisely "he's good but not as good as everyone makes him out to be" kind of thing.
- artour thinks highly of his teammates. i disagree. I don't think anyone on Secret is bad, I just think there are better counterparts out there. No one on Secret is top 2 at their position minus artour. Like I think PPD/Universe/fear/sumail are all top 2 or 3 at what they do.
- zai is a better 4 than 3. he is a good 4 for a lot of reasons, which i wont go into (on a very deep level, which would fly over a lot of people's heads), but i doubted his ability to play 3. he's not a bad 3, he's just much better at 4. i will say one reason is that he knows how to abuse free time/space. what i mean by this is that when he was playing heroes like sand king he understood the threat of being off the map and you have more room to sort of do what you want... the offlane is much stricter and allows less freedom. when you're an offlaner you have to play a certain way, and I don't just mean in the laning phase, I mean in the game overall. This is all kind of hero dependant but at the same time not really. Basically what im trying to say is that zai "eeks" out more of an advantage from the 4 than he does from the 3 (at least from what ive seen).
- arteezy's best role is carry from the mid lane. for several reasons. one of them being he understands how to roll with an advantage. being put in the safelane isn't really an advantage, getting 60-80 cs in 10 minutes from the safelane means a LOT less than getting 60-80 cs in the mid lane and ALSO you end up with less exp AND you can't punish/outplay whoever ur laning against 99% of the time because offlane just sits back and soaks. no player skill is involved. while he's definitely a good "1", he's a better "2".

- one thing I've noticed about Secret is that they're not really on the same page. Allow me to elaborate because this one kind of seems like a big deal. Arteezy is the kind of player who, when he farms, he FARMS. He does not look to fight AT ALL. He maximizes farming efficiency by backing as little as possible and farming as fast as possible. This usually means tanking creeps from time to time, spamming skills, and not going back very often. He will farm with 70%~ hp and 30% mana and use skills and lose even more mana. This means that ARteezy is in no position to fight. Even if his team wants to fight, or an opportunity for a solid engagement comes up, it's not as solid as you'd think due to Arteezy's lack of resources. Of course you can make the argument "the opposing team is putting themselves in a compromising position because they see Arteezy with low hp/mana", and while that is true AT TIMES, sometimes it doesn't apply at all because he's off the map or something.

While it may seem like I'm just bashing arteezy for being greedy and unwilling to help, it's not necessarily his fault. Sometimes thats the best way to approach and play the game. And if thats the case, your team has to follow suit. Zai/s4 need to be split farming. Puppey/kuro need to not have a shit load of meaningless deaths. Etc. Your team needs to follow suit and it's obvious Secret is kind of all over the place (or at least this tournament). Also, if you're going to have ARtour RRing hard, I said the team needs to follow suit, and that also means kuro/puppey (one of them) need to farm as well.

I'll use EG as an example. I think/thought we were the best team in the world during TI4/around TI4. I still believe that, even though we got 3rd. I think the reason we were the best is because I felt like every player understood how each player played and we worked around each other's habits. Obviously there are some things that hindered us that I won't get into (some drafting/trust issues were definitely a part of it), but overall we knew how to work together. All 4 of us would get farm or look for farm. We were always thinking about getting leads. PPD made sure to keep the feeding to a minimum as well so while we were all farming or doing ganks or whatever, there wasn't really any consequential deaths occurring from us being split up so much. We dictated the flow of the game. When you control the flow and you're forcing the other team to react or make the plays, you're the one winning 99% of the time. To take control the way we did we all kind of needed to be on the same page. I'm kind of going on a tangent here so I'll pull it back in.

When I watch Secret play (especially this tournament), I feel like they don't really play as a cohesive unit. I'm not saying its 5 solo players just on the same team, but what I am saying is that one person will be thinking of something and it seems different from what the other players are doing/thinking. Obviously I could be way off base here but that's what it looks like from a spectators perspective.

This kind of turned into an analysis of their play but w/e.

some of this may be pretty sloppy/poorly worded. yolo. didnt put that much thought into typing it.

EDIT/TLDR: Secret overrated. Not clicking as a team it seems. Still a good team, at least top 6 TI imo. At this rate though they probably won't get top 2, like many people want them to or expect them to. When you have a team this "big" anything but top 3 is sadly looked at as a failure. Look at DK last year and how people bitched/cried about their finish. Similar scenario I feel.

no techies win for eg

the salt isnt there to be blamed, lold