Nothing to EnVy - A look at the French team's decline

As is often the case when a team is struggling, the French team has undergone a roster shuffle in an attempt to polish out the problems they believe originated with their teammate Fabien "kioShiMa" Fiey. After a heart-breaking loss to NRG at the CPL Finals prior to the major, they have also dropped out of the MLG Columbus group stage following two losses against significantly lower ranked teams. With the addition of Timothée "DEVIL" Démolon, they aimed to get rid of these problems, but so far the results suggest their decision was not the quick fix they had hoped for. DEVIL has been on the lower end of the score board, with only a few matches in which he was able to match his teammates. In some ways this is understandable considering the relatively small number of matches he has played with the team so far, as well as him being asked to adopt the positions and roles of kioShiMa, which sometimes didn't seem to suit him that much.

But far more important than the question whether DEVIL will improve the team in any way is the question of whether kioShiMa was even the cause of their underperforming, or if he was just a symptom of a much bigger issue.



kioShiMa was not the problem

Now, it goes without saying that his rating in recent times has been quite lacklustre and he has not delivered on many occasions, but his teammates have hardly done any better, and losing to the likes of E-Frag is something that cannot be attributed to just one player. If the Ninjas in Pyjamas were able to take out FlipSid3 and mousesports with their coach as a stand-in, then a former major title winner should be able to see off teams from tier 2 with ease, even with one player underperforming, but they haven’t and on multiple occasions it was not even kioShiMa dropping the ball. There is something deeply wrong within this team, which will be discussed later, and it is surely not just down to kioShiMa having a bad time. This leads us to the conclusion that even if DEVIL were able to play as well or even better than kioShiMa it would probably still not make things right, doing nothing more than putting them on the level they had achieved before the roster change.

DEVIL is not the solution

So far EnVyUs have been using him as a stand-in rather than an actual team member, with DEVIL playing roughly the same positions as kio, often to no avail. Only time will tell whether EnVyUs will be able to give him the freedom to develop his own mentality on the maps and how much the other players will be giving him the opportunities do so by rearranging themselves as well. Regardless of this, and as mentioned before this will likely not resolve their issues in any way, because they are symptoms of a much larger problem.

There has been a change of meta in this game for quite some time now, with teams like Natus Vincere and Luminosity leading the charge, and EnVyUs and FaZe particularly have fallen prey to this evolution. To understand this, you need to know that EnVyUs have long been a team that was centred on individuals and fast execution rather than slow-paced, considered tactics. There was a time in which they were able to just pile onto a bomb site on an eco-round and take their enemies out with ease, and that puggy style enabled them to succeed over Na’Vi at the last major of 2015.

FaZe is another great example for this. For quite some time there has virtually been no leadership structure in this international mix-team and their performance was just about hero plays. This was not wrong or bad, by no means, because the team has boasted incredible individuals that were able to deliver in that endeavour, so much that they went on to take out Virtus.Pro and almost EnVyUs at Cluj-Napoca. But alongside the French they have virtually vanished from the tier-1 scene.

This all goes to show that there has been a profound development in the way that this game is being played at the highest level. Happy had even given an interview in which he stated that he had destroyed the strategy-heavy meta-game, but ironically this has opened a window of opportunity for teams such as Luminosity to set themselves on top with thought, intelligence and good planning. There are many ways to counter a bomb-site rush, and once the mentality of EnVyUs was figured out they were in dire straits. It is far easier to counter individual skill than to anti-strat complex tactics, and judging from today’s perspective it is fair to say that the individual talent on the French line-up has masked the fact that they have developed into a slightly one-dimensional team. This change in CS:GO has been going on in the background for quite some time now, but there was one event and one match in particular in which a profound evolution occurred in the way that Counter-Strike is being played, that showed that the time of those individualistic teams is coming to an end.

DreamHack Winter 2015, Group B, Lower Bracket, Loser’s Match

EnVyUs were going on against Luminosity. They had just lost against NiP who performed far above expectations, and were now facing the team that had lost 16-0 to fnatic the day before. They started off on Mirage and were ready to set themselves up in the pistol round, but LG expected them, and after Fernando "fer" Alvarenga got Vincent "Happy" Schopenhauer in mid, the Brazilians knew to anticipate a rush onto A Site. This pretty much set the tone for the match and despite nV being able to succeed in some rounds, it was Luminosity who had complete control of the contest, totally reading every move the Frenchmen made. On the second map, EnVy were able to come through quite convincingly, but yet again Luminosity were answered back with something that the French were not able to counter, with their coach, Wilton "zews" Prado standing behind his team with paper notes at all times.

On Inferno, EnVy’s home soil, they were beaten down 16-11 by a team that had done their homework. It was telling that throughout this last map in particular, LG were able to keep their opposition guessing as to where aggression would come from. They knew the positioning on the French side, and executed strategies based off of that, giving them the upper hand in terms of controlling their enemies. They could simply render the B players useless by throwing well-placed grenades, since they knew where they would be playing. EnVyUs have for a long time been a great team on Inferno due to the fact that they were able to execute their individual hero plays on demand (like Happy with his infamous Deagle Ace on B site) but against LG they were completely shut down from first to last.

On this day, on this map, history was made in the sense that the puggy-style, strat-light meta-game had given in to the tactics based gameplay that ultimately won the major for Luminosity. It has become fairly obvious that EnVyUs will not be able to compete with the likes of LG anymore, if they continue down this path, but that still does not explain how EnVy have managed to lose against CLG, Gambit, E-Frag and NRG. This is one hell of a question, and not for an outsider to answer, but luckily kio provided us all with insider information as he left the starting roster.

The mental aftermath of loss

EnVyUs have fallen a long way since their major win. There was little success to be found outside of smaller events that featured weaker opponents and this deterioration was never more obvious than at MLG Columbus. After CLG had beaten them down to the lower bracket in their groups EnVyUs had to go up against Gambit, a CIS team which had virtually no experience against tier-1 competition. Gambit weren't close to the top 20, but the French lost anyway, despite their opponents having emerged just recently not really featuring a strategy-heavy game plan. In an straight matchup, the raw talent on the French side should have been sufficient to surpass both CLG and Gambit. Well, we know what happened instead.

So what has gone wrong? Is it their mentality? When kioShiMa left the starting line-up, he issued a statement in which he said he felt disrespect from the others. The communication had become an issue. “We basically lost our soul.”, he said. As simple as that. The atmosphere gets uncomfortable, players start to blame each other and basically you develop a toxic atmosphere.

To get back to the initial point of this article, a roster change won’t compensate for that. There is a profound need for change within the players and culture of the team. They need to get onto an offline server, go over the maps and start developing strategies again, as a unit. Because this is what made Luminosity great, and has ultimately brought them to the point they are at right now.

Even if they begin with just setting up pop-flashes for their teammates again, or going together for re-fragging, it will mean progress. This sounds so ridiculously basic, but it has been missing for them on so many occasions.

You won’t win a major if you don’t work as a team. You just won’t.

Pictures courtesy of: DreamHack Flickr (Benjamin Cotton/Sebastian Ekman) (1)(2)(3)(4), team-ldlc.com