First interview with Ups, coach of Team Empires Valorant squad

Hello. Please introduce yourself! Hello, my name is Artyom, nickname Ups. I’m the coach for Team Empire’s Valorant team. How did you become a part of this roster and this organization? I’ve had access to Valorant since the first days of closed beta. Also I’ve had a full team at that time. That we’ve tried to succeed with. And I keep acting as a coach in Valorant esports since then. I have found pro players, mixed them all together. Then I’ve talked with Nirvana. My previous team has disbanded. There was no First Strike announcement, we couldn’t find motivation to keep playing.

00:48 - We’ve decided to make a pause, didn’t want to play together. We’ve talked with Nirvana and discussed that there are people who can support our strong pro roster. And we’ve become the part of Team Empire as Valorant roster. What are your tasks as coach at Team Empire? My previous task was to compile the whole experience of all players combined. And complete it with helping the team to achieve full understandment of how do they want to play, what are they capable of.

01:25 - How do they play as attacking side, as defensing side, how do they move on the map and so on. Also it’s the adaptation to current meta. I’m analasying what EU and CIS teams are doing, their strats and tactics And we are trying to adapt to one or another playstyle while we’re on bootcamp. I’ve also collecting the stats regarding our opponents. Trying to write down the specific moves and interesting features of our opponent’s playstyle. And I’m preparing the team for any things it’ll face during next game. Let’s discuss the bootcamp now.

02:13 - How it all started? As I know, some players met each other for the first time ever. We’ve met on the TeamTalk for the first time. Everyone except Edelweiss. And we’ve met Edelweiss on the bootcamp for the first time. The teammates had seen each other before, but no one ever lived together or played from the same room. We’ve came on 12.11 and the first official game was on 13.11. We were able to finish the preparations of bootcamp only in the end of 12th November. Preparing the gaming setups for our guys to play.

02:54 - Our player purp0 has 120 FPS back at home, here he has 240 Hz monitor and 250 FPS in-game. And he’s adapted. Also we couldn’t adapt to bootcamp’s atmosphere in time, and the first official game from bootcamp was really hard for us. We’ve tried to play until the very end. We were ready for our enemies and we knew what they would do. But we’ve lost because we had hard time with adapting to new conditions. We’ve lost the first official game. On the second day on bootcamp. Let’s analyze the few games from second CIS qualifier. The first one vs SKYLINE was really easy.

03:43 - We decided not to prepare for this opponent. Because they’ve asked our team’s captain about how to get the team together, and for some other recommendations. We’ve set our minds that it’ll be a start of our game, that we’ll be able to tune in during gaming session. And we’ll be able to get our confidence and perform really well. And so that’s what exactly happened.That game was easy. Now it’s time to talk about Team Offenders. What can you share? We’ve got a bit of stats from previous Offenders games. And we’ve found a few typical things they are doing on maps. The plan was to play our familiar game and not to invent any bicycles. Considering that our playstyle has changed. Because we obtained a new core-hero. We’ve decided to take out Jett from all our picks, because our newest player Edelweiss prefers to play agressively on different agents. We’ve shuffled things a bit.

The main task for the game vs Offenders was to play our own game at our prefered pace. To secure our confidence. And so we’ve closed the game with 2-0 score. We’ve played a bit worse on the second map, Bind. But then we’ve take the tech pause, discussed things a bit and then won it effortlessly. 2-0. Even before we won the game vs Offenders we’ve seen Viper as key agent pick of Team Guess. We knew they’ll switch the map’s geometry. And they will play by the pack. They’ll plant Spike and then leave. After that they will use Viper’s skills.

05:44 - They had really good Viper performance on Split map and so we’ve banned it. So we picked Haven, Bind and Ascent. We were a bit off when we started to play Bind. And finished 3-13. That was a strange game for us. We were ready for anything but in the end it was like we didn’t even wake up. On the second map, Ascent, we We woke up and showed what we can do. Everything was fine on the second map. Third map, Haven, there was a really close game.

06:32 - We gave them the opportunity to dominate with Viper and lost about 4 rounds because of that. Our Attack half has ended with 8-4 score. We were playing Attack confidently. As for Defence, we knew what they were doing but couldn’t do anything against them. And the last game was vs AimAttack. We’ve analyzed their previous game from the past day. We were ready to face them on Split as Defence. We finished the defensive half with solid 10-2, but then it was Attack… And ended that map with 13-11 score.

07:22 - We’ve tried to finish it quickly, making fast rounds, because our opponents had problems with holding A site, in our opinion. There were only Jett and Omen. It’s just one flash that could have stopped us. But our enemies pick the positions we were not ready for. And when the score was 10-10… Our ping has raised for 2 rounds. We were a bit tilted and couldn’t come back into fight. So we were getting ready to play the next map. We’ve played the Attack with 4-8 score on Ascent. Not a bad score for this map. We could have won more rounds to be honest. As Defence we’ve raised the score up to 12-12. In overtime rounds we’ve won this map with 14-12 score. Bind was next. We were a bit tired to play Bind, I think. Because of this emotional swing. We’ve lost the first map with throwing away rounds that we should’ve taken. On the second map we had to be the runner-ups.

08:50 - We’ve had emotional blast because we were able to come back into game, it was so good. As for the third map, it was like we’ve started it… We couldn’t brace ourselves and played Defense really bad. Second half was Attack and we were not able to finish it. And now we understand what should be changed in our Attack. We should make them a bit more variable. To rotate more throughout the map during mid-game. These maps allow rotates. As for Defense, we can now fully comprehense what enemies are able to do with their setups. And to adapt to enemy’s playstyle faster. As I’ve said before, we knew about our enemies, we had their stats and strats. But we couldn’t adapt quickly to that. That’s why we lost so many rounds. That’s why the games were so long and we got tired to play them. We couldn’t save the pacing. Are you saying that this loss was because of spirit’s failure? Or not? You could say we had morale issues.

10:21 - But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t do all that better. Shoot better, communicate better. At some point we were gravely worried by losing rounds. We knew one thing about AimAttack. That they play really fast. They rush rounds asap. But they understood that we know about their playstyle on Ascent. That we can read their moves. They’ve adapted to our gaming style on Bind. They knew we’ve been overthinking the whole strategy. Additionally our morale was low because of emotional swing. And it all led to the point for us losing the game. What’s the next for your team? We plan to take a break. Chill for a week or so. Until the end of 2020 we plan to adapt the whole information we’ve got to our gaming. We will switch our playing style a bit. Switch our hero picks for some maps. We’ll try to play without Sova. And we will wait for new tournaments’ announcement. Which we would like to participate in.

11:51 - And to get our slot on First Strike tournament. Because actually we’ve lost both times to times that were able to make it to Top8 CIS teams. I see, I see. Well then, it’s time to wish you luck and see you next time! — Thanks. — Bye, everyone! .