Immortal brotherhood - An unlikely success story

Looking at esports history, there are some elements to teams that prove to be single points of failure: younger and therefore less experienced players, language barriers, overworked teams, long-standing rosters at the mercy of meta changes. Any one of these issues could eventually mark the downfall of any once-talented and successful roster.

If the patterns are anything to go by, Immortals shouldn’t be working: Their 17-year-old support player is the shot caller despite no previous esports experience. On top of that, he and two other members of the team need to finish high school still. Their Mexican main tank is not a native English speaker. Their coach is a former teammate, which often leads to issues with authority in other teams. Six of them have been together for nearly seven months and therefore have constantly been exposed to meta changes which so often break teams apart. Rosters with one or two of these special circumstances tend to implode in seldom less than glorious internet drama.

And yet here they are, the longest standing top flight competitive team, winners of the Winter Premiere and Carbon Series, with no finishes outside the top 4 in the last six months. It all just doesn’t add up - until you learn about them. They are the immortal brotherhood.

Not mere colleagues but brothers

The age gap in Immortals seems huge. Aythen, the flex support player for the team, sits flush in the middle at 21. The tank line is made up of the old guard, with main tank Nomy at 26 and flex player Hyped at 27. The former is a Mexican national who also represented his country at last year's World Cup, therefore not a native English speaker. As he joins us for the interview however, there seems to be no language barrier. He has a slight charming accent and is not only perfectly fluent but even eloquent in his answers, with the odd grammatical mishap here and there. Nomy lets us know that this is something he has worked hard on, as he wants to contribute to the information flow in their in-game communication. It definitely shows.

The other player in the call is 17-year-old Verbo, who joined the team shortly before Christmas. He too is incredibly well-spoken, especially for someone his age. They explain that they are sitting next to each other while doing the interview as they are currently boot camping at the Immortals League of Legends team house. Despite the age difference, they have found common ground. Nomy says that he has a sister the same age as Verbo and it was therefore easy for him to build a relationship. According to Nomy, this special bond extends to 17-year-olds Grimreality & Agilities too.

"I see them as my little brothers. It’s not hard for me to talk to them or make them laugh."

The rapport between the two is apparent, they are having fun while still remaining professional at all times. Verbo seems to agree with Nomy, stating that "even when we were talking over voice comms, Nomy would always crack up jokes to make the environment more comfortable and he would always make me laugh. [...] Seeing his facial expressions makes it ten times more funny." When asked how this relationship translates to their in-game roles, Verbo states that he feels respected in his shot calling and that no issues have arisen as a result of the age difference.

Organisational back-up

Rounding out the family metaphor is 22-year-old IMT CEO Noah Whinston. Whinston says he sees himself as more of a parent than a boss as he tries to create to create healthy team environments for all his players. To achieve this, the organisation is working on what they call “the complex setup”. The idea is to bring all Immortals teams from several different games to one place, in which they can work and have access to “coaching and developmental resources” such as sports psychologists and performance coaches. Furthermore, working and living spaces will be divided as the team house culture of doing it all in the same place is on the way out.

This arrives at the perfect time for the OW roster, especially with the upcoming OWL in mind. While the older players can reasonably be expected to think about building families, Agilities, Verbo & Grimreality still need to finish high school. Verbo shares with us, that the three young talents have decided to take online classes so they are able to structure their day in accordance with their professional gaming lifestyle. It would indeed seem strange to house all of them under one tiny roof when their positions in life are so different. Even as a big brother, you wouldn’t want to live in the same house with your siblings in your late twenties.



This is all to say that if we want to understand how the Immortals phenomenon works on the inside and can keep working in the future, we would make a grave mistake in excluding the staff and management from the equation. The personalities on the Overwatch team seem perfectly in tune with the organisational vibe of Immortals. All players seem intrinsically driven to succeed as the organisation does their best to make it a sustainable endeavor.



(Image courtesy of Immortals, left to right: Agilities, Chance, Verbo, Grimreality, Aythen. Nomy missed the event because of visa issues and their coach Chance stepped in)

Know your limits

After both their victory at the Winter Premier as well as the Carbon Series, Immortals decided to take a two-week break to recuperate. "Burnout is a very real thing. If you are constantly grinding and giving your 100% with no breaks in between, it kind of gets too much" argues Verbo and he is hardly alone with this opinion. EnVyUs stated that their team felt deflated during OGN’s Apex Season 2 after months of staying in Korean hotel rooms. Also RunAway’s team captain Runner let through that he often felt helplessly overworked between scrim sessions, vod review and being a father and a husband. Both the Carbon Series and Winter Premier, much like Apex, were month long, almost league type tournaments that take a lot out of a team.

Once again, the management of Immortals were on top of that says Verbo: "Immortals came to us and said “Hey, we’ve seen you guys working really hard. Do you guys want some sort of break?”" In a scene that frankly doesn’t generate nearly enough money to even sustain the rosters living expenses and salaries, the organisation had approached the team about taking a two-week break.

Naturally in the bizarro world of highly competitive esports athletes, when your employer gives you free paid holidays, you just sit down and work harder. Verbo justifies this mindset by the constantly on-going arms race for the top rankings. "You know that your opponent is playing while you are not and you know that they are getting ahead of you", he tells us, not unlike the soldier that rises up an hour before sunrise to have a perceived advantage over his enemy in the trenches. He clarifies that breaks for him are usually times in which players get to stream and work on their solo play, while we wonder if he’s just allowed to change the meaning of the word “break” like that.

His team did however make one judgement call in the case of their invite to Apex Season 3. They declined the invitation for the North American spot they got on the back of their LAN tournament win at the Winter Premier. "Going over there is a whole new different ball game on the types we are going to play, but also the type of lifestyle we are going to have. "Nomy suggests. He argues that the decision had to be made before they had ever boot camped together and the team was unsure how it would all pan out because of that. Now that they had extensive experience of practicing together in one spot, he assures us that everyone is feeling “much more confident in the team and being able to travel”, a quality that might be required of them depending on the still unknown format of the Overwatch League.

Meta adaptations

It truly reveals the beauty of esports, when we get to understand that a player's or team's playstyle is heavily informed by the kind of entity they are. Like only an acorn knows how to grow an oak, only a team and an organisation with a culture like Immortals has so far been able to build and maintain a team in Overwatch with basically no roster changes. The last one was moving Chance to the coach position and recruiting Verbo late last year, again a move so unlike the common practice of the scene where former players like Kyky and Internethulk have to leave their respective teams in order to pursue a coaching career. Meta changes have rendered many-a-team incompatible and inevitably force other organisations to recruit more fitting talent to the current state of the game. Most recently Fnatic, EnVyUs & Misfits all got rid of their Lucio players after the hero was changed to a be more mechanically demanding while historically having been the typical hero the shot caller of every team would play.

The way Immortals dealt with this once again exemplifies their approach as Nomy explains it: "I’m pretty sure the team understands how strong Lucio is right now and how much value you can get from the mechanical part of it. So we are trying to let Verbo explore that side and see if he’s comfortable playing the game. So if he’s not gonna shot call as much, then me as a Reinhardt for example… I could just try to help him ease those ends or give out the enemy’s positioning etc. just so we can work together." Instead of exchanging the seemingly broken parts, Immortals vows to mend and repair.

After this peek behind the immortal curtain, it comes to the surprise of no one, that when we asked if they were confident that they as a team as well as as an organisation could enter the Overwatch league together, Verbo confidently answered:

“

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QUICKPOLL Can Immortals take the next step and become the best North American team? You can't keep winning without eventually switching players.

Thank you for voting! Their trajectory is up and up. Eventually they will be rewarded for their hard work.

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Yeah, we definitely can. Hundred percent. We definitely look forward to join the Overwatch league together as a unit, or I guess you can call it a brotherhood.This piece was a collaborative effort of @Yotobari288 and @Yiskaout. For more Overwatch coverage follow @GosuOverwatch