A love letter to LD2L — A Retrospective

Well I’m in Canada and lest you all think I’ve abandoned you for RD2L, solo-queue, or some other salt-fueled endeavor, I’ve decided to write a pseudo-response to Lava’s post. It should go without saying that I respect Lava and his opinions — he is a good DotA player and far more PMA than I’ll ever be. He is entitled to his opinion, as are the rest of you degenerates.

As an aside, I know some of you will likely accuse me of being blind at best or ass-kissing at worst. Frankly, I don’t care, but I will say that I am not blind to LD2L’s faults. I’m also not advocating that the admins stop iterating. Instead, I hope to be a positive voice that highlights what LD2L has done for me.

Before I dig in deep, let’s go over how I arrived at LD2L. I read about the league on reddit and I was understandably scared shitless. I was a girl gamer that had to play inhouses and ‘be PMA’. I played my inhouses, bugged someone to vouch me and prayed that the few players on my inhouse team(s) didn’t make a big deal out of my gender or piss poor hero pool. Thankfully, they didn’t.

Shortly thereafter I was drafted by Mous to one of the best teams I’ve played with across LD2L and RD2L. You can read my team review in my Medium history or ask me how I feel about the team. I’ve nothing but glowing reviews for the lot of them.

In contrast to my vibrant and manic team — the LD2L discord was pretty barren. We didn’t have our cool logo, we had a coaching channel that was pretty empty, and there was no organized inhouse system or ladder on the site. There weren’t even bots to invite you to lobbies. The lack of these features didn’t tarnish my LD2L experience, but the recent addition of them has rekindled that initial giddy feeling.

Being petty like I am, everytime a new feature was rolled out, I went to the RD2L PST-SUN discord and bragged about it. “Look at our leaderboard!” “Oh you guys are still making lobbies and telling people which side to join? Ha, we have bots for that.”

I even bragged about our vibrant fantasy community. While RD2L felt like it was happily sticking with the tried and true- LD2L was iterating and communicating with us about the changes. The point above is really the crux of my post. I’ve been a part of a large number of online communities. Rarely do I get a survey asking me how my experience went. If one does exist, I hardy expect anything to come of it. That isn’t the case here and I cannot understate how difficult it is to assess and incorporate the suggestions of a large community in a way that doesn’t cause a mass revolt. The LD2L PR Team LLC is incoming (I hope).

So I’d like to highlight some of the features that make LD2L amazing:

• The fanatical, passionate, sometimes questionable, always rowdy community (and all of their criticisms and demands)
• The reliable, monotonous, steadfast admin team (and all of their announcement posts and April Fool’s jokes)
• The inhouse lobbies and accompanying ladder — for inspiring an absurd number of inhouses at the start of this season that dwarfed all the seasons that came before.
• The bots and their creator — they are a free labor of love that I will always brag about and be amazed by.
• The LD2L ‘coaches' (not gachi) for supporting the community with their insight
• The constant changes (like the Masters split). While these changes might not always pan out, your efforts are noticed and appreciated.
• The fantasy draft makers and supporters — this adds so much depth to the league
• The content creators that add yet another layer of memes, analysis, and criticisms for the community to feast upon
• The friends who I have made during my time here
• All the admins, outside/unrecognized helpers, etc who have donated their time (free of charge) to handle all that this league entails.