The first iteration of
Immortals
Immortals
Inactive
' roster, when revealed in the game's beta, lacked the hype of some of the other rosters revealed before or soon after Valorant's full launch.
They didn't have any popular superstars like Wardell or TenZ. The roster hadn't proved their winning credentials as unsigned competitors in beta tournaments. It was a group of relative unknowns. And yet, it was exactly the roster Jordan “ Gunba ” Graham and Michael “Packing10” Szklanny Sr. wanted.
And neither is any stranger to their creations being doubted.
The pair built the 2020 roster of Immortals' Overwatch League team, the Los Angeles Valiant. Few of the players on the roster had established themselves as stars within the game prior to joining the squad. Many fans expressed doubt on the team's ability to win and some predicted them to finish near the bottom of the table. Instead, they wound up with a winning record and were one of the few teams to notch a win against the league's champions.
“I would love if I was told as a head coach, ‘hey, listen, here's all the money in the world, pick whatever talent you want and you know, go win with it,'” Packing10 said. “But I don't necessarily believe that that's the smartest way for our organization to operate as a whole. I don't believe that's the way esports teams should really operate as a whole.”
Packing10, Immortals' Valorant general manager, and Gunba, their head coach, have established track records with proven success for utilizing tighter budgets to build rosters made up of hidden gems. And success tends to open doors.
Please welcome @GunbaOW as our @PlayVALORANT coach. From Immortal to Valorant, we're in good hands.
“[Mike Schwartz, Immortals director of esports,] agreed to let [Packing10 and I] build the team given that we've been successful in the Overwatch League building a team,” Gunba said. “So we decided to build a team the same way we did in Overwatch, which meant using kind of an unorthodox approach that I think people are now familiar with in Valorant.”
“And that means looking at players that maybe aren't household names, you know, looking at players that people didn't really consider,” he continued. “And then using statistics and like VOD analysis and computer vision and all that stuff to kind of get a bit of an edge in that decision-making process and get through a lot of people really efficiently. Which is basically the math on how you find players that people aren't really looking at.”
He estimated the team's initial tryouts included over 100 people, but Packing10 believed that number was higher: 150 to 200 total players. Immortals whittled down that gargantuan set of players to just three: Genghsta , jcStani , and bjor . The last two they added to their original roster, KOLER and Asuna , they added through a more typical recruiting process.
That less typical recruiting process — the one relying on statistics, VOD analysis, and computer vision — relies on software that builds a log of game events by recording each individual frame. In doing so, it can rip stats from the game that would otherwise be impossible without data from demos or access to the game's API.
“This is kind of something that's pretty well known in Overwatch and hasn't really been seen as much in other esports,” Gunba said referencing the lack of demos and accessible stats in that game.
Gunba, who has experience as a software engineer and is studying data science as a postgraduate, built the software himself using similar methodology to the one they used in Overwatch. Packing10 was quick to praise Gunba on his work with that — especially since he had it ready within a week.
Both Gunba's quick work in putting together the software and their overall process of moving through lots of players efficiently was and still is important to the foundation of Immortals' Valorant roster. That's because time came at a premium for them.
At the time they were putting together the original Immortals roster, both Gunba and Packing10 were still working for the Overwatch League team full-time while also taking university courses. While Gunba has since moved to Valorant full-time, he is still doing his university coursework and Packing10 remains the Overwatch League team's head coach while they're making offseason roster changes. When asked how they juggled all those responsibilities, especially when they first jumped into Valorant, their answer was simple.
“Work hard?” Packing10 said, making them both laugh.
Immortals General Manager Packing10. Image courtesy of Packing10.
The work is especially hard considering that even their statistical shortcuts can't solve everything in the scouting process for them. Sometimes you need to just watch the game.
“But we obviously look at the game itself as well, right? Like we're not robots, you know, we know what good aim looks like,” Gunba said when he talked about his computer vision software. “We know when someone's a good player, and we know what intelligent ideas sound like and dumb ideas sound like, and we know which players are panicking and which players are not.”
Which leads to their large trial pool. “The biggest benefit to the tryout process is that it's nerve-racking, right? If you can't perform in a tryout, how can we ask you to perform in a tournament?” Gunba said.
The biggest thing they're looking for that statistics can't measure is potential, which plays into this nerve-racking environment. “A lot of the intuition comes from really small sample sizes,” Gunba said. For example, a player that can pull out a 1v3 clutch in a high-pressure tryout against some of the best players in the world is going to catch their eyes. “That's not luck. There's multiple things that had to go right for him to win this round and he did.”
Small sample sizes are abound in the stress-inducingly large pool of players they tried to create the team — which was inspired, once again, by their Overwatch experience. Their tryouts for the Valiant last offseason included nearly 1,500 people by Packing10's recollection and they selected from a crop of players that had largely been overlooked by others.
“It doesn't matter if the player is the most famous player in the world or if it was somebody that was a no name that never played any type of game ha was anywhere conceivably close to Valorant,” Packing10 said. “That doesn't matter to us, what matters to us is if we think that player has potential, if they meet the kind of qualifications that we're looking for as both a person and as a player, and if we think there's room to grow and develop.”
He later added that it has felt like most in esports avoid signing players directly out of the ladder because they don't have experience or understand how the game works in a competitive setting. “And that's something that we learned from Overwatch: talent is talent. And you can't replace that. If a player is genuinely good at the game, you can teach a player how to play on the team.”
This open-mindedness on player background means the two are scouting even from their players' streams. Packing10 said they watch high-ranked players and their own players stream and have created a shortlist of players they may want to try out because they may show off high mechanical skill even if they've never played on a team before. “And it's funny when they started releasing the leaderboard and you look at the list and we're like, ‘oh, hey, that guy, he's on our list, that guy's on our list, too.'”
But it's not just Gunba and Packing10 who are weighing in on the roster-building process. “I don't think our players get enough credit, as well,” Gunba said. “Like we make them a part of that system.” He described how the team's newest additions — neptune , ShoT_UP , and jmoh — were recommended by Genghsta and jcStani, the only remaining players of Immortals' original roster. “It's not just me and Packing in a room together making all these crazy decisions. Our players are always playing ranked and we make sure of that. So we like getting information from them, too.”
Overall, if it sounds like their Overwatch experience has a lot of influence on how they've decided to lead the team so far, that's because it does. Both began their coaching careers in Overwatch and each coached for small-budget teams that needed to find creative ways to scout talent and win prior to their current stints with the Immortals Gaming Club organization. And the influence of Overwatch extends beyond their roster-building philosophy; it also impacts how they coach the team.
In fact, Gunba thinks that Overwatch experience has given him a distinct advantage when it comes to coaching his team. While a top team in Counter-Strike could survive without a coach, he said, “if you don't have a coach in Overwatch, you're dead in the water. You just don't exist. Like you're not a functional team, you will not win ever.”
“Looking back on it, [coaching Overwatch] was the perfect experience, I think, to go into a new game.”
That came after he reflected on the intensity of working with massive teams of nine to 12 players and massive staff systems made up of managers, team chefs, translators, and as many as three to four coaches while facing the pressure to win every single week after putting hours and hours of preparation into a single match. Not to mention doing so with teams that may be made up of a mix of Korean players, North American players, European players, and perhaps the rare Australian or APAC player.
Gunba feels his experience has helped him sharpen his skills on how to be direct with, criticize, and interact with players in a way that actually helps them improve. He also thinks it helped learn how to appropriately hold people accountable for their behavior.
Helping players improve is the ultimate goal — all of that work they put into scouting and signing players goes to waste without effective coaching. After all, a chunk of coal will eventually burn itself out without the proper pressures to turn into a diamond. They must develop the raw talent after they've signed it.
For Gunba and Packing10, that starts with the word Gunba mentioned above: accountability — on everything.
“I think that's the most important aspect out of anything,” Packing10 said. “Regardless if it's.. you know, if it's KOLER saying he wanted to really start streaming and to try to build his brand. [We started] messaging him and were like ‘yo, you're streaming today? I want to watch your stream, where's your stream at.'”
“Our philosophy isn't only about what happens in the game,” he continued. “We're gonna hold you accountable to be the best person you can be, to be the best version of yourself that you want to be.”
Packing10 and Gunba are open-minded with the roles players want to play within the team, but that philosophy of accountability they hold continues to apply just as equally to a player trying something new as someone who has been doing the same thing for months on end.
“Because at the end of the day, growth doesn't happen by people not holding you accountable, by people not telling you when you're things right, when you're doing things wrong, and at least even if there's a disagreement on that conversation,” Packing10 said before describing situations where Gunba may think one thing and a player may think another. “If that conversation never starts, then no growth ever happens.”
This logic means that even the new players don't get a break when the result is anything less than a victory. “Our expectations for them are through the roof,” Gunba said.
Gunba coaching Team Australia in the 2018 Overwatch World Cup. Image credit: Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment
When the new Immortals roster made their debut in the Renegades x NSG Invitational in October, they went on to surpass public expectations by making it to the grand finals. But on their way there, they lost to Gen.G. Gunba said that while Gen.G is a good team, and some may have wanted to excuse the team for losing as a new roster to such a strong team, their internal messaging was far from that.
“I think I straight up said to them, ‘losing to Gen.G is unacceptable and we should feel bad. Like, that can't happen again,'” Gunba recalled before proudly adding that the team then went on to beat Cloud9 in that tournament. “I think you can't accept weakness, and you can't accept people making excuses and finding reasons to justify failing.”
While Packing10 believes losing is an important part of the growth process that needs to happen, both coaches made no effort to hide their hatred for losing; Gunba even went so far as to say he believes he hates losing more than he loves winning. So part of this mindset can be attributed to that, but this mindset is also a byproduct of Gunba's and Packing10's reverence for work ethic, an attribute they think is important to see in their own players. But not all of their coaching is tough love.
“[We need to hold players accountable] if they're doing good things [by] rewarding those and holding them in a positive sense of accountability there,” Packing10 said. “It all revolves around that level of accountability and making sure that everything we do — every conversation we have is productive.”
“It's all about maintaining that level of accountability without putting too much stress and too much pressure on the players. But at the end of the day, this is a professional sport. And to be the best, to be a player who is playing for championships, you need to put in that effort. And as staff, we believe that we put in that effort. So it's really easy for us to say we expect our players to do the same.”
For a few action-packed days in October, you could see it all coming together. Immortals surged into the grand finals of the RNG x NSG Invitational, powered in large part by ShoT_UP's emergence as a rising star.
Packing10 described how he was talking to ShoT_UP before that tournament about how he wanted to be a top pro in Valorant and never had that opportunity before joining Immortals with his university, family life, personal life, and whatever else he had going on. He said he finds it more validating than winning to be able to tell someone he believes in them and will invest in them and then see them put on a performance like that and validate themselves.
“It's validating to be able to do right by those players and seeing their dreams really come to reality, whether that's with us or whether that's somewhere else,” he said while also referring to players who have since left Immortals to join other teams. “I think that's something that genuinely keeps me going a lot of the time.”
Packing10 and Gunba talked about all of this after Immortals had already been eliminated from North America's first First Strike qualifier. While the squad surpassed public expectations in the Renegades tournament, they failed to meet the new expectations that earlier strong performance placed upon them.
And regardless of public perceptions, the two maintain high expectations for the team always. They hate losing. They try to impart that mindset on all of their players.
If their rhetoric is any indication, they'll enter the second qualifier motivated and coming off of extensive practice. Should the pair's vision succeed, they'll be a scary team over the next couple of weeks.
To make that vision succeed, they'll need players to continue to validate themselves. Continue to make their dreams reality. Continue to develop that latent talent into an explosive force.
So far, they've put in all of the work to make it possible.
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