Many of these agents people don't even play right. So they are likely going to dumb them down to the level to which people play at.

When did all the unsigned valorant pros end up with "pick me" vibes? Just seems like everyone is begging for a roster spot on twitter or retiring. What happen to merit?

Valorant matchmaking is like going to a recreational basketball league with 20 good players, 20 average players and 20 bad players. Instead of getting the 20 good players and having them play each other, the recreational league has decided it would be better for the teams to be 1 from each group and then random 2 people from the street.

most pro players are/have been duelist in their career and some just got to play it longer than others.

I love how complex and enigmatic the IGL role has become.

There’s a massive game of telephone happening between the older generation of gamers and the new one. Unfortunately, this new generation has been taken advantage of by opportunists who’ve grifted their way into leadership roles.

We’ve moved away from finding real answers to problems, instead opting for quick fixes. The reason the IGL role seems so complicated is because we expect them to solve issues in real-time, without proper preparation. You can’t find a comparable example in other areas of life. Imagine a group of police officers suddenly deciding they’re a SWAT team and charging into a building with zero training. The entire concept of a SWAT team is built on specialized training and coordination.

So what does this have to do with VALORANT and IGLs? People are cutting corners by eliminating the crucial element of practice, hoping to find some kind of savior figure instead. And when that player-leader inevitably struggles, it’s not due to a lack of tactics—it’s because we put all our faith in someone we expected to be the solution to all our problems.

It’s sickening to see how many players and coaches deflect blame onto individuals instead of owning up to structural failures. Stop hiring your friends. Start hiring people who understand the fundamentals of the game and how to teach them. CEOs of these gaming organizations need to stop being complacent and educate themselves so they don’t let frauds into leadership positions. Right now, the fox is in the henhouse, and the farmer is asleep at the wheel.

It was more than that. If you go back to their most recent games, especially on haven, where they have their highest win percentage. Derke is constantly over-peeking. And so many times they play back from 4v5 to win the round. I didn't count because I thought it would be rude but it's like double digits.

The collateral damage of Hiro was crazy to me. The amount of times he was able to help FNC bring it back from a 4v5... I was stunned.

You can't really describe it as "winners/losers" queue because that's not the purpose. Winners and Losers queue would be if the desired outcome was to get you wins. That doesn't mean anything to a publisher of the game. They've given you a free game and they need you to stick around and play it.

Instead, using your match history, frequency of play and other data points, how likely will you continue to play regardless of the outcome of the game.

This paper came out in 2017. The lead developer at xDefiant says most of the industry uses some form of eomm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy9Ytq_cG4

It's actually the opposite of cool stuff unfortunately.

Excerpt:

"In this paper, we propose an Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (EOMM) framework that maximizes overall player engagement. We prove that equal-skill based matchmaking is a special case of EOMM on a highly simplified assumption that rarely holds in reality. Our simulation on real data from a popular game made by Electronic Arts,Inc. (EA) supports our theoretical results, showing significant improvement in enhancing player engagement compared to existing matchmaking methods."

Translation:
In free to play games, we need to find a way to keep players coming back because it seems like sbmm doesn't do that. Instead we match people who likely will play games together and the results of those games will keep them coming back.

https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~yzsun/papers/WWW17Chen_EOMM

So a person who doesn't know how to play the game, relies on a person who pretends to be an expert, uses his expertise to identify a problem on the team, mysteriously finds the answer to all their questions of why they are doing bad and then kicks that back up to the person who has no idea how to play and that person takes it as gospel.

Esports is a dystopian landscape.

FNS was a top 2 player?

I think a top 2 player could achieve above a 1.00 rating... right?

https://www.vlr.gg/player/817/finesse/?timespan=all

Thank you for swooping in and proving my point :) Tag team.

How many soloQ Radiant players are there?

You can ride the success of your past achievements very far in esports. Even if you were not a part of the reason they won. No one will ever look at your stats and newer consumers of esports will just take what someone else says for canon.

So if you wanna stay in your bubble of narratives, I'm all for it. Don't ever go to liquipedia and actually look. All your heroes will become human.

It's literally ucla.edu?

I had a crazy friend tell me about this the other day. Claimed that Valorant wasn't actually sbmm and then sent me this white paper from UCLA to tell me it wasn't bs.

https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~yzsun/papers/WWW17Chen_EOMM

Thoughts?

SEN has one fundamental flaw on Lotus:

Not playing defense properly.

Not playing together on defense should be one of the most obvious things to SEN because they do the exact opposite on attack. On attack, they are always grouped up. But on defense, at any given time, every person on their team is held up in a solo angle or lost in a solo transfer to whichever fake Loud is throwing. It's frustrating as a fan because on attack, they have nothing but setups and executes. Unfortunately the coaching staff seem to think every defensive setup is some offensive setup in disguise. Just look at our first deaths on defense. ON DEFENSE! It's pushing in the first 5 seconds or a poorly planned retake where one hand isn't talking to the other and they scale weird with usually no utility.

To get an idea on how SEN plays retake, look no farther than the first round. The worst part is you can tell they practiced this. With zero information from waterfall or mound. With no info gathering agent... they just run out and die to a 3 stack.

SEN Coaching staff... come here for a second... get closer. closer.... LEARN WHAT COMPARTMENTALIZING IS. These maps are LITERALLY BOXES INSIDE BOXES. Get out your wittle crayon... pull up a map of a spike site... you see the walls... draw extensions of the walls out... now instead telling your players to just run out... take your itty bitty pencil and shade the boxes closest to the entrances of the site... now tell your players... use your utility to shade the boxes.

Oh and while we are giving out advice, stop thinking your players are going to win duels on ecos. Use your recycled abilities to create traps or have an actual support player/s support. That weird execute you did on B where you used an omen flash and TenZ botched the direction of it so everyone just side stepped it. Understand a "trap" allows players to get close. That's the whole idea. You are luring them in. It's not... OMG THERES ONE THEREEEE!!!!! USE IT USE IT OMG WERE ALL GONNA DIE.

-sen fan tired of watching his team be bad.

I get sad that Valorant ended up being a franchised situation. Economics cool... spirit of competition...dead.

But what if instead of hiring contractor players that we stay with over years, we bring back from the dead 128 team tournaments... well sort of, 100... why 100?

100 THIEVES... just imagine, we lived in a time where in order to make the starting roster, you had to be the best team out of 100 teams. We would solve so many issues with coaching, strats, player salaries, t2...

Everything within the seasonal time period could be the same situation money wise but at the end of the season, they 10-99 their way back through 100 teams to get back to the starting spot. I'm sure it's against the rules but I'm sort of tired of the same cycle we go through in this win/loss thing we do. This would just guarantee that you have a squad that is tested with strats that are proven to work on other teams.

Theoretically it could be the very team we have constantly at the top. But imagine the content, drama and new talent that would rise.

To beat LEV:
Do you have a star player? Yes -> Are they better than Aspas? Yes-> win.
Do you have a star player? Yes -> Are they better than Aspas? No -> Can you form a comp to stop Aspas (see LOUD)? Yes-> win.

Demon1 can't blast pack.

One of the common misconceptions about duelist is that if you can play one, you can play all. The issue with duelist, Raze in particular, is that each one brings a different style. Raze's style of duelist is aim minimalistic. She has a boom bot, a grenade, a blast pack and an ultimate that requires minimal aim. This is in contrast to an aim-centric agent where the abilities directly tie in to the player's ability to aim (Jett knives etc... oh and the highest aim ceiling ultimate, deadlock ult) While we often see high-caliber players pop off on this agent. I think this causes some confusion among the community that it's some how attributed to the agent and not the player.

So why is Demon1 bad at Raze? He tries to play Raze as an aim-centric duelist. If you go back to the last time NRG played Sunset (vs LOUD). Every single blast pack was in the clear and never challenged. This allowed him to push up and basically ignore the fact he was on Raze. He did use blast pack at times to escape but the double blast pack sort of flying through the air, a cornerstone to most Raze players, is absent in his game.

If you still don't believe me, in his game vs LEV (sunset), this was his blast pack usage:

r1 - aggro blast pack
r2 - no blast pack use
r3 - blast pack into b, challenged, dies
r4 - blast pack into b, challenged, dies
r5 - no blast pack use
r6 -blast pack to clear no opp, blast pack ult no opp
r7 - escape / push, no opp
r8 - double blast pack, challenged, dies
r9 - blast pack in b, challenged, dies
r10 - no blast pack use
r11 - no blast pack use
r12 - no blast pack use
r13 - no blast pack use
r14 - no blast pack use
r15 - no blast pack use
r16 - no blast pack use
r17 - no blast pack use

Unfortunately NRG's coaching staff doesn't know their players.

Retirement memes please.

I think in order to beat LEV you need a superstar and a team that feeds the super star. SEN doesn't really have that on this team despite the TenZ fandom. The talent/skill I feel is more equally spread on SEN among a couple of people.

Basically it's Greek nation states fighting where you send out your best fighters. Aspas seems to crumble in these situations vs other nation state's best fighters. But if you don't have a best fighter and you just have a spectacular army, Aspas will tear you to shreds.

Currently you have a league coach with probably some working level of how Valorant works. Mike probably is supposed to be there to fill in the gaps. But outside of a couple of set plays, this seems to be a player-run team. What I mean by this is on-the-the-fly type calling with minimal organized plays. The problem with this method is that it is player performance dependent. Since you are giving more control to the players in loose calling than you would in tight, organize set plays and you expect them to win their duels.

One of the important parts of this system is that in order to perform better, you need your players to perform better. Traditionally, you would see players rotate out of teams and new players rotated in. This has been the esports model for decades now. For example you saw this in EG's rise with the addition of Demon1.

This isn't happening on 100T. You've got people on contract playing for the team for long periods of time. So if this is the situation, so what?

Well in a situation where you are player-performance dependent and your team is on contracts, you can't switch people. Thus the entirety of your practice has to be on player development. So yes, you got the win against G2, a struggling team, but long term it can't work out because you don't have the expertise to improve the players.

mo money mo problems

Test out whatever new algo you got going on that's not going to be good and just create us a solo q.

Thank you everyone!

If you have above a 1.2 k/d in ranked, can you drop your tracker? I'm doing a school project for stats. <3

damn that's a logic leap... why does everything look like women hating to you? Do you hate women secretly?

I feel like writing... I woke up to become the head coach of 100T.

In order to fix 100T you have to break it down and build it back up. No one is let go. Everyone is re-committed to becoming better.

This needs to start with a review of how badly things have gone. Everyone gets to vent their feelings. Feelings will be hurt. People have to be torn apart before they can be built back up. There needs to be a recognition that the current state of things is unacceptable.

We are starting from the bottom so what do you do when you're just starting out... you have a conversation. We start at the basic level and work our way up. Everyone learns tactical shooters differently. Everyone can learn from each other. There is this common idea when you're young that you are at your best now. No one really thinks about how they improve over time, or at least that is the goal. These conversations going from its a 5v5 game to the details of meta.

Oh and we are not done with the conversations. After discussing the basics, we run through the maps. Each player explains their position, their goals, how these goals are achieved through team work. IGL explains how people will move around the map, what the rotations are, what will trigger rotations etc... Each player is given the ability to question everything here. They will lose this ability once this phase is done.

We then break the team into divisions. 2 groups of 2 and a lonely igl. Using the current meta comps for each map, we discuss how the agents contribute to their positions and their goals. For defense, the groups are organized so the groups are closest together. Promoting reliance on each other. Using a two group system, it is easier to understand rotations and defensive assignments as they are regulated to two people instead of one. For attack, groups are expected to come up with their own executes within the 2 person groups based on obstacles and abilities. IGL has the ability to stack groups based on challenges. Each group is responsible for the most common obstacles a team would encounter on each site and have an execute that uses the each groups strengths to overcome. This lessens the responsibilities of the IGL and is given options by the advance planning of the groups. IGL would be able to find interesting ways to group these plays together or utilize effective fakes by unleashing a group and leaning with the other group.

Lastly, we're deep diving economy and gun metas. Running through a similar exercise with the group that we did with the basics, we want to hear everyone's approach and then agree upon a unified approach. The deep dive through gun meta is to finally acknowledge what "situational" actually means. Riot gives us the information and we are going to start using it. Pairing distances with angles and buying appropriately based on advanced planning.

That is probably 2 weeks of work.

Now that we have all agreed upon the basics of the game, it's now time to talk about day-to-day and performance.

I think at this point aimlabs is pretty much widely accepted. We're putting everyone on an aggressive daily assignments. We're focusing on things that SPECIFIC to Valorant.

I'm sorry but we are running drills. Dry Practice vs. Scrimming will be 2:1. We will have the most beautiful executes you have ever seen in Valorant. We will get that through painful repetitive dry running.

In scrims, we simply are focusing on things we want to focus on. While staying somewhat competitive, we will purposefully create situations and mindless playing will not be allowed.

Opponent reviews - Focusing strictly on economic patterns and triggers that cause rotations. In trigger reviews, noting timings. This information will be used and tested on previous games by reviewing them blind and trying to use our predictions. Review findings, reiterate and if unhelpful focus more on our plan.

Performance days, have fun days. We've done everything we can up until this point. Hopefully the practice sticks.

Timeouts - multiple round losses due to player error. Use opponents timeouts to discuss team's strengths and what's been working. Use to reinforce and look for possible counters.

That's the framework.

Player specific moves:
Cryocells to initiator (can flex to op duelist if meta demands)
Asuna back to rifle friendly duelists (not Raze)
Boostio to sentinel
Bang flex to duelist for Raze

There ya go vlr... content

He was also playing league on the side.

Ranked does matter. Ranked is the closest thing you have outside of practice where people take the game somewhat serious. How else would a person get good at an agent? There's not enough scrim time in the world to get above-average on any agent.

Also you can't hold a support player to the same lens as a duelist. They're often not put in the same positions and don't have the same aggressive utility to back it up.

In regards to his control ranked play, he's a professional player. The coach is his boss. It's not a matter of control but a matter of training to get the job done. If you didn't control his ranked play as you put it, how would he improve? I'm not sure if you're in the corporate world or not but they have something called a "PIP" or Performance Improvement Plan. You usually get this right before your fired. Within that PIP you are given specifics about how to improve. It's a really great tool because when you let someone go you point at the specifics in the plan that they didn't achieve.

They should sit down with Asuna and do something similar. Except they can't... why? It's two assistant coaches, neither with playing experience, trying to organize a championship team... Maybe you're right though... maybe they can just rng a championship team through finding other players. It worked during Zikz coaching dominance era when they found demon1.

Yes but the coaching staff should look at his tracker every once in a while... because it's very obvious he doesn't understand Raze. This happened earlier in Asuna's career when OP'ing on duelists was popular. Asuna consistently did bad with the OP because he was a rifle duelist. The coaching staff at that time didn't see that either.

https://tracker.gg/valorant/profile/riot/100T%20Asuna%231111/matches?playlist=competitive&seasonId=ec876e6c-43e8-fa63-ffc1-2e8d4db25525

Of the 375 hours of play on his "main" account, you can literally see an issue just by looking at the page. His hs% is waaaay below the average across other agents. It's 19% vs mid 20% on all other agents. Why is this?

Asuna is a person who shoots first and then corrects. You are asking him to go waaay outside his comfort zone with Raze and double satchel anywhere and his timing is going to be messed up.

And where I'll give this thread credit is that he doesn't seem to be putting in massive amounts of work on Raze. He's just picking whatever he wants. How do you get reps on an agent if you're not grinding him? Why aren't the coaching staff forcing him to grind agents he's most likely going to play? To hide strats? At 1-9? No one is looking at 100T to counter-strat... it's just very clearly the coaching staff and very clearly management who doesn't want to do what is necessary.

1-9 in the last 10 matches... how come we aren't asking for Zikz and MikeHD to step down? Why are we focusing on a player who is only doing what the coaches tell him to do?

Zikz was an assistant coach on a team that won champions. Do we just ignore the fact that they did absolutely abysmal until Demon1 showed up? That they only got a chance at the run because specific teams lost? How is that successful coaching?

I honestly feel the management at 100Thieves do not care at all. If you were in management and actually cared, you would look at that situation and understand the 1 in a 1,000,000 shot they took advantage of but you're not looking at the legwork before? Are you really that oblivious? You are legitimately picking at random in hopes of rng'ing a championship team.

Be kind to yourself when you need to miss days.

If you have to start all over and lose your progress, just remember it's a marathon not a sprint.

If you don't get the results you want, do research and find a plan that fits for you.

W for Curry ... just going to give him more eyes on his twitch over time. Hopefully he gets some playing time and some content out of Tarik.

You're not American, please don't adopt our style of thinking. There is no script. There are no conspiracies.