New teams always seem to produce hype. Whether it’s a rag-doll tag team taken with the majority of it’s players taken from the hole that is Ghost Gaming, or if it’s a super team, like FaZe, newly formed rosters and teams won’t ever stop people from being overly excited for a team, which, well, doesn’t always perform up to expectations.
As prestigious as an organization Complexity is, sadly not exempt it from this rule. Recently gathering a five man “Juggernaut” roster, Complexity has garnered a lot of new fans attention and hype. And they should. On paper, it’s a promising roster. With stacked talent in it, it should beat lower tier teams and hang with the top teams. It should do damage. It should win some events.
Time has shown that should doesn’t mean will.
What I’ve found is that there is a bit of a hype curve in terms of good teams. It begins slow, then more and more people are announced and people start to get excited. This excitement reaches a maximum when the team plays a small tournament and does damage, and people start taking them seriously.
My point is that first events don’t mean anything. Maybe they’ve been proving that they can do damage against top teams, but taken into account, the fact that a new team’s play style and strategies are relatively unknown really tip the balance in their favor and make it seem like that team can hang with the great, that the team is going to be good.
A clear example of this is the mousesports lineup, announced at the beginning of 2018. On paper, it looked like a great lineup. The young talent of Robin “ropz” Kool, Ozgur “woxic” Eker, and David “frozen” Cernansky under the great leadership of respected in game leader Finn “karrigan” Andersen seemed to be a lineup that would do damage.
And for the first few events and matches, it certainly looked that way. Mouz destroyed Fnatic in ECS in there first match. They won Dreamhack Open Tours against teams like Optic and Valiance. They hanged with Na’Vi, and kept it close aganist Astralis and Team Liquid
But as we know, the mousesports roster took a year to find success. After weeks and weeks of still finding no success against teams like Liquid and Astralis as well as dropping maps against lower tier teams like NoChance(now Godsent), Tricked, and VP, mouz were written off as a disappointment. They showed promise but ultimately failed to deliver when it mattered most.
Recently however, Mouz has started to prove everyone wrong. After winning CAC 2019 Shanghai, the skill and talent of mouz as well as the hard work has started to pay off, and we can see this through their results: The Mousesports core has now won 3 prestigious events (one is debatable) and is ranked second in the HLTV world ranking, losing only to Astralis. Their darkest time period might’ve been extended to a point where most people would be uncomfortable, but ultimately mouz has shown that the hype was right, and they still have so much more to prove.
Let Mousesports be a reminder, a story of perseverance under adversity. Let them be a model, an example of a successful team and a team like the Timothy “autimatic” Ta led Cloud9 in 2019 be a warning.
Great teams aren’t born overnight. It takes patience, courage, and a bit of madness to persevere to the very top.
So that is what the OGs of the world, the Complexitys, and the TSMs 👀 of the world have to ask themselves.
Are you willing to adapt?
Or are you prepared to lose?
