When Wings.Gaming Was The Greatest Team Of All Time
Image by Valve on Flickr
When they won TI6 nearly a year ago, it may have been presumptuous to declare Wings.Gaming the best Dota team of all time, but that’s the territory analysts Black and Winter were breaching during the closing minutes of the award ceremony.
“You can’t reach perfection, but they are so close,” Black said.
What does it mean to play perfect Dota? It wasn’t just that wings.gaming sliced through the main event competition, but it was the way they won. They were adaptable to the meta, flexible in strategy, and versatile in their hero pool. The nature of Dota is that its landscape shifts even when there isn’t a patch change, but by the players who shape it through their play. That’s easy to see over the course of a LAN, where underrated heroes can become that tournament’s top pick, and picking the top heroes could be running into a trap.
Wings.gaming was able to navigate this terrain on their road to the TI6 championship. They were the antithesis of the previous year’s top Chinese team, CDEC, who smashed the competition by excelling on a handful of heroes and one streamlined strategy. Wings.gaming wasn’t confined by the meta, and they won in particular for their ability to flout it altogether. They’ve picked Pudge and Techies and played Axe in the 1 position.
At the team’s peak, it seemed that they could’ve picked any hero and played any strategy. Pile on the team’s chemistry and their appetite for Dota, they had a solid foundation that appeared to be sustainable for the indefinite future. Finally, a TI champion who would not only maintain its roster but also had a fair chance of repeating. It all fell apart in a handful of months.
“We are not scared of any team. I think the most important thing is to adjust our own mentality and compete with ourselves.”
wings.gaming in an interview before ESL One Manila 2016
Peaking At The Right Moment
Before TI6, wings.gaming was largely inconsistent. They first broke into public consciousness at the World Cyber Arena 2015 with a victory over Team Secret, who was a juggernaut team with an all star roster. But then they floundered in Valve’s three Majors. They were eliminated during the Shanghai Major’s qualifiers, and their highest finish in the circuit was at the Manila Major 2016, at 13th-16th place. Their breakthrough performance, before TI6, was at ESL One Manila, where they qualified by running through China’s top teams, and then won the championship with a 3-0 finish over Team Liquid.
During ESL Manila 2016, Faith_bian was one of the first players to standardize Drums of Endurance as the Batrider’s first item on the professional stage.
They were largely a tier 2 team that had a few spotlight moments, but even then, both the community and pros saw their potential for greatness. It helped Wings.gaming’s case when they won The Summit 5 shortly before TI6. They weren’t under the radar anymore.
Then at TI6, fans tuning in can’t be blamed for thinking that wings.gaming was this good, all the time, because they weren’t that good even during the group stages just a few days before. They were one game away from being in the best-of-one of the loser’s bracket, after getting 2-0’d by both TNC and Na’Vi. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that Wing's inconsistent finishes and their risk-taking tendencies was a recipe for failure to repeat a TI championship. But their TI6 performance was so transcendent that they made us believe they could.
In the ensuing months, wings.gaming exited Boston Major 2016 at the bottom of the bracket (in an unfavorable first round matchup against EG), failed to qualify at the Manila Masters, and dropped out during the group stages at Starladder i-league Season 3. The breaking point came with wings.gaming’s ouster from ACE, China’s Esports regulatory association, and ultimately the team’s disbandment.
Ever watched an anime where you face the final boss on the first 5 episodes and get absolutely demolished? #wingsgods
— Theeban Siva (@1437x) November 11, 2016
The Tenuous Grasp On Making History
The window for being great is narrow, and what’s often forgotten is that it’s influenced by vectors of chance, luck, and misfortune. Teams who have failed to repeat their TI performance are afflicted by the “TI curse,” a metaphorical force for the intangibles that makeup a championship. Wings.gaming was great at the right time and place, and they had a foundation that could’ve beaten the curse, from the diligence to combat post-TI idleness, the internal chemistry to be cohesive amidst egos, and the versatility to adapt to the meta that lies ahead.
Dota is still too young of a game to append “all time” to any team. Other sports are long enough to have eras and its dynastic teams usually have successful championship runs of at least two years in a row. No team has accomplished that yet in Dota. Few have come close, and wings.gaming had the best chance. They played close to perfection, but not for long enough.
nice article
WHY WINGS???? :((( THE DIRECT INVITE THO. ooops didnt notice i am third.
^haha, as long as you say something relevant to the article, calling "first" or "third" is fine, wp
Wings were so powerful because of how diverse the meta and hero pool of TI6 was. At Boston, when the meta finally started to stabilize into the SD-Luna style, they couldn't run their chaotic drafts anymore.
Hope they players of wings do make a comeback in the scene.
They'll have trouble to as they're banned from china's competitions, so giving them the chance to enter a team is limited now
hard to find sponsors as well
Every patch has its own constraints. It's stupid to not consider this constraints and expect to succeed. So I think it's bad to be as conservative as IG, it's good to be as dynamic as EG and it's stupid to be Wings. Sorry, I never liked them and I believe they were a flash in the pan.
They were so fun to watch!
@Fight Machine
I don't think anyone can really argue that they weren't flashes in the pan, but honestly most TI winners have been exactly that. Alliance, Newbee, I think Wings, Maybe even IG (I'd have to look it up) all formed their main core group the year that they won. If you take runners up into the mix too you can add at least CDEC and DC, and I think even EHOME and VG (the only other runner up is Na'Vi). Up until this recent announcement for the 2018 season, you could make the argument that the only real success comes from being a flash in the pan, a team that intends to only be together for a single year.
That mentality I think will change as the new system makes consistency less of a concept that some teams adhere to (Liquid, EG, OG sort of) and more of a soft requirement. It's healthy for the scene because it really should reduce the amount of underdog stories that we see, thus rewarding true skill over luck a healthy chunk more. Any remaining underdog stories will be easier to credit to hard work instead of the result of hidden strategies and dumb luck.
they were so unpredictable too
i miss wings
Biggest prediction i have ever done. Its very sad now
Sometimes I just like to appreciate we're in an era we have every TI game on YouTube so we can revive Wings eventually... Same for that 2014 DK or ppd's EG...
Midone 10K too fast,his performance gonna drop at TI😢
Mean while where is Miracle-?
miracle is 500 mmr behind 10k, but really who cares... eu pubs are stacked as fuck, wonder why abed got 10k on NA since there are no players to comete against him (next highest mmr pro would be rtz)
^MidOne reached 9K in EU and climbed there, finished the final ~400 MMR for 10K in SEA.
Nice article fam, 10/10 would read again
wings was my favorite team to watch, sad they're gone :(
Last sentence is just sad man
Wings will not go down in history as the greatest team of all time -- you need more than a TI win to do that. But certainly at this point there was never a team so dominant at any major Valve event.
3 years playing dota, cant reach 4k... stuck in 3k sea lol
I wished they all moved overseas and started playing together again..
Nice article. I miss Wings Gaming. :( I just wished they still stick together and probably move outside of CN to play. I know for a fact that there's a ton of organization that is willing to sponsor them.
But for now, I think VP is getting close in being the next WINGS with the way they draft and play and their hero pool is really large just see their performance in the recently concluded Summit.
i actually feel sad when i saw the title :(
Still salty with ACE decision :"(
You can knock on any of the past TI winners save Wings. NaVi were kings during a time when the hero pool was woefully limited, and Alliance, IG, and Newbee were powered by the meta or lived and died by their one or two main strats, whatever you choose. EG don't necessarily fall into any of those categories, but their pool was also limited by the meta (Fear was spamming gyro IIRC) and competition was less than stellar.
Wings had all the ingredients they needed to make their legend. They could play any style, they were versatile, and as far as tourneys go TI6 was replete with capable challengers. There's DC with the cinderella run, the upstart SEA teams (MVP, Fnatic, TNC), a two-time major winner, and the defending champions who weren't necessarily stuttering during the tournament
@I WANT TO DIE
I think you're making it sound more legendary than it really was. I remember people predicting Wings, OG, EG, in that order. Everyone else wasn't given much thought, and it ended up basically being a repeat of the previous TI when CDEC was calmly handled by EG in the finals.
Na'Vi won TI with limited heroes but it was still a level playing field. What impresses is that they made it to the grand finals for the next two internationals. EG has come close to this feat with two 3rd place finishes, but everyone else crashed and burned after their TI win. It's great that you love them, but if they were so much different than all the other TI winners, impervious to patch changes etc, why did they crash and burn like almost every other TI winner?
ITS ALL ABOUT MONEY
Title makes me sad
back then when miracle hit 9k everyone said that og will win the international and whenever i told them i know wings will win they said u are retarded or sth
disband made me so sad :(