Early Exits And Quick Defeats: Has North American CS Really Gotten This Bad?
Ever since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there hasn’t exactly been a lot of contact between the various Counter-Strike regions. Travel to and from the United States has been quite difficult - if not entirely impossible - and so the European and North American teams have largely kept to themselves.
As a result, they have drifted apart again in terms of playstyle. After months of not seeing these teams compete against each other, some American teams have finally made their way onto European soil again, and we have witnessed them taking on their overseas competition. For Evil Geniuses, FURIA, and Envy, this was their first international encounter since March (or even 2019).
THE FIRST NA TEAM ON EUROPEAN SOIL
To be fair, MIBR have been over to Europe before. They bootcamped here in August, but their results were abysmal. They were finished off by the likes of Wisła Kraków and forZe, leading to a complete breakdown of the team’s core. Fernando “fer” Alvarenga, Epitácio “TACO” de Melo, and Gabriel “Fallen” Toledo have all exited the roster, leaving behind their two newest recruits, Vito “kNgV-” Giuseppe and Alencar “trk” Rossato. In a last-minute rush to field a complete lineup for BLAST Premier: Fall and Flashpoint Season 2, they loaned out three players from Sharks Esports and DETONA Gaming.
This roster has done decently well so far. During BLAST, they actually came close to defeating Astralis and took a map off of them, before finishing off their Brazilian competition, FURIA. They took another map off of G2 before exiting in third place, a great result for a team that basically hadn’t existed two weeks prior to this event.
Click to enlargeTeams like FURIA and Evil Geniuses had much more time to prepare against their European opponents before they headed overseas. However, this didn’t help them a bit once they faced off against the likes of OG and G2 Esports. Evil Geniuses took part in BLAST Premier: Fall Group A, narrowly losing out to OG in a nailbiter Best-of-Three. With the notable exception of Ethan “Ethan” Arnold, Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz and his men have all underperformed individually.
The same holds true for FURIA. After dominating the North American competition and despite Henrique “HEN1” Teles basically styling on his domestic opponents, the Brazilians were hopelessly outmatched in their fight against G2 Esports. Nikola “NiKo” Kovač didn’t even need to bring his A-Game in order for FURIA to crumble. In the end, the team was finished off by an MIBR roster that was less than two weeks old. Now that BLAST Premier: Fall is over, and the American teams have gotten basically nothing for their efforts, was their journey over to Europe really worth it?
CATCHING UP WITH LIQUID
Team Liquid have played their cards well. While FURIA and EG were hungry for international trophies, Liquid understood that they were far too underdeveloped to actually cut it in Europe. Instead, they have remained on home soil, basically giving them free reign over the North American scene. In IEM Beijing, they only really have to worry about Chaos, whom they have already beaten in a decisive 2-0 fashion.
Click to enlargeThere’s just no reason for them to try their luck in Europe right now, as Jake “Stewie2k” Yip hasn’t quite reached the leadership level necessary for making it against the top brass. The likes of FaZe, Vitality, and Heroic have actually taken great strides forward. When it comes to performance, some teams have outright benefitted from this pandemic. BIG would arguably never have been able to flesh out their gameplay this much in a LAN environment. However, they have taken their incredible volume of online matches to heart and made it a point to fix as many issues as they can.
A NORTH AMERICAN ECHO CHAMBER
But in North America, there just isn’t enough competition to achieve such a feat. With the 100 Thieves out of the picture, a team like Evil Geniuses can only really take pointers from FURIA and Team Liquid. There is very little diversity in the way these teams approach the game. Most crucially, they have sometimes fallen back into the puggy and confrontational style of CS:GO that the region was renowned for back in the day. Obviously, this just doesn’t cut it against European competition. It didn’t work in the early days of the game, and it doesn’t now and has become evident by the lack of success that these teams have experienced in Europe so far.
So maybe it is a necessary step for these teams to poke their heads into EU competition, even if it means going out in last place. Obviously, their North American tournaments don’t really help them grow. The pandemic is likely to stay for longer. With the cancellation of the IEM Global Challenge, there will arguably not be another Counter-Strike LAN event in 2020. Even if these teams lose out on some easy North American prize money, they might benefit from playing on European ground in the long run.
Images via DreamHack | Starladder | ESL