“I rate it very highly now, but at the time...” - Sheever on a message from IceFrog in 2012

Caster Jorien 'Sheever' van der Heijden recalled the beginning of her career and meeting IceFrog on the ALL CHAT podcast, and also explained how she came up with the phrase "Where'd he go?" for the Compendium.

I started as an administrator of amateur tournaments, and then began to commentate. To be more precise, I just sat and watched the games on my stream, and then I started commenting, because it would be stupid to watch Dota in silence. After that I continued to play amateur tournaments. At some point, I was asked to apply to Gosu Gamers, and then I was invited to do interviews for them at TI 2012, and then to conduct interviews for Valve themselves at the same TI. It was a great interview, I still remember it. It was the same interview with SingSing.

This was my first interview in my life. I then thought that I could interview someone I already knew because we played together with SingSing. I thought it would be easy. I was very nervous. I was so nervous that I thought, “Okay, I have questions in my head, I’ll just ask them.” It didn’t really matter to me what he answered, I just wanted to ask my questions.

It was this interview that made IceFrog notice my skills as an interviewer. So, somewhere I did something right after all.

[ When you received the message from IceFrog, where would you rank this moment among the most significant moments in your career? How high does he rank on this list? ] Now I rate it very highly, but at that moment... Obviously, I played the first Dota, but I was an ordinary player. Of course, I knew that the game was created by IceFrog and other developers, but I wasn't somehow... I loved the game, but at that time I had only been in Dota 2 for about nine months.

So it wasn't some big event where I was like, "Oh my god, can I get your autograph?" I've never idolized people. But it was very cool. The whole TI was an amazing experience for me, and I was then on an incredible emotional high.

I find this to be a very useful way to increase motivation because I'm not going to let these idiots win. I also think that it used to be much more common to hate and criticize so much any person appearing on screen.

This is no longer the case. People have become much less anonymous. Perhaps people have become kinder. But I really think that's when we received the bulk of the negativity. If I didn't have so many haters, but instead just people who didn't care, I don't think I would be here. Or maybe I would still be some kind of tier-2 caster somewhere at amateur events. I definitely tried harder because people acted like idiots.

During DreamLeague Season 28, we were asked to record short videos on a green background, which could then be played during breaks or directly in matches.

People came up with different jokes, gave thumbs up, high fives, and so on. I wrote down something like, “Where did he go?” - and ran through the screen. This was my option. And this phrase was used a lot because sometimes when a thing is repeated enough times, it becomes even funnier.

Previously, Jorien 'Sheever' van der Heijden, Quinn 'Quinn' Callahan, Austin 'Capitalist' Walsh and Aiden 'iNSaNiA' Sarkoi discussed the banning of Santiago 'TaiLung' Olivos Aguero Gustavo and Topias 'Topson' Mikka Taavitsainen's participation at The International 2026.