How Wings Changed the Game Part 2, Open Dota and the Post-Wings World
“Dota2 is a beautiful game, but watching Wings is even more beautiful sometimes.” — Kuro “KuroKy” Takhasomi in a Summit cast
Wings came into the scene like Haley’s Comet. An instantaneous burst of transcendence that lit up the skies of Dota2 for the briefest period of time. Wings’ time in the limelight was exceedingly short, they only won three bit tournaments: ESL One Manila 2016, The Summit 5, and The International 2016. However in that span of time they changed the game. In part 1, I talked about the world of archetypes. In this article, we go into Wings open dota and how it has influenced all of the great teams since.
The Mystery of Wings
“I understand what they[Wings] end up having, it makes sense in game. But the way they get to it, that’s what I don’t understand.” — Sebastien “Ceb” Debs in Duncan “Thorin” Shields Reflections Part 2
Wings remains the biggest mystery in all of Dota2. It has been over three years since Wings hit the scene and in that time, our overall understanding has evolved to heights we never thought possible. But even with those extra years of insight, no one has ever cracked Wings methodology or fathom whether or not they even had one.
The history of the team and it’s players gives almost no insight. The core of this team was Zhang “y`” Yiping, Zhou “bLink” Yang and Zhang “Faith_bian” Ruida. The three of them had played together on Speed gaming since 2014. Later on they added Chu “shadow” Zeyu, another unknown from the tier2 Dota2 scene and Li “iceice” Peng. Iceice had the biggest name amon the five as he played in the BigGod stack with legendary Chinese players at DAC 2015.
Not only that, but the gesticulation period was strange as well. The team gathered together in August 25th, 2015 and didn’t have much success for the first 8 months of it’s lifespan. Most Dota2 teams that go on to be great show some early signs of it in the first 3–6 months and those that don’t usually end up shuffling before then.
Finally, there was no obvious lineage of thought. In other teams, you can sometimes see a continuation of style either through a superstar, a captain, or a coach. In Wings case, none of those things applied and there were no warning signs of what the Wings player eventually became. The only thing notable about them was their practice regime as they had a strict training schedule. While the training regime likely honed their skills, it doesn’t explain why Wings did what they did. On top of all of this, the most befuddling thing about Wings was that they were a Chinese team. As I pointed out in part 1, China was the haven of structured Dota. They had most rigid adherence to the 1–5 positions, lanes, and archetypes. They focused more on the execution and mastering what was already discovered.
If you believe in the idea of nurture over nature, then Wings are a clear exception to that rule. Nothing in Chinese Dota should have ever given rise to the Wings way of playing. The closest comparable to them was DK 2014. While both teams had a wide array of heroes, their approach was fundamentally different. DK 2014 used their all-star talent to win off of skill and game sense. Wings 2016 used pure Dota knowledge to win their titles.
Open Dota and Pure Dota Knowledge
Trying to elucidate what made Wings great is like trying to grapple with the concept of the infinite. Wings was transcendent and formless in a way that makes them hard to pin down. It’s easier to try to negate what they weren’t to define what they were. Wings are the most open Dota2 team in history. They completely eschewed the idea of the archetype or rather, their knowledge embodied all of the archetypes.
They could play any draft from any era. Every strategy and hero was theirs for the taking. They could play split push, deathball, aggressive kill-heavy styles, gank-heavy map-pressure, face-rush, 4-protect-1, or late-game team fight. What made Wings so mesmerizing and frustrating to analyze was that they had almost no north star. There was almost no guiding light which they valued above all others.
I once asked Ceb what made Wings special and he answered, “Every time they[Wings] went into a game they had everything that was in the game. Not the meta or anything. Just everything, 110 or whatever…all the heroes, all the ways to play, all the items. Everything was on the table for them to grab and every game they were grabbing very different things because when you have everything to grab, there’s so many things you can do to break whatever people try to put in front of you. So Wings gaming was pure Dota knowledge. It was amazing.
They were doing drafts that I remember teams doing five years ago to counter a certain hero combo. Wings they just know, they do it. It’s great, it’s absolutely amazing. Let’s say Wings would play against TI3 [A]lliance. They would probably come up with how Na`Vi beat [A]lliance back then. It would be coincidence, but they thought…they just feel the game, they were just really good at the game. I mean in terms of concepts. Not team concepts. Like this hero is good against this hero because of this and that. The understood the heroes, the items, they were just really smart. I think a lot of it was instinctive. The more you play, the smarter you get but not because you’re thinking of whatever happens…”
His answer holds the key to understanding why Wings are a nightmare to conceptualize. Wings had every tool possible, but what made them unique was that they deliberately chose to use different tools as often as possible almost every time they played.
While it doesn’t sound crazy, what Wings did goes against the tenets of basic human nature. Every living has created certain subconscious structures that they use in their everyday life so that they aren’t inundated with information. People look at situations through filters of value and take action based on those values. An example of this is the famous invisible Gorilla experiment done by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They had viewers watch a video of people passing a basketball and count how many passes they made. During the video, viewers failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit pass through.
This experiment is instructive in that it shows people make acts based on their value judgements. The mind ignores the gorilla because it is of no significance to the actuated goal at hand. In a game like Dota then, values are all the more critical in establishing what works and what doesn’t.
As far as I can tell, Wings only had three value systems. The first was a priority of heroes they thought were overpowered. At ESL Manilla, Wings prioritized getting Invoker for bLink. At the Summit 5, they tried to get Drow for shadow. Outside of that though, Wings didn’t have a scaling tier of how they valued heroes or drafts. They were willing to do anything. In fact the second value system I found was that Wings had an almost pathological resistance to using similar answers multiple times in a row. They had no central tenet or philosophy they liked to play around more than any other.
The third value system is that Wings were just as likely to pull out old answers from the bygone days of Dota as they were to pull out something completely crazy and new. The reason Wings are the most open team in Dota history is because they seemed to value old ideas as much as new ideas. At the Summit 5 for instance, they pulled out a last pick Silencer for shadow. Carry Silencer was an old idea, but perfect for what Liquid had drafted up to that point. In the Summit 5 finals against OG, they last picked a Spirit Breaker into OG which caused the entire casting couch to break out into laughter.
The final thing to note about Wings and open Dota is that while they could play any strategy at any time with any hero, they always had core concepts or odd pieces of Dota knowledge that made it work. In the fourth game of the Summit 5 finals, Shadow built an Assault Cuirass on Void as their draft lacked actual objective strength.
The most telling game I found was in the second game of the Summit 5 finals. In that draft, Wings went for a Huskar as their third pick. In a typical Huskar draft, if you shut down the Huskar in the early game, you win. As the draft continued to play out, OG ensure victory in the top and bottom lanes, but Wings came out with a final pick Invoker. The genius of this particular move was that Wings didn’t fall for the idea that if a draft had a Huskar, it had to play through the Huskar. They realized that a final pick invoker secured three objectives. It helped their team-fight and gave them better scaling. The mid-lane was also safe for Invoker and the Invoker could knock down the mid tower early. That in turn created space for their roaming duo of Ogre and Batrider to put pressure across the map. This was only enhanced with the Invoker sunstrike.
When KuroKy was casting this game on stream, he was in absolute awe at how Wings had played out the game. Wings were the team that questioned every preconception of Dota and enforced their idea of a free and open Dota. They were cultural arsonists who burned down the rigid tenets of the old world while simultaneously revivifying the wisdom and truths that the old ideas held. For them there was no ultimate value system in how to win Dota games. Instead all archetypes and heroes had truth to them depending on the situations. That is why Wings were a nightmare to draft against. They had almost no initial structures to the beginning of their drafts. Instead they negotiated possibility based on their Dota2 knowledge. They started with a pair of heroes and then played speed chess as they synthesized their experience, hero counters, itemization, timing, overall Dota knowledge, and impulsive desire to use a different solution than the one they had recently used. This ability to inhabit all archetypes, the versatility to play all heroes, the impulse to try new things, and the knowledge to make it all come together. That is open Dota and while no one has ever quite recreated how Wings played, that Open Dota spirit lived on long after the lineup broke apart.
A Post Wings World
At the end of each International, the winner of the tournament is copiously studied. In that moment, the champion is the pinnacle of Dota. Therefore all of the players and teams study and take lessons from what that winning team embodied.
In the case of Wings, I believe the lesson teams took was open Dota. Ever since that period, player versatility is now more of a requirement than a boon. All of the best players need to have a specialized style while being versatile and knowledgeable enough to play a wide variety of heroes. Players that couldn’t adapt to this change or were too stylistic fell off as a result. Luo “Ferrari_430” Feichi and Danil “Dendi” Ishutin were earlier examples of this. Both were once the greatest mid-laners in the world, but as time has gone on, they couldn’t keep up with the requirements of the times. More modern examples include stylistic players like Jacky “EternaLEnVy” Mao, Sun “Agressif” Zheng, or Kim “QO” Sun Yeob. All three were great in their unique field of play, but in a post-Wings world that wasn’t enough. Top players needed to be masters of a unique style with the versatility to match.
Perhaps that is why Wings itself fell apart. The WIngs squad is one of the strangest to win The International in the historical context of the players. If you look through all of the International winning teams, all of them have historically great players. Each of the winners had at least 2–3 players that were dominant for a span of 2–3 years. The only exception to that trend is Wings. None of their players were considered top talents before Wings and after the collapse of Wings, none of them ever reached the same heights again.
If you look at them individually, they all have incredible versatility, but none of them ever had a polarizing identity or individual characteristic. Shadow was a good carry, but he wasn’t a great team fighter like Sumail “SumaiL” Hassan or a great end-game carry like Anathan “ana” Pham. When you go down the line, the only player you could say was definitely the best at their role was Faith_bian. But even in his case, there is no identifying marker to his play like Daryl “iceiceice” Pei Xiang or Saahil “Universe” Arora. The Wings players were microcosms of the Wings philosophy and that philosophy was already evolving past them.
In a post-Wings world, the best teams have synthesized the world of archetypes and Wings’ open Dota to make something completely new. The world of archetypes had teams build structures to order the chaos of Dota. The most successful teams were able to create a structure while emphasizing their individual characteristics of their players. In the post-Wings, teams integrated ‘free’ Dota into their teams.
It’s hard to quantify this influence as it isn’t a macro change like when EG started to play the carry through the mid-lane. Rather it was a cultural shift in attitude of how teams should approach Dota. While all of the original precepts and rules had wisdom in them, they were no longer taken for granted. Each was questioned in relation to their team, players, draft, and patch.
The Synthesis of old and new, Liquid, VP, and OG
Among the different teams I’ve seen, the three that I think integrated the Wings’ philosophy the best were Liquid, Virtus.Pro, and OG. The Liquid lineup I’m talking about included: Lasse “MATUMBAMAN” Urpalainen, Amer “Miracle-” Al-Barkawi, Ivan “MinD_ContRoL” Ivanov, Maroun “GH” Merheg, and Kuro “KuroKy” Takhasomi.
During this time period, Liquid was extremely flexible. They had a wide hero pool and an overlapping hero pool between their three cores and KuroKy can (and has) played every hero possible. The only player that may have had a limited hero pool was GH and he has continually expanded his hero pool ever since he joined Liquid. This let Liquid play through any of the players or lanes and it largely depended on draft.
What made Liquid a great synthesis is that they took the concept of free dota and focused it through KuroKy’s mind. KuroKy is one of the greatest captains in Dota2 history. As a player, he is also uniquely qualified to understand the Wings system as he is one of the few players to have played multiple roles, be a captain, and play every hero in a professional game. So Liquid added Wings’ open Dota, but applied it through core pillars or concepts. I once asked Lee “Heen” Seung Gon, Liquid’s former coach, about Liquid’s success across multiple patches and he told me,
“SuperMajor was more like…I wouldn’t say recycling old strategies but these strong ideas. The pillars are so strong that patches might change, but it’s still good. Like pressure, we talked about pressure and space. The concepts don’t really break down and then we just played on to the heroes the guys were feeling comfortable at the time. Seeing how we can build a lineup.
Visage was a huge hero. Visage was a fairly recent hero. I want to say about that tournament it was really a lot about the visage. We just naturally thought about…it depends on every game. We don’t really have like, “This guys our star player, we’re always going to play around him.” It changes, it can be a miracle it can be MATUMBAMAN, it can be MinD_ContRoL sometimes, GH, rarely KuroKy. When we have Visage, just an example, when we have these heroes we can lead the game. I think that’s what we are missing in ESL Birmingham. We didn’t really have a focal point as a team.”
Liquid had core ideas, values, and archetypes they played around, but had made it more open. This let them experiment and play through different players and heroes. When look at in this context, it isn’t surprising that in terms of sheer consistent longevity, Liquid is the most successful five-man lineup in Dota history.
Virtus.Pro’s assimilation of Wings was similar. Virtus.Pro’s entire style (whether you’re talking about the Vladimir “RodjER” Nikogosyan or Ilya “Lil” Ilyuk lineup) was win lane, win game. What made them great was that they realized they could take Wings idea of using any hero and reinterpret it through the prisms of their aggressive CIS style. Sadly for Virtus.Pro, they never couldn’t fully synthesize the ideas of open Dota. While they had a massie versatility (once playing 80 heroes in 17 games at the Summit 7). However they didn’t have Wings spirit of experimentation and couldn’t play outside of the Virtus.Pro archetype which hurt them in all of their TI runs.
The third team to integrate Wings’ open Dota was OG. The particular lineup I’m talking about is the back-to-back TI winning iteration with: ana, Topias “Topson” Taavitsainen, Sebastien “Ceb” Debs, Jesse “JerAx” Vainikka, and Johan “N0tail” Sunstein. In terms of player and hero makeup, they are more divergent from Wings than either Liquid or Virtus.Pro. Ana, Topson, and N0tail are very stylistic players with unique characteristics. None of them have obvious comparables to how they play their game. JerAx may be the closest thing to a “normal” player as he fits the mold of an exceptional play-making support. Ceb is a role-playing offlaner who can play out his part perfectly in relation to the overarching strategy of any particular game.
While OG doesn’t have as much hero diversity as Virtus.Pro, in terms of spirit they are the team I’ve seen synthesize their unique identity with the spirit of Wings. Unlike Wings, OG have very strong filters and values when it comes to strategy and draft. If you look at the OG teams from their inception to now, they all have value structures in terms of detailing how to win a game of Dota. They know how to control a game, what position/objectives are critical, and how to move around the map and win team fights, especially in the late game.
OG have combined that identity with Wings’ attitude. This is best seen in their two International victories. The reason for this is because those were the two LANs where OG were the most Wings like. Like Wings, they had access to a massive amount of Dota2 knowledge as if they were tapped directly into the Akashic records of Dota2 knowledge. They not only had the knowledge, but they also had Wings’ devil-may care attitude. In the TI8 finals, they final picked an Axe in game 4 as the perfect answer to PSG.LGD’s draft. Up to that point, all signs pointed to PSG.LGD smashing OG before ana’s Phantom Lancer could take over the game. Ceb reached into his knowledge bank, realized that Axe (which had been out of the meta and was a hero he hadn’t played for months) was the perfect answer for the draft. He realized that Axe could win the off-lane and then open-up the map to create space for their win conditions to come online, not unlike how Wings final picked Invoker against OG in the Summit 5 Finals.
Another example was the TI9 run where ana last picked IO against NiP upon realizing it was the perfect answer to everything that NiP was throwing at them. After that pick, OG set the meta for the entire tournament and no one was able to come up with a better answer for Dota than OG. In the final game of the TI9 finals, OG went for a final pick Gyro. It was a masterstroke pick as it countered Liquid’s plan to push the pace of the game to the extreme. Topson then took it to the next level with a diffusal blade. Diffusal blade was an unheard of item choice for Gyro, but he recognized that the crux of Liquid’s timing was based around the Bristleback. If he could drain the Bristleback’s mana, then he could end their hopes of a push. This itemization had shades of Wings to it. Not because Wings ever had the same idea, but because it was such a free move. It was something no one else could have thought of, but once it was played it looked like the best move possible.
OG’s victory at TI9 had brought Dota2 through to a full circle. The game started in a world of archetypes. Wings challenged those precepts and opened up Dota. Teams like Liquid, VP, and OG have combined their individual characteristics with Wings’ open Dota and have taken Dota to its next phase.
The End is the Beginning
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot
Dota is a microcosm of life. To gain any meaning or value, we superimpose structures and play out the game. Once we’ve come to understand those rules and enact those roles, we question their validity and articulate what the truth behind those rules and meanings. In the wake of Wings, everything was questioned: drafts, heroes, items, lanes, and gold. Each of the old world rules had meaning and truth behind it, but they weren’t the only truth.
As time has gone on, Dota2 seems to be reverting closer to a primordial enlightened state. The pros understand the rules, roles, and archetypes of the past, but are no longer bound to them. They no longer enact them as rigid rules to abide by, but as artifacts that have with purpose. As Aliwi “w33” Omar told VPEsports in an interview, “Positions don’t exist anymore, they’re just heroes now and they can be versatile.”
Dota2 has lived an entire cycle. It started with endless potential as a child, specialized their potential through the use of archetypes, grew old, blew up those rules, and has synthesized the old and taken on a rebirth like a phoenix from the ashes.
Wings were a rebirth for Dota2, a return to the joy of childhood. Ask any hardcore spectator, pro, or commentator and it’s likely that the Wings of this time period is one of their favorite teams to watch. They were open and free in a way that no one else was. As MATUMBAMAN says, “It’s stupid. You watch a Wings game and you want to cheer for Wings always.”
This freedom has infected the entire Dota2 world. Before, teams and players inhabited the coded structures of tradition to tame the chaos of Dota. While those structures still have truth to them, Wings showed that teams needed to be able to inhabit all of the old archetypes and push their boundaries. This openness forced Dota back into a state where people now play heroes rather than positions or lanes because all of those other truths are negotiated and changed through the context of the game or draft. In the wake of Wing’s victory, teams learned how to combine that openness with their own unique characteristics to create a hybrid of the old world and new. This synthesis has created some of the greatest teams in Dota2 history: Virtus.Pro, Liquid, OG, and Secret.
So while Wings only lasted for a short period of time, they are one of the most influential teams in Dota2 history. Their ideas, innovations, and ideas of open Dota resonate to this day. They didn’t innovate or an archetype like many of the other great Dota2 teams. Instead they inspired an open spirit of exploration, one that continues to influence all Dota2 players. Wings have become synonymous with freedom. When a team picks an unorthodox hero or item, people call them “Wings-esque”. Not because Wings ever did the same thing, but because like Wings, they exhibit the same level of freedom and brilliance that Wings did in their short peak of 2016.
The Legacy of Wings
It has been over three years since the Wings picked up the Aegis. With that retrospective, we can say that Wings left behind two legacies. Their first is how they inspired open Dota and the second is the mystery they pose. In a way, both legacies are intertwined with each other.
Consider this, Dota understanding has evolved in leaps and bounds over the years, but no one has given a credible theory as to how Wings reached the type of Dota that they did. That mystery in and of itself may be why Wings continue to be such a source of inspiration. Every other great Dota2 team had an ideology, patterns, and tendencies you could study. Many of them had great leaders who you could talk to (if you spoke the same language) or glean information from through interviews or documentaries.
The same cannot be said for Wings. The Western teams could study Wings games, but no one ever figured out how they came to be what they were (or if some pro has, they’ve kept mum about it). There were no interviews or documentaries that dove into their strategy or overarching ideology. Nothing has come out from the Chinese scene and based on the teams that have risen up in the post-Wings era, Wings seem to have a greater influence on the Western Dota than Chinese Dota. Not even the Wings players themselves either together or separated replicated that style to similar levels of success.
Wings remain one of the most mysterious and influential teams in all of esports. Plenty of teams have had inspired performances for short periods of time, but no one ever reached the level of freedom in their play the way Wings did in theirs. They were an impossibility given shape and though their time was brief, they changed the world. An existence that continues to spark the imagination even now.
As Ceb says in his interview to Thorin, “To this day, I still go to Wings replays and drafts to try to understand what I couldn’t understand back then.”
