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Their coaching staff is actually ASS lmfao, these guys at ZETA management have to actively be looking for shit coaches. How is Carlao still on the staffing roster LOL GE got a better coach than ZETA in the offseason, that's crazy.
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Their player selection is too delayed. They had Laz & Dep for the longest time, and SyouTa was rotting in Tier 2 for ages, but they refused to drop the bag for JP T2's strongest player bar Meiy and kept TENNN & crow, even shifting crow to the assistant coach role as if he did anything LMAO I wonder if they've looked into RIDDLE's players considering the run they had in Ascension. They're literally from ZETA Academy.
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The players themselves have like 0 passion it feels like. They have legit no reactions to losing from what I've seen. Laz was the only guy in the Japanese scene who actually seemed to care about winning. These guys look so dispassionate. They're disjointed as well, there are some times when it looks like one of them wanted to flood and the other just waited, or the trade was so slow because the other guy wouldn't proactively look for it. Like what are you doing, why are you so passive? Didn't these guys want to play like PRX? The Japanese scene was suffering from passive baity playstyles since the game released and nothing has changed.
ZETA's problems thread
It's not shallow, i never said it was shallow, it's that ZETA's management is so fucking slow at scouting good players and they're so unwilling to let go of bad ones I feel. Same applies to their coaching staff. Honestly their current roster isn't even that bad. It's mostly a coaching + management diff imo
I actually wasn't too disappointed with SyouTa's Chamber today, at least. Seemed like he was put in a pretty difficult spot on Fracture tbh, and it's a sample size of 1. His Cypher has been looking very decent though. He can't take Dep's spot as Duelist, and SugarZ3ro is serviceable on Smokes, so it makes sense they'd put him on Sentinel.
If by some miracle Laz unretires, then a JP godsquad of Meiy duelist, SyouTa flex, Dep Initiator, Laz Sentinel, and SugarZ3ro Smokes with someone like bullco (JDT coach) and a competent assistant coach could be pretty good, assuming one of them can pick up IGLing.
JP tier1 & tier2 teams except the current DFM, tends to copy EMEA's playstyle. Slow and disciplined.
But they are so bad with it, they don't know when to fight.
They look so afraid of making mistakes and plays textbook valorant too much which makes them so readable.
I also don't have any hope for their tier2 talents. They just look good on tier2 because they are all equally bad. Only Koreans, Russians, and Meiy was the good players on JP tier2.
JP tier 2 has been a higher level than their tier 1 for the past 2 years I think. It just looks bad because their tier 1 teams are incompetent as fuck and incapable of properly staffing good players, plus they're slow to scout their promising players and assemble a team capable of reaching the peaks shown by their individuals.
I think a big problem here is that they got used to losing. They don't have winning mentality as an org, or as a team. Seeing how DRX steadily changed for the better as a team during 2022 after losing to Zeta, is what you should expect of Zeta as well, every time they have underwhelming performances.
For DRX, it was an absolute shocker that they've lost to Zeta of all teams. Unfortunately at the moment, losing to any PAC teams would not be the same kind of a shocker for Zeta. Losing to the likes of PRX, DRX, GEN or T1? 'It's an expected outcome, they are top dogs.' Losing to other teams? 'their aims are cracked. nt gg.'
If anything, maybe it would be a good idea for Japanese teams to have a public tourney between T1 Japanese teams and T2 teams. I think there's a good chance that T1 teams will lose bad, and once they lose in publicly humiliating way, maybe then they'll fix their shit. Obviously that would never happen, but that sort of wake-up is what they need, I feel.
I understand the choice to bring in FENNEL instead of RID. It was a bad choice, but it's logical and makes sense.
Syouta was more valuable than all 3 of RID's players combined. He is the only Japanese player who can match the import corps' ratings for many years. Meiy was also not as good as Syouta in tier 2.
The other two and riddle's 3 were similar, they were all just 1.0 rated players. Just because xdll and clz got completly smashed in tier 1 doesn't mean that suddenly RID players were much better.
Besides, Joxjo's shotcalling was what made the 3 rid players stand out, and without him, their strengths may reduced, and if they were to bring them in, they'd be left without a player who adapt at igling on Zeta.
Clz, on the other hand, is an igl, and you can solve your problem by just bringing him in.
Easy solution, right? But Hiroron was also a tier 2 player with a 1.0 rating. You should have been able to intuit the problem here.
The root of the all problem is that Laz is retired. He was the best player in Japan in 2024 (even Meiy has a lower average rating than Laz across all stages average.) If Laz remained and you had just brought in Syouta and CLZ, it wouldn't have been as terrible as it was. but he retired and xdll came. Instead of your best player, you added a mid player 1.
CLZ, Xdll are not significantly better than Hiroron, Yuran, which means Syouta would have to be very good as Laz to make at 2024 Zeta power at best. And the 2024 Zeta was shit.
And Syouta got mashed in the first two games. Now you have an even worse team.
I don't blame them, because they didn't really have any Japanese players to choose from. If they had one more player who was as good as the imports group, I'd be calling Zeta org stupid. But tier 2 japanese players of last season are all pretty much the same and bland.
I've said on VLR about 3 times since the Zeta roster was formed that even if they do well, it will be just the same as 2024. As you sow, so shall you reap.
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