never said hes washed, just that hes not top team in the world material anymore, he always had good eye test and hes by no means a bad player, but I just dont see him being at the level of dominance he was on Gambit 2 years ago, especially when you consider how many good sentinel players are running around these days, it seems like hes reinventing himself as a very mechanically skilled IGL and that could be a way for him to land into a potential championship roster, but I dont see him as a superstar sentinel player like back then

Isnt Rainbow SIx Siege the most popular shooter here in Italy besides CoD? You can also see that in the fact we do have some T1 talent in Rainbow Six unlike here, I font think Valorant is that popular in Italy but maybe im just on outdated info

honestly i dont even know if nAts is championship level nowadays, that lurking playstyle he became known for is being sidelined thanks to players getting bvetter at the game, his aim is great but i dont think hes in the upper echelons of the sentinels in the world (think of Forsaken, Meteor, Alfajer), I dont really see him as a centerpiece of a championship winning roster, i think theres other sentinels that id much rather have in my team like the three i mentioned above or players that bring more to the table like Vookashu (IGL with amazing mechanics), Tomaszy or BenjyFishy (lots of untapped potential still and amazing aim talent)

If you think players from certain countries dont ever make it to tier 1 is because they "dont try hard enough" you are missing the forest from the trees, if certain countries dont have the means to make a player "try harder" then nobody will ever even try, its not even about being a big region or a small region, Peru has a huge amount of great DotA 2 players because the love for that game made a big scene flourish in a small country (thanks to the completely open system in DotA 2 that allows anyone to make it to big tournaments and get gameas against good teams), but if you take away the means for a region to develop those players then we will never ever have someone good enough to make it to the bigs

we do have an Independent organizer, OG Esports, but calling them independent is kind of a stretch, they are known basically only for being the guys that run the LoL Italian league and have ties to RIot, the main problem with PG with LoL was that they idnt want a good ITALIAN league, they just wanted their league to be seen as good.

This is why the Italian LoL league is absolutely atrocious from a scenen development point, cause theres barely aqny italian players in it, they were very lax with import rules and didnt take long for Orgs to realize that you could get players from Turkey and eastern europe for way cheaper than italian players (Italy has a fairly high cost of living and italian players expect to be compensated in a way that lets them live) and with better results since those foreign players already have experience playing in their own regional league and thats how we ended up with more turkish players than italian players in the league.

For Valorant they did a better job in helping italian players get to the league, but they still held on to some convinctions that we should provide a big event instead of focusing on a smaller scale tournament that could be economically sustainable

How do you think players get good though? IF these players have no scene to play in and improve they will stay bad and become bricklayers, with an avenue to play regularly, we saw some of our players starting to improve and new talent come up, obviously not as good as countries who already had solid playerbases from the start and players with experience in other games such as CSGO, but it was the start of something and now almost all of the italian players will be left fighting for the 1-2 spots that DSYRE will give to Italian born players, instead of having a good structure where to hone their skills, our tier 3 system was based around access to the VCL and with the VCL being cancelled theres no more reasons to play in tier 3 excpet for hoping DSYRE notices you and even then, nothing stops DSYRE from just signing spanish or portoguese players

The frustrating part is that we were starting to set up a Tier 3 scene with Circuito Tormenta and the BTL, the problem is that the end goal for both of these leagues was reaching the VCL in Italy, now that opportunity is goine and with likely only 1 italian team in Tier 2 the chances for players competing in our tier 3 are extremely scarce, with the VCL you could get a batch of 5-6 new players every year ideally and maybe 1 of them becomes good enough to compete in the upper echelons of tier 2, but now unless there's an incredible talent running around, its almost impossible for italian players to even get the chance to improve and become good tier 2 players, I really think the only way is we fuse the tier 3 leagues togheter too but that would definetely be a mess from an organizing standpoint.
Regarding the viewership and economics side fo things I understand the decision, our league wasnt popular enough for riot but ev en then I think this problem also stems from Riot itself, who instead of organizing a smaller event witht he main goal of developing talent and making Italy a Valorant region on par with other euro countries, decided we had to host expensive Live Finals, provide full coverage with multiple casters (almost all taken from our regional LoL stream btw, not even giving community casters a chance) and make a product on par with France or Turkey, that was never going to happen, expectations were too high from the start and of course they were disappointed and now we get almost nothing despite doing our best

Riot relied too much on the expectation that the national scenes would build themselves off the pre-existing fanbases for CSGO and other TacFPS and you can see that where it worked it was because of a strong presence of a pre-existing fanbase of the genre that decided to switch (Germany, Spain, France, Turkey, even Portugal to a certain extent) but in places where this fanbase was small or unwilling to switch (Northern Europe, Italy) this process would have required way more time than just 2 years, i dont know if its because they are Riot or if they expect healthy communities to build that quickly, but the time we had was clearly not enough and they decied to destroy it when we were starting to make our first steps to a good ecosystem (The BTL and Tormenta were our first attempts to build a tier 3 scene with the end goal of going to RInascimento, now this possibility doesnt exist anymore).
It is very frustrating as an Italian cause despite the many obstacles we have in our country (very high costs to organize live events, cultural disposition adverse to PC gaming and more towards consoles, lack of serious estabilished Orgs) we were still starting to see some real progress and now its gone.
I really hope DACH succeeds and shows just how important T3 and making a good pipeline for regional talent is to make a good and healthy esports scene but I think Riot isnt very interested in this and probably wants to keep T2 around only for the big teams to pick up young players.

I'd love to have a discussion about this with someone that follows the Spanish VCL closely, cause I cant really see how this can be good for the health of the italian scene as a whole, I only see DSYRE as the beneficiaries of this merge cause they will be able to improve against good competition but the rest of the Italian is probably going to be left behind with no means to develop our talents with most likely only 1 team looking to recruit italian players

The problem is that unlike Portugal, we do not have a big scene inside our country, PC gaming isnt super popular in Italy adn we really needed initiatives like the VCL to kickstart our FPS scene, cause unlike SPain and Portugal, who already had a solid playerbase even in Counter-Strike Italy starts basically from zero, having the one token Italian organization is better than nothing but this wont help the Italian scene at all in growing and becoming solid enough for young players to thrive and become as good as players from other countries with estabilished scenes, the only way is if we get a truly earth shattering talent down here, but I highly doubt we will have ever a scene as healthy and filled with players that can play for a living like in Turkey, France and even Spain, its frustrating to see a lot of right moves made by riot in helping us being unmade in the blink of an eye

Even if it was T3, even if we fucking sucked, it was atleast an endgoal for italian players, an objective to grind towards, a place to showcase our players, now its all gone and trust me that DSYRE wont bat an eye when it comes to making non-italian signings when the results dont come in from our players

with the announcement of the merge between VCL Spain, Portugal and Italy I think its official that Italian Valorant might very well be dead in the next couple of years, I was so excited to see a league for italian players to develop in and finally start a healthy comp scene in our nation, which wer lack for almost any major game save for Rocket League, but then Riot decided to kill Rinascimento completely and throw us into a very competitive league.
We had some good players that showed promise in the european field like Cayden, Tag, Bipo and HEartbeat, upcoming young talents like Sword and Alann, but why would a team ever invest into developing these players when Spain offers players that are already at a good level and dont need time to settle in? Why would a team invest in developing talents from a nation that now has minimal support and no way to showcase the upcomers? Portugal will be fine cause they have already shown their ability to produce good players like Tomaszy and ADDICTED other than already being a known presence in TacFPS like CS and with a strong org in SAW that is willing to invest in portoguese talent, we dont have that in Italy and it'll be a short time before the one italian org that gets in decides to throw away their old toys and recruit superior Iberian players rather than develop our scene.
TLDR: Its over for Italy