Wins and Losses

Wya entered the competitive Overwatch scene in August 2017. Since then, two years and three months had gone by before he made his way to Guangzhou Charge, one of the twenty teams in the prestigious Overwatch League. Wya spent two years playing for the Chinese Contenders team The One Winner, and its predecessor, MT1. And he is not unfamiliar with victories and defeats.

Already a strong team back in its MT1 days, T1W gained a ton of attention since its founding in 2018. In September of the same year, T1W won their first ever championship, the LanStory Cup. Nonetheless, the upcoming NeXT series was a lot more important to them, as they would be playing against Korean teams.

“Our coach, Jumpcat, cares a lot about cross-nation matches, and so do we,” said Wya. For two seasons in a row, T1W played Lucky Future Zenith, an all-Korean team, in the semi-finals of Contenders China 2018. Twice they pushed their opponent to the limit, and twice they failed to finish the job. To them, every match against LFZ was a cross-nation match. And only a cross-nation win can make up for a cross-nation loss.

The NeXT Summer series gave Wya and his teammates a chance to revenge, when T1W was at the peak of its popularity. But they failed once again in the grand-final, where they played RunAway, the Korean Contenders Season 2 Champion.

That game became the biggest regret for Wya. “KK (Krystal) was still with us at that time, but I played poorly and we got 0–4’d. After the game, KK left the team. I wanted to win so badly but I wasn’t good enough. I was willing but incapable.” Wya reflected on some of his losses in the past, “All Chinese teams have pretty much the same playstyle, so when we run into something unfamiliar, we panic and underperform.”

“It’s true that we don’t perform well against foreign teams.” He said bitterly.

Nonetheless, T1W continued their dominant performance as they stomped Contenders China Season 3, dropping only one map over the entire season, after the original members of LFZ had gone off to the Overwatch League. However, nobody was satisfied with a Contenders championship and another LanStory Cup championship. Their stellar records in domestic tournaments pale in comparison to the string of defeats against foreign teams, and the community mockingly called them “gods of domestic battles”. For a while, their social media coordinator even put this nickname into the team’s official weibo bio.

“We didn’t really celebrate.” Even though the Contenders Championship was T1W’s biggest achievement to date, Wya’s memory of it had already faded. “The upcoming NeXT series was much more important.”

But they didn’t get to face off Korean teams in the Winter series of NeXT 2018. To T1W, this only meant another missed opportunity for atonement. In 2019, T1W slipped into a series of ups and downs, and Wya never got to touch another championship trophy.