Vir Esto
In 2012, I was busy pouring hundreds of hours into Valve's Team Fortress 2, when I heard they were making a new game, and it was in beta - Defense of the Ancients 2. I signed up to be on the list for a beta key, and lo and behold, a month or so later I opened my inbox to find one. I remember telling my friends from school that I usually played TF2 with - "I got a Dota key, guess I am gonna fail my A levels now".Dota changed my life. I have never been as passionate about anything as I am about Dota. But I have written about that plenty of times, this is the story of the beginning. I played a few games - my first game I picked earthshaker and had no idea what I was doing at all. Obviously I fed and had no farm whatsoever, and we lost. According to my Dotabuff, I lost the first 7 games I played. But I was hooked - the complexity of this game, the mechanics, the strategy, the teamwork - I couldn't get enough. I would grind matchmaking with all my free time, watch professional players stream, watch Youtube videos of the best plays. I had lists of what heroes suited what roles best, and questions about the mechanics of interactions between specific heroes I wanted to experiment with in the sandbox.
A while after I got my key and got hooked, I got another email from Valve - this time they had given me 5 beta keys, to give with my friends. So I did, and guess what, they fell in love too. Soon we had a team. Higgs played carry, Jack played mid, Matt played offlane, Garrard was hard support and I played soft support, as well as being captain. I studied drafting and tried to learn everybody's playstyle so I could pick heroes that were both effective as part of a grander strategy, but also would suit the individual controlling them. We spent every night after school in a skype call, queuing vs other 5-stacks to test our mettle.
It didn't take long for Dota to introduce an inbuilt team system. Now, the five of us could play under the same banner every time, and our opponents would know we were not just a rag-tag bunch of scrubs - we were a team. Which meant we needed a name. Three of us studied Latin, and given we were all teenagers, we ended up deciding to ask the Latin teacher the best translation of the then in-vogue "man up". While now I cringe a little at the toxic masculinity we displayed, our name was born - Vir Esto. And, to be fair, a far better translation of "vir esto" back into English is "to be a man", which is altogether less offensive to me.
So we played under our new Roman moniker, and one of Jack's friends made us a logo. I might still have it on my old laptop, it was a flexing bicep and forearm on a grey background. My favourite team back then was No Tidehunter, and I aspired to be like EternaLEnVy, their support player and captain. The captain of a team is usually a support, as their job is to survey the whole map and provide information to the rest of the team, which is hard to do on a farming role such as carry or mid. For those reasons I had elected to play support for the team, but Higgs was struggling with the carry role. His mechanics just weren't cutting it, while I was our best player mechanically, so we made the switch, and I would play carry and try to captain too.
We all loved the professional scene, and often talked about the previous day's matches at school the next day. We all idolised Dendi, the star mid player for Na'Vi, one of the most storied players in Dota's history, even to this day. A few years later I would buy a Na'Vi jersey, lastly because of him. I think we all dreamt of playing professionally one day, although whether the others were as serious about it as I was, I'm not sure. One day while scrolling through joindota.com I noticed an amateur open competition, held online, the next weekend, with some trivial amount of prize money. I think there was a 128 team limit, with £100 for first and £50 for second. Obviously we signed up.
On the day of the competition we all went to Higgs' house to play. We bought our laptops and plugged into ethernet connections so we had the best ping possible. My setup was pretty ratchet - I think I was sitting on the couch and playing on a low coffee table. But there wasn't enough desk room for 5 of us, and I needed the others to feel comfortable and play their best. We signed in and got matched with our first opponent, and loaded into the lobby.
I drafted, and picked a 4-protect-1 strategy. An EternaLEnVy classic. I was playing antimage - the aforementioned "1". The plan was simple - the other four would protect me, and do their best to limit what our opponents could do, essentially trying to keep 5 of them at bay with just 4, while I farmed. After 30 or so minutes of peaceful, uninterrupted farming, I would be so powerful, I could come to a fight and wipe the entire opposing team out.
So we started, and I began farming in the safe lane, with my two supports, Higgs and Garrard. Matt in our offlane was struggling, and got killed a couple of times. Jack was losing the mid match up. But I was getting farm, and I was going to have a good battlefury time - sub 15 minutes. On that old patch, if an antimage got a sub 15 minute battlefury, it essentially started a timer. Our opponents had a window where they had to do fatal damage, or antimage would become too strong, battlefury in hand. They took our tier 1 mid and offlane towers. Then they took our tier 2 off. But I was farming the jungle and safe lane efficiently. Last hitting well was probably one of my biggest strengths in the game. I was getting farmed and fat - we just had to survive.
The other team started pushing as 5 - we responded as 4. I was trying to call the fights, when to flee or when to press on, which enemies to target first, urging caution. My team wanted me to come to the fights too, they couldn't win 4v5. But they didn't need to win, they just needed to not lose catastrophically, and I was stubborn, I kept farming. The game timer hit 40 minutes, and I was stacked. I had battlefury, manta style, butterfly and boots of travel. Now the time for farming was done - it was time for fighting.
Our team crossed the river for 5 for the first time, and pushed towards our opponent's mid tier one tower. They teleported in as 5 to defend - and we wiped them out, all 5. We took that tower and moved onto the tier two. They didn't have time to respawn before we'd taken that too. We kept going - I felt like I could 1v5 and win at this point. Tier 3 is high ground in Dota, so defenders get an advantage. The enemy team moved to defend their tower - the penultimate line of defense before we reached their titular ancient.I began damaging their tower, waiting for them to engage. And when they did, we counter engaged perfectly - my teammates comboed their abilities perfectly to stunlock the key targets on the enemy team, while I picked them off one by one - antimage's abilities drain his opponents mana, leaving them unable to cast spells. They were defenseless, and we annihilated them - all five dead again. Their tier 3 fell in seconds and we moved onto they mid barracks.
And then something magical happened.
Just two little letters in the chatbox, typed by their captain.
"GG"
We'd won. All five of us let out a cry of celebration. Like our team had just won the Superbowl, our horse had won the Grand National, we'd just found out our wife was pregnant. I don't know what to liken it to. It was an amazing feeling - victory, pure and carnal. We had won.
Unsurprisingly, we got absolutely wrecked in our 2nd match in less than 20 minutes.
But... I am never going to forget that feeling when I saw the "GG" called in our first match, not for my whole life.