Team Secret Puppey: “You know what teams play and you exploit those things”

Just before the start of DreamLeague Season 22, we chatted with Clement “Puppey” Ivanov about the state of Dota and how to settle the League of Legends vs. Dota 2 debate!

Sophie: The first thing I wanted to ask you about was actually the state of the structure of the Dota year. You’re one of the most veteran players out there.

How do you feel about the removal of the DPC and moving towards this tournament to tournament structure?

Puppey: I mean, there is no structure really. I mean, there is a structure that was created by ESL and Riyadh tournaments. Practically. But, yeah, it’s better to try to let things kind of flow out in the Dota universe in a way and see where it goes because there are organizers that are willing to put some money into esports of Dota. Therefore, I agree with it.

It’s just that it’s kind of confusing that nothing happened. I didn’t even go to this TI , but they removed battle pass and then said, we’re going to put it into next year’s tournaments and none of that happened. So it feels like a scam. But it’s just funny.

Sophie: Yeah, when they released it, they were like, oh, there’s going to be loads of second party tournaments. We’ve had the Dacha but that’s about it.

Puppey: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard kind of to get into the system right now because there’s a lot of qualifiers. And most of them are related to ESL and Riyadh. So, I mean, that is the new TI. If there’s no knowledge of what TI really is going to, I mean, it’s just going to eat a lot of the schedule in right now. I do feel like it’s a little bit lengthy. Things that are lengthy, but the price pools are big, so it kind of makes up for it.

I’m not really sure because the point is like, tier two teams. Currently, I’m a tier two team, so it kind of doesn’t feel good when it’s very top heavy because the top teams only qualify and the top teams get to play top tournaments. We will need time, though, to process this because obviously nobody else can create a perfect system instantly when nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen next year.

If I would be an organizer for Dota tournaments, I’d be like, okay, so what’s going to happen next year? Valve says we don’t know, so, they probably know something, but not enough to make big investments.

Sophie: Yeah, the road to TI is a little foggier these days.

Puppey: I mean, it was just majors and DPC points and now it’s EPT points. It just get a little confusing.

Sophie: You said you are a tier two team at the moment, but I’ve noticed that we’re starting to see some more of the old Secret coming back through qualifiers lately.

How have you turned this around in terms of play style and team morale?

Puppey: Not really sure. It comes and goes. And the thing is, we had a different atmosphere when we started the year and that atmosphere kind of got broken up because of a team change and now we’re trying to get it back. It’s hard to reach a type of atmosphere where you feel confident in your game, in everybody’s game, and everybody gets to understand what’s going on.

So it really takes a lot of time. Not every team is instantly good, but I don’t know what to say. It’s just basically going to be a time of just figuring stuff out.

Sophie: Yeah, definitely. And are you guys boot camping right now?

Puppey: Yeah, we’re all in the same place in Romania.

How does that affect your preparation in terms of having you all together?

Puppey: It depends on person to person because, for instance, the level of stress being together all the time can get very high. But if you’re at home, usually that stress doesn’t reach high. But some people work better if they’re next to each other and get to explain things, to point at things, especially when we have some kind of a language gap. Even though everybody speaks English here pretty well, some people might not understand everything if you show them. It’s much easier.

The body language is better anyway, like in real life. There’s things you can never pick up online. But I’m used to having teams where, when Coronavirus happened, I used to have a team that was perfect to stay at home. It was just five guys that were very happy to stay at home and knew exactly how to chill and keep an atmosphere. That was good. It all depends on what type of team you have.

Sophie: does the minor language barrier affect your in game comms at all?

Puppey: No, not really. Everybody in the game can speak good English. It’s just like some things you don’t pick up right away because people have a different accent and therefore you can maybe not understand, see?

Sophie: Okay, cool. So I just want to touch really quickly on the start of Dream League, I think you guys have got Xtreme and Shopify on your very first day.

So are you preparing for individual series differently, or do you just kind of have a blanket approach?

Puppey: Every series is different, and I think it’s been for every team for some time. At some point, it switched a lot because you just have to change your draft completely or ban different heroes depending on what team you’re playing. You know what teams play, and you exploit those things. So every team is going to be different.

Sophie: That’s interesting. It sounds like that takes some time to prepare different strategies.

Puppey: For sure. So much.

Sophie: So obviously, we’ve just had a little patch drop.

Do you think we’re going to be seeing a different meta coming out?

Puppey: No, not really. I feel like some heroes got nerfed and they’re not as good as before. Like, let’s say Meepo. But the rest of the heroes kind of still seem fairly similar. There are some heroes that are a little bit more buffed, like Leshrac, that might be seeing a little bit more showing in the drafts. But at the same time, I think pretty much nothing changed, really, besides a few heroes.

Sophie: Maybe we’ll see a little less Mage Slayer now.

Puppey: Yeah, Mage Slayer abusing has probably gone down on some heroes. But most heroes that were, like, Dragon Knight is still going to buy it. That’s not going to stop. Vipers or something like that are still going to buy it, and there’s going to be a lot of heroes that are still going to buy it and not care.

Sophie: I just wanted to go back to the topic of pubs and practicing. I noticed that you play some core roles in pubs.

Do you think it’s important to play different roles just to understand, or is that more for fun?

Puppey: No, it’s very important to actually play core roles to understand the game better. But usually I don’t do it out of choice. You’re forced into it because you have to draft in a high MMR dota, where you draft your four teammates that draft the others. And there’s probably a section with two supports, and I play support. So I’ll throw myself whichever role that I have to play.

And mid lane is the worst for me, for sure. By far. It has too many nuances in there. The thing is, I always play safe lane and offlane in the sense I will always play those lanes. Practically 98%, actually, 99.9% of my life. Double lane mid hasn’t happened since, I don’t know, ten years ago. And that wasn’t that big of a thing anyway. So I’ve been basically playing on side lanes my whole life. So mid is, like, the most alienating for me.

What do you play mid if you have to?

Puppey: It depends what flavor I’m feeling. Sometimes, I will maybe test out support heroes to play mid. Like, I will try to play like Chen mid. I’ll play Enchantress mid. And then if I feel strong about some hero, and I’ll just play like, I don’t know, Death Prophet or something like that. Whatever I feel like is my hero because I will choose one usually and then I’ll go there. Interesting.

Sophie: Yeah. I’ve only ever played mid, like, once in my life, and it was because I accidentally picked Medusa instead of banning her.

Puppey: I’ve done that mistake. It happens.

Sophie: Okay, so I just had one very last question for you, I just wanted to ask a little bit about your off time when you’re not preparing for a tournament, and how you like to sort of chill out or maybe take a break from Dota.

What do you like to do during downtime?

Puppey: Most of the time when we’re in boot camp, it will naturally be chosen some game that we want to play together or something that we want to do together. But mostly it’s just playing another game. A lot of the times it is a custom map in Dota. A lot of the times it’s not. It’s sometimes like some puzzle game we’ve been playing. Like, Baba Is You. I don’t know if you know what the game is. It’s a f*cked up game, and it will kill you if you play it. If you will play it, you’ll understand that it’s going to kill your brain. But we’re already pretty far. We’re pretty much 95% done, but we haven’t had the time to finish it. But those are the types of things we do here when we want to fool around and just kind of like chill out.

There’s another stuff like online website games like Guess The Game where you have six frames of the game and each frame gets better if you don’t guess the first time. So it’s like Wordle, but for games in a sense, you’ll just see screens of it and there’s like a billion types of games. Like you’re Geoguessing games. But Guess the Game is one of our favorites because we’re all gamers, so it’s fun that way.

It’s definitely good to not always play Dota.

Sophie: Yeah, maybe a bit of League of Legends sometimes? :D

Puppey: No, that’s just Dota, but for kids.

Sophie: I mean, I wasn’t going to say it, but it’s good that you did.

Puppey: Whatever, who cares? I can make fun of their game, they can make fun of mine. It’s fine. They can just tell me that Dota is just f*cking League of Legends. But for f*cking boomers, they can do that. It’s fine. We’ll just choose our strongest man of Dota to fight in a ring against their strongest man of League of Legends. And that’s how we figure out what the better game is.

Sophie: I got to ask who you would pick to put into that now?

Puppey: Oh, Fly. Fly easily. We’ll see. Yeah, I don’t really know their players, but they can choose a good one. Maybe Tyler can do it or something. I don’t know. I need to talk to Fly, I’ve always thought about he should be doing something like that in his life, but he’s not an aggressive person. But it’s about sportsmanship.