hey boys, thought I'd add a bit of additional context as a friend linked me this thread.
there's no copium on why we lost. we lost because our teamwork was abysmal this tournament and we were disconnected on a lot of key rounds. we lost some inexcusable 4v2's/3v2's and major man advantage situations, in which if you're wanting to win a tournament you need to close out every time. there's a lot of things we need to work on for champs coming up if we want to have a chance at taking it.
when I was referencing some NA teams copying our stuff, there a few teams in particular that map for map/side for side/agent for agent copied legitimately everything. which is fine, don't get me wrong as I guess it's a form of flattery. but from a personal motivation perspective it makes me a bit bored sometimes as I'm not learning much from playing against our own strats. it'd be one thing to take a comp and expand upon it but that's rarely the case. there's even been instances of us scrimming teams for the sake of taking our new shit LMAO. don't get me wrong either, every team takes from one another and we've taken a lot of stuff as well.
my main reasoning behind this was behind my experiences playing in the EMEA region. we played against top teams for their respective countries and they had completely unique styles/comps/strats that I had not even seen top EMEA teams do. even for me personally, I saw some really creative util (trips/tp's) that I've never seen before. and for me that's exciting because it allows me to continue to improve as a player and gives me fresh ideas. it does make a bit sad though as I felt NA in the past was more diverse at the start- as people were more open to trying things and we saw some really unique styles (everyone was figuring out the game). now it feels much more stagnant and more follow what the top teams do. although this could just be a perspective/biased pov, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
hope that clears everything up or at least makes more sense