I remember the OpTic era.
While all of NA was embroiled in clout wars, Victor, Crashies, FNS, Yay, and Marved would barely make an effort to market themselves--they didn't need to.
None of them were trying to get noticed by bigger orgs, all of them knew they had a world class roster and worked tirelessly to polish their game for the sole sake of winning.
Crashies and Victor in particular would go highly underrated for A. Never streaming and thus never getting to show off their individual skill, and B. playing selflessly instead of going for flashy but risky plays; all this despite being the best NA had to offer for those respective roles.
It was them that embarrassed the rest of NA for their slothfulness and forced them to up their game--when your entire region is shit, nobody cares if you do bad, but when there is a world-class team winning majors, everyone cares about watching them play and not you.
OpTic/NV was the shining beacon of hope for NA Valorant.
No matter what meta, they remained consistently world-class; from Berlin all the way to Champions, they never fell off the way other NA teams did.
And now, we're back to square one. NRG is good, and I'm expecting great things from that core once again, but with no clear team on top of NA, teams like C9, SEN, and 100T are once again able to call themselves world class by accumulating world-class talent and putting in none of the effort to build up their strategy, protocols, and scrim experience that made them world class in the first place.
Nobody wanted to scrim each other, they accumulate world class talent and refuse to let them play each other; instead, they learn to play against Turtle Troops.
If NA valorant is to survive, one team has to not only pick up the crown of undisputed best, but also assure that they do not get complacent after the fact. They will bring the rest of the scene up with them, and our teams will become world class once more.
The only two teams I trust to do this are NRG and 100T.
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