messioso: "Player changes are always on the mind"
After the tough 2-0 loss against Liquid, which meant an early elimination for the Complexity side, Ryan Friend talked with Graham "messioso" Pitt, Complexity's General Manager. messioso spoke about the missed expectations, the disappointing and early end to the major, and what the future holds for the North American side.
Complexity started their journey in Paris with a strong win against GamerLegion, but then a tough BO1 against G2 sent them to the 1-1 bracket where they faced off against paiN. A very tough loss against the Brazilians and then a 2-0 loss against Liquid, while nearly getting beat 16-0 on their own map pick, eliminated Complexity from the BLAST.tv Paris Major. The General Manager was not happy about how the last three maps went.
Obviously not good enough on the last two days. We started off pretty hot, actually. The games against GamerLegion and G2 were promising. We expected to beat GamerLegion, G2 was obviously going to be a tough game, but I feel like we gave a good showing ourselves, at least in the first half, and then G2's T-side dominance, which they have shown against a lot of other teams. It was a tough one, but that was par for the course, I was like "Ok, we're in the right place, about where we thought we would be" and the games against paiN and Liquid were just not what we expected, definitely underperformance and things we need to, you know, clearly we have an issue and we need to start resolving these things very soon. It's becoming a bit more of a pattern now, for sure, and that's concerning.
The start of 2023 was good for Complexity, with the team giving a lot of good signs of improvement. Recently, things have started to go downhill, and messioso agrees. Looking forward, Complexity are setting their sights on Dallas. As the last event prior to the player break, it's an important one to go into the break with a positive mindset. Unfortunately, the team's AWPer is at risk of missing the event.
Gameplan moving forward is, we have a few weeks to prepare for Dallas, for a number of reasons they are not going to be the best weeks. We have some visa issues to resolve, and right now, the realistic possibility that hallzerk can't attend Dallas is there. We are still waiting for an answer from the US Embassy on his visa. That's not a thing we shied away from. He had his passport at the embassy and there were issues and we still haven't received a full answer when he was being accepted for his visa yet. Right now, preparation for Dallas is not going to be that smooth, because we don't know who we're actually going to be playing with at that event, but we will be in attendance in Dallas and, obviously, we will give everything we've got but it's not going to be a smooth few weeks. Mostly, right now, we are sort of hoping that he gets his visa in time, but there's no guarantee, so it's more about thinking long-term. We are looking at the second half of the season, starting in July, sort of thinking "how do we reset from this downward trend that we've had since Katowice?", because we hope that would be the springboard towards finally realizing the potential that we've had and it feels like since that day we've gone backward and not good enough, not where we wanted to be nor expected to be. We need to start making some changes internally, to try to figure out what's going wrong and how we can fix it for the long term.
Not happy with the team's recent performances, messioso revealed that in-game changes need to be made in order to fix the recent problems.
I'm talking mostly about how we are playing in-game. It's clear that we feel from our preparation that we feel like we're in the right place. It doesn't feel like we're not preparing for our opponents the right way. It feels like they are doing what we expected them to do but when it comes down to the crux of it in-game, we are struggling to put together our gameplan and put together our defense, essentially. That's looking very disjointed and we need to figure out what's going wrong with that and get to the crux of fixing it.
When asked about the loss against paiN and the almost 16-0 Overpass against Liquid, Pitt gave a very honest answer regarding what the roster showed inside the server.
Unacceptable is the honest word. We are not happy and that's definitely a lot of disappointment within the camp, both from the management, my side, coaching, and the players, you know, the players are disappointed, no one is happy with what's going on, no one's sitting there going "this is fine". It's not like we are unaware of the problems going on. How we fix that, again, that's, you know, if we knew the answer that, we wouldn't be in this position. It's something we need to learn. Right now, we are not in a good position, I think that's fair to say and we need to dig ourselves out of this hole. I think the player break, in a way, can't come too fast, because I think the guys need some breaks, I think we need to regroup and recoup and figure out how we're going to approach the next season. Right now we are in a hole and it's going to be a very hard way to dig us out.
Not totally disregarding player changes, messioso has told Dust2.us that those are not likely to happen at the moment. Although the current roster has support from management, things can change if the results don't show improvements.
Player changes are always on the mind. We prepare one year, two years, ahead of time. We have a scouting system and we are looking at players all the time because at the end of the day, this is a results-based team, and we have to be cognizant of the fact that if we are underperforming, changes have to be on the plate. Right now, we are not looking to make any changes for Dallas, apart from potentially we have to replace hallzerk on a temporary basis. I wouldn't rule anything out, but to say that something is definitely happening would also be a lie. We can't keep going the way we are going and if we can't fix it ourselves then something has to change, and if that ends up being a player, it is what it is.
