Team Secret is a terrible name, and the Western super-squad of former champions and fan favorite players has been anything but clandestine in its bid to take The International 2015 Dota 2 (or "TI5" as it's known) championship by storm. After last year's event, the independent organization swallowed whole the best players in Europe and North America, and in the past two months the group has cut their way to first place in premier tournaments in the US, Europe, and China.
Team Secret is Manchester City and the New York Yankees rolled into one. So while it has not made the relatively new brand a great deal of friends, with a $18 million (and growing) prize pool on the line at this year's tournament, they have everything to gain.
This isn't a philosophy exclusive to Team Secret, but they do embody it well. The team is so fixated on The International to go so far as to drop from their last tournament entirely just to practice for the thing.
This is often the way of Dota 2. It's common, even expected, for teams to split up and restructure to find that "perfect" roster that will let them win—or at least place in—The International. The prize money eclipses not only everything else in Dota 2, but the rest of eSports. This from a game that comes in a distant second among players of the genre.
Team Secret's brand of player poaching is likely coming to an end, however. Next year, Valve will introduce its new majors system to, in theory, bind players together by more official means than just mutual respect and greed. Nobody is sure what the impact of these changes will be or what the implications will be for the pro scene as a whole. But that's next year. For now, Team Secret comprises three two former champions and some of the best their primary Western rivals could offer. [Update: The original article incorrectly stated how many former International champions currently play on Team Secret.]
The backstab
That was the case earlier this year when the European Team Secret took two of the star players from Evil Geniuses—currently the North American team of note—just weeks before the only tournament to ever give The International a run for its money: the Dota 2 Asia Championships. The story of Evil Geniuses, one of an American organization poised to become the first to win The International, suddenly shifted to that of another squad gutted by the all-consuming dream team.
And yet, Evil Geniuses remains one of the favorites at The International 2015. Despite their loss of the Canadian hothead "Arteezy" and the Swedish lone wolf "Zai," Evil Geniuses not only beat Team Secret at the multimillion dollar Shanghai tournament, but it went on to win the whole damn thing in the heart of China—typically the strongest region in professional Dota 2. This was in no small part thanks to "SumaiL," Arteezy's replacement, who at 15 years old mirrored his fresh-faced predecessor.
Despite being at odds, Evil Geniuses and Team Secret have worked together to change the entire story of professional Dota 2. While in years past The International has been a showdown between Europe and Asia, much of the attention around the main event next week will follow the rivalry between these two titans.
That's not to say that China is completely out of the running. Vici Gaming, the nation's strongest team this year, has done well, though not exceptionally so. Dark horse LGD Gaming has done exceptionally well in The International's group stages, which determine the teams' positions in the brackets of the main event, though they have yet to face some of the stiffest competition—including Team Secret. Another Chinese team, CDEC, has also impressed, even though the team only scraped through qualification.
Vici's solid-but-secondary performance, however, has only cemented the Western teams' place in The International's narrative this year. Chinese teams have long been seen as an obstacle for Western players to overcome, a stereotype Valve itself helped popularize in its self-produced documentary about the first International.
Evil Geniuses has beaten Vici Gaming in all the places that matter: they beat them in China at the Dota 2 Asia Championships, they beat them at home in the U.S. of A., and they beat them in Europe just over a month ago. (It's worth pointing out that Team Secret went on to beat Evil Geniuses for first place in the latter two cases.)
Net worth
None of this has hurt The International's bottom line. Most of the prize pot comes from fans who purchase the Compendium, an in-game sports schedule/ticket/bingo card that allows players to earn and vote on new cosmetics. A quarter of what goes into the Compendium, as well as any microtransactions spent to level it up to earn better prizes, goes into the pool. It's how we went from $1.6 million in 2011 and 2012 to $2.8 million in 2013, and from $10.9 million in 2014 to this year's whopping $18 million.
While microtransactions in online games are quite powerful in the US and Europe, they're not quite as obligatory as in China, where games like Call of Duty and Diablo 3 are reworked to support them. The extra eyes on Dota 2 thanks just to the possibility of a US team taking the title this year can't be overstated. People want to be a part of that story, and buying a Compendium is how one does it—in much the same way Americans watch soccer when their team is doing well.
Think about it: Evil Geniuses and Team Secret, two Western teams poised as favorites for the first time ever, in the final year of professional Dota 2 before the new league system. Two outlaws in the dying days of the wild west. It couldn't be more perfect—that is, of course, if either of them actually wins.
Dota 2 is an intensely capricious game, as anyone who's ever played it can tell you. This year's metagame—the soft "rules" which govern which strategies work and which don't — has led to some incredibly tight games. We don't actually know for certain that Team Secret, Evil Geniuses, or even Vici Gaming will make it to the grand finals, so isn't that exciting? Whether they win, lose, or drop out after having their eardrums shattered by the commentators, we're in for likely one of the most talked about Dota 2 tournaments in half a decade.
And, again, that is why Team Secret is such a terrible, terrible name.
Want to watch all the action? You should! It starts today, and the International 2015 site has all the main details. Valve will be streaming the tournament on Twitch (of course), YouTube. and Steam streaming, the latter giving stream viewers all manner of stats and data, too. And if you want more control, you can watch in-game; Dota 2 is free to download from Steam, and it's available on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
reader comments
39