T.c: "I'm pretty excited just for a change in the map pool"

Complexity have been out of action for some time, having played their last match during the PGL Major Copenhagen back in mid-March. With that the team has had ample time to scrim and theory craft, but few opportunities to show off their progress as a team. ESL Pro League Season 19 will hopefully give the NA squad an opportunity to prove their mettle as the team look to make a deep run in the Maltese events.

Ahead of their EPL debut against Pera tomorrow, Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke to Complexity coach, Tiaan "T.c" Coertzen, about Complexity's chances in Pro League, their recent bootcamp, the state of North American practice, and the changing CS2 map pool, among other topics.

We haven't seen Complexity in action since the Copenhagen Major. What has the team been focusing on during their extended break?

Yeah, it has been a while, we're eager to get back into matches. After the Major we took some time off because we had a pretty hectic schedule to kick off the year and spent a lot of time in Europe. We took a week to ten days off after the Major to give everyone time to spend with their families, do some life admin, and all that.

Ever since then we've been back at it. We started practice in America, getting about two weeks of practice in NA even though hallzerk was playing from Norway so he was on high ping, but we're pretty used to practicing with him from Norway by now. We got two decent weeks of practice in NA before traveling to Malta.

It's been five, six days since we've been in Malta and we've had five days of practice here in Europe heading into Pro League.

Has the Malta bootcamp been highly productive for you guys, being able to play top teams after spending time back in NA?

There is definitely a quality difference in the scrims when you get back to Europe. It's not just the quality, it's also the amount of teams and the variety of teams that you can practice against. We generally do a pretty good job of making the most of our NA scrims. A lot of people complain that they struggle to find more than two scrims, but when we're in NA we're still able to play four scrims a day. It's obviously easier for us doing this full time than for some of the teams who are still working and studying on the side.

We're able to get decent practice in NA. The problem in NA is the repetitiveness of playing the same teams on the same maps over and over again, especially when you have teams that are traveling. When we started up in NA again we had some teams in Chengdu, M80 were bootcamping in Europe, etc. We were stuck playing NRG and BOSS every single day.

Getting back to Europe is always nice because you have such a large variety of teams you can scrim and the availability of scrims and being able to focus on certain maps instead of playing all of the maps because there may only be one time available on the day.

It's nice to be back in Europe, scrims are going well and we're excited to get back into matches because you can only practice and add new things for so long before you need to try them out in matches and see how things are working.

Right before EPL Valve announced that Overpass has been replaced by Dust2 in the Active Duty map pool. While Overpass will still be on the table in EPL, what are your thoughts on how this change may affect the team?

I'm pretty excited just for a change in the map pool. It sucks that they're removing Overpass. I'm a fan of Overpass and it has been one of home maps for a pretty long time and it has been a comfort pick for us even though in the past three months we haven't really been playing that well on it.

It sucks to lose a map that is also very different from a lot of the maps in the pool and it has longer rounds, slower timings in general. But, I'm just excited for a change in the map pool, it's always exciting and Dust2 hasn't had a chance in CS2 so we will see how creative teams are going to be with some of the new dynamics and mechanics we have in CS2 on the map.

I'm sure the map will generally play the same, but people always like to get creative with the new mechanics so I'm excited to see how that will play out.

Looking towards EPL, your opening match will be against Pera, a lower level squad who has seen multiple roster changes lately that should realistically be an easy win. Do you have any thoughts for this matchup and what's the game plan for them?

We obviously don't want to underestimate anybody. At the start of the year Pera had some really good results online I believe and there were a lot of allegations in the scene going around and I saw a lot of stuff on Twitter and so on. But, we're not looking into any of that, we have to treat every team the same.

We're just going to treat them as business as usual for us. We'll do whatever prep we can do against a squad with two roster changes that have been on the team for less than a month. They obviously don't have a lot of maps for us to look into, but we treat everyone the same and can't underestimate anyone at this level especially with MR12 in CS2, you don't want to be underestimating anyone and being caught on the backfoot.

If we're looking at "business as usual", I think we can safely say you'll be playing HEROIC next. What are your thoughts about that matchup after previously beating them 19-17 at the Major?

HEROIC has to get past NIP first to set up that rematch. But, with NIP's woes and having to use another stand-in yet again I guess that's quite expected. It will be a nice rematch if we get to face HEROIC again.

Our map pool matches up quite well against them and they're a really good team and they've been playing really since the inception of the lineup at the start of the year. I don't think everyone expected them to gel together as well as they have. After the match we had against them at the Major I'm sure we will have a really exciting rematch if that does happen.

Speaking of that HEROIC win, that victory sent Complexity on the path of heartbreak at the Major, going 2-0 to 2-3 to miss out on playoffs. Now that some time has passed, what are your thoughts about what went wrong in Copenhagen?

There's always a learning experience after every loss, right? But for us it has been a lot of focus on.. look at the end of the day we need to get better. It's not like we lost to bad teams at the Major, losing to three top-five teams in MOUZ, Vitality, and FaZe, so it was always going to be tough games, and we knew that when we reached the 2-0 stage.

It's one of those things where at the end of the day we need to get ourselves and our level to the point where we can beat those teams consistently and that's what we're focused on. We're focusing on every single day little by little and putting in the work. We're not just putting in the work as a team, but individually because that's where we want to be, right?

We have shown that we can beat these teams, we've shown glimpses of brilliance, but we need to get ourselves to a level where even if we're not playing our A game, and we're playing our B game or C game we can beat these teams consistently. That's mainly been the focus for us, to bring the same level every single day and against every single opponent no matter what.

Over in Group B, we saw M80 make their LAN debut with their new roster to great success. Have you had a chance to watch them or scrim them, and what are your thoughts about that squad?

I didn't have the opportunity to catch all of their games, we were following their scores most of the time just because we were busy playing scrims whenever they were playing so it was hard to watch. But, I'm really happy for them and it's nice to have another team from NA that can compete against the EU teams and that can take some upsets. Really excited for them.

We did have the chance to scrim them in NA when they came back from their EU bootcamp and we were still in NA. They were by far the best team and the best quality of practice that we got in North America.

Really happy to see them carry their form into the matches here at Pro League because they got to Pro League right after playing a qualifier for the EWC so I don't think they had that much time to acclimatize to Europe and settle back in so I'm really happy they were able to take some scalps. Hopefully they can keep building on that form and it will be nice to have another strong team in NA.

What are the teams overall expectations here in EPL, where does the team need to finish in an event like this at this stage of development?

For us the minimum standard is playoffs. We want to make playoffs and that's our minimum expectation as we've got to that point where we want to be making playoff runs more regularly. We don't want to underestimate anyone, but with the teams in Groups C and D, that is a minimum expectation from the outside as well to be making playoffs.

We would be happy with a top-four finish here. Obviously if we can win the event that'd be amazing, but there's building blocks to this, and stages to this so a top-four finish is something to be really happy with.

Complexity will be taking over Pera tomorrow at 10:30AM to start their run in ESL Pro League Season 19 Group D.