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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> his team isn't the strongest (they placed 17-18th during this TI)

Oh, is that all :P. Assuming a 2x buffer for players who are good but not competitive, there are maybe 200 humans in the world who are better at DotA. If mastery is 1 in 10,000, these people are masters.

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No, there are way more than 200 players better than Pain, all due respect to them. That’s clear by looking at leaderboards. But team dynamics and synergy in this game matter so much that they are definitely in the top 20 of teams regardless of their individual skill.

Seeing OpenAI do so well against this team impressed the hell out of me.

A really big factor making up your ranking on the leaderboard is your ability to play in a chaotic game where your team and yourself aren't on the same page. Just taking the top players from the leaderboard (who aren't already on a top team) and putting them together makes up a team that is good enough to win against other similar random teams (hence their high rank) but can't win against actual teams, which is evidenced all the time in the open qualifers where actual teams that consist of lower ranked players beat them. TI open qualifer / regional qualifer / actual event placements are way better indicators on how good a team is than pub leaderboards.

The way TI is structured they invite one team from South America. So Pain is likely not in top 20, but still a very good team.

I know how TI is structured, but I’m confident they’re top 20 anyway. Which team not at TI is better, do you think? Complexity? Navi? I don’t think so.

Many believe that it’s an exponential curve so there’s a substantial difference between the first and twentieth place teams.

Looking historically at team ELO and how squads have gone on 27-series win streaks, this is probably right. Though I think the gap between "low-tier" TI teams and TI winners is getting much tighter. Group B at TI8 was so close the difference between upper-bracket and lower-bracket was 1 game for most of the teams.

*Elo, not ELO :)

lol, good catch. Gotta give Arpad his credit :)

Even if this is true, pain is one of the unpredictable teams that can take a game off anyone. They went 3-1 against Liquid at the Birmingham Major.

Actually, "weaker" (top 20) teams regularly do take games off better teams so I don't think there's much evidence for an exponential skill increase between teams.

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