What do you think? TL and Evil geniuses were top 5 teams for a few years. Cloud9 won major
NA VAL has the same problems that NA CS had. Players in the scene care more about egos and reputations over winning. We can already see these problems in Valorant. NA CS has had some great teams with great players but there was only like 15-20 players that truly put all their dedication and effort into it. Imagine if it were different, the talent was there and same with the org support. But orgs left when time after time players and teams failed to produce results. Same players just cycling between rosters hoping one will work. I think it’s mainly the mindsets. Level of competition in CS is another level as well.
Why waste money on a NA team when you can buy EU players knowing they put their full effort into it. I think it’s too early to tell but NA teams seems to be good in their own region but once it comes to international play. It is another story.
Sorry I made this longer than I initially wanted to.
+1 the whole twitch popularity in NA is a big detriment to the pro scene. Twitch pays more and people feed off of their ego worshippers on twitch. This partly results in the bigger overarching goal in NA Val is becoming the top tier fragger, while in EU there are more good "support" players that just play for the team and don't care as much for their stats. Your Xyp9x type player.
Of course this is a huge generalization but it boils down to this in the end. in EU CS you can list so many great support players and we're seeing this come up in EU valorant as well, while it is much harder to do so in NA CS and NA Val
although i highly agree with you, i feel like it has more to do with a build up ego (not for everyone, of course) than with money.
while it is true that these players make a lotta money through streaming i would say it is not enough for them to just stop focusing on pro level, i would say is just being intoxicated with this streaming/pro status fame they build thanks to some succesful tournaments and their streams that makes them just lose focus on keeping themselves up to form to perform against other teams/regions.
it would be a little naive to think that just because someone's born in NA or in SA or wherever else they just instantly become worse than some random kid being born in EMEA or wherever else, mostly the mindset that goes around from player to player in those regions is what truly intoxicates the whole scene and makes most of these NA situations just fall short from being the very best or at least big contenders for most or every other title out there
Sorry for the late reply, I went to bed after the post. I agree with you. I think people don’t realize, specifically NA players in Val. You can’t full time stream and be a pro at the same time. It will never work if you are trying to have results. Sure you might make a boat load of money with stream money + your monthly contract but it comes to would you rather win or make money and stream. Look at csgo, the top players in all regions hardly stream, it is mostly during the player break. they stream when they can. In Valorant, these NA pros are streaming it seems like all day or all night. Look at the jarso videos. 90% of it is NA Valorant pros.
Going back to just the mindsets. As someone who is from NA, I think the egos and reputations like I said have the biggest impact. Money does as well. Professional cs players in t1-t2 treat cs like it’s their job, because it is a job. Seems like NA VAL treats it like “yeah I’m good at the game, I’m pro, look at my following, stream, twitter followers, and how much money I make.” Obviously exaggerating a bit but you get the point. EU VAL and other regions seem to do the same. I remember L1nk on liquid saying that NA wants to stream, EU wants to win. And he is right.
NA pros prefer to stream ranked games insteadf of grinding scrims, also too many egos, this is the reason NA CS had so many failures, players that sacrificed themselves were rare but they were always in top teams(RUSH, Stewie2k to a certain extent, Daps, fUgly), just like in CS na needs more supportive players and a better work ethic, less hours on twitch and more in scrims versus top tier opposition, there's a reason why top pros in eu arent in ranked leaderboard, its because they are too busy scrimming all day, leaving the ladder to t2 players like Kadavra, AslanMashadow, Cender and other players that grind the ladder to prove themselves.
In NA I always see Asuna and other pros online streaming, no hate towards him but shouldnt he be praccing with his full team against other full teams instead of pugging?
NA is terrible at both, I would say that they are better at Valorant than CS. Over this past year, NA teams made it to finals in 2/3 international lans. On the other hand, NA has been shockingly bad in CS. Admittedly, their CS scene is bound to improve with roster changes and players returning from Valorant. Whereas I cannot imagine NA performing as well in 2022 for Valorant as they had in 2021.
is there any purpose in comparing? NA CS' peak was very high considering Liquid was legit a top 5 team during the Astralis era. You can't say the same in Valorant when the competitive scene is still not developed when the top teams barely play each other so we don't really know who's gonna win at a given point in time.