T.c: "We hadn't practiced with hallzerk since the Paris Major"

Looking to bounce back after an unfortunate showing at the BLAST Premier Fall Groups, Complexity's dreams were ultimately dashed after an opening overtime loss to fnatic in the IEM Cologne Play-In, shipping the American side to the lower bracket. The team was unable to recover in the bottom half of the bracket, as OG ultimately sent the squad packing with a 2-0 victory.

Shortly after the loss to OG, Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke with Complexity coach Tiaan "T.c" Coertzen to touch on the loss versus OG, the process of amending the styles of Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski and Johnny "JT" Theodosiou, and the impact of Håkon "hallzerk" Fjærli's absence in the previous few events.

Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.

Recently just bringing in EliGE, has he been helping the guys manage the hump of being disciplined and not just holding passively?

I don't think we have a problem with being passive at all; we've got too many guys going for plays when we don't need to be going for plays. We have the opposite problem; it's not that we don't have information, but a lot of the time we're going for unnecessary information. EliGE really came in as a super hard worker. He brought a lot of things to the team, and it's taking time to work everything in and get everything built into our structure. Even back at BLAST, JT was feeling very uncomfortable with the new structure that we were calling, and we had to change things and try and find a balance between what EliGE brought and what we had before. I could just feel from behind that JT was not calling his normal style, not reading the game the way he used to, so we kinda had to find a balance and iron things out.

We basically had to try and change that almost three-quarters of the way through the BLAST tournament. At the moment honestly, we're just trying to figure things out. We're working very hard, we're putting in long hours, we have been doing that for the past three weeks. Unfortunately, it's not showing, the results are super disappointing for us. We have a lot to figure out. We're still trying to find the perfect fit of bringing EliGE in and finding that fit for the players as well. At the end of the day, we still need to work on the players limiting mistakes and playing disciplined CS if we want to win.

When I spoke with hallzerk he mentioned he was not able to join you guys in North America due to visa issues. Is it damaging to have him remote while the rest of the team is one location or does it mean you guys will spend more time in Europe moving forward?

It's definitely damaging in a way if you want to use that word. Not necessarily when we just have practice time in North America, but more when we have tournaments in North America. For example, we hadn't practiced with hallzerk since the Paris Major. We had Dallas without, we had BLAST without him, then we had the player break, and then we brought EliGE in. It's almost like you're bringing two new players in, because we have to play with a completely different stratbook with Sonic. We obviously just made a simplified stratbook, Sonic hadn't played CS at this level for over a year, so we were just trying to simplify things for him as much as we possibly could. Obviously, at the end of the day, if you're constantly switching players and different styles and different playbooks, it is hard to continue evolving. Now, for example, when we started it felt like we started from scratch, with all these things that we've brought in. It's a lot of things to work on, and you have to basically reintegrate him into the team.

I don't think it's damaging when we don't have events in North America because we can at least practice with him while he's playing from Europe. It's also tough to practice in North America; I spoke to the Nouns guys and they're playing like two scrims a day, so obviously it's tough to get a lot of practice in North America. To answer your question, for the foreseeable future we will be spending the majority of our practice time in Europe where we can actually have efficient practice and play five or six scrims a day and still work on theory and actually evolve the team as much as we possibly can with the amount of time we have.

You can catch the full interview here: