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When I first got back into Counter-Strike a few years ago, French teams were among the best in the world. This came as a bit of a surprise to someone who had skipped Source entirely.
I was used to France having one decent team at a time, and occasionally winning an event like WCG, but not much else. The fact that a French player had been considered the best in the world by people whose opinions matter was strange to me.
Pre-AWP nerf, Kenny S was absolutely up there, and he was surrounded by teammates to match. And, let’s be fair to the guy, on his day he’s still one of the greats. The trouble is that those days are rarer and rarer, and his teammates don’t pick up enough of the slack to maintain their prior success.
For a while it looked like G2 might be the next great French team. I wrote a couple of articles for a different website this time last year in praise of the G2 organisation and its then-successful CS team. Since then, though, the team has been in disarray. Since the turn of the year, G2’s HLTV ranking has fallen off a cliff, bottoming out at 25th in February, only recovering to 20th as I write this. They do look to be set for a good run at ESL One Cologne, however.
Envy’s former players, currently under the banner of LeftOut, are 24th, by the way.
So what happened? How did France go from a country with multiple Major finals appearances and two different Major champions to a nation with only one team barely making it into the world top 20?
Part of it (the easy part) is that other teams caught up. This is simply a fact of sports in their fledgeling stages. It happens to the best teams in any competitive field, and Counter-Strike is no different. One team, or region, gets out in front of the pack early on, only for other teams to research them, learn their secrets, and figure out how to beat them.
In the very early days of CS it was the Swedes, in Starcraft and League of Legends it’s the Koreans and in football, it was the Brazilians. Things change, however: meta-games evolve and other regions catch up. Well, except in Starcraft, apparently.
To try and keep up with the shifting tide, roster swaps abounded to the point where “French Roster Shuffle” seemed to crop up as a headline on a monthly basis, but they rarely seemed to help matters. Rather than concentrating the talent into one or two so-called super teams, the constant shake-ups somehow diluted the pool instead.
(Photo by Gennadiy Gulyaev/Kommersant via Getty Images)
Envy were definitely the losers of the majority of transfer deals themselves and G2, eventually leading to what seems to have become a pretty toxic atmosphere in the team. The team’s coach left just before an ill-fated relegation match in the ESL Pro League, which is never a good sign, but it only got worse from there.
Team leader Happy was removed by the other players in the squad and RpK decided to skip the Asia Championships in order to take a break from the in-fighting.
Exactly how things got as bad as they did we might never truly know. A string of poor results never helps, of course, but such a catastrophic downturn in team spirit is unusual. Too many egos, perhaps? We can only speculate.
Regardless, it came as little surprise when the American organisation decided it was washing its hands of the entire mess. After signing the Major-winning roster of LDLC back in 2015, EnvyUs’ management must have expected better. I mentioned earlier that they got the raw end of the G2-Envy deals, but they gave the team plenty of time to turn things around – something the players just seemed incapable of doing.
Where the players end up now is anyone’s guess. It seems unlikely that they end up forming a team together in the long run, but LeftOut (Sixer, Kio, Scream, xms and Hadji) are due to compete in the EU Minor qualifier. Needs must, I guess.
The problem they face is a simple one: many of these players simply don’t have the pull they once did. Nobody is talking about Scream’s one taps any more. Kioshima isn’t solely The Problem, but he is damaged goods, as are his teammate s.
Are G2 going to want to make more changes just to bring in a big name or two? I don’t know Ocelote, but he seems smarter than that. Even if Scream was still talked about in the same breath as S1mple, he isn’t worth the risk right now, surely.
If you’ll excuse the pun, Kio and co are not in an envious position right now. LDLC may be interested in some of the talent, but do they have the same funding as EnvyUs? If egos were a problem in the previous team, pay cuts might be tough to swallow, which can lead to all sorts of problems down the line.
It seems like their dryly humorous team name might be apt for a while.
I would love to offer these guys a solution, but I’m afraid I don’t have one. The only way I can see out of this mess is if LeftOut can overcome whatever inner turmoil they struggling with and fix the personality clashes. Oh, and if they can get Scream firing on all cylinders, that’ll help a lot.
Either way, it’s no easy task, and, in my experience, it rarely works out, but it’s that or try to find teams on a solo basis and we already discussed how problematic that could be.