Is It That compLex?

Posted by: bootman

Many people have posted articles, forum threads, or blogs about compLexity's performance this season and their theories of why the team has had it so rough. Recently I made a blog post discussing the issue, but in light of the two articles posted on TheCGS.com by my good friends Mike “LD^Mike” Luxion and Paul “ReDeYe” Chaloner, I decided to give my thoughts a bit of a more public forum than just a simple blog. Below, there are links to TheCGS.com articles, and following is my blog.

A Complex Season by Paul “ReDeYe” Chaoloner
Righting the Ship by Mike “LD^Mike” Luxion

The Blog

I didn't really know of anywhere to post this, so I thought I'd put up my first ever blog about my thoughts on team compLexity this season, and what exactly is going wrong. I'll start off by talking about Jason Lakes 2008 draft.

Protected Players - fRoD (franchised), rambo, storm, KreeganBG, zet.

1st round: PerfectLegend in; sWooZie out

From there, Lake continued to redraft Warden, belle, chavisan, and GTO.

Did I think it was a poor draft? To be honest, yes. But Lake was extremely justified in how he picked.

belle - All he asked belle to do was to keep matches much closer than she did last season, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. In 2007 she had 4 rounds for, and after the 10th match today in 2008, she has quadrupled that number. Would I have personally kept belle? Probably not, but Lake was going out on a limb that she had improved enough, that during the season she'd eventually have enough practice to bring home some wins. It hasn't happened yet, but Lake was banking on the rest of his teams not dropping the ball so bad.

Racing team - After the draft, Jason Lake immediately did a live webcam interview to explain his picks. His philosophy in Forza was that his racers would have the pure teamwork to win races. Bad choice? Of course not. Even though the two are ranked last in the league, Forza is all a points game when it comes to the big picture. coL actually has a better point average than Venom's 4th place racing team with a 3.2 PFA and 3.8 PAA compared to their 3.0 PFA and 4.1 PAA. The racing team could be doing better, but they are not losing 6-1 races often.

PerfectLegend - The guy has been a dominant figure in the DoA community forever. He went to the combine and got first place. Although top players from season 1 weren't in the combine, he still proved to be the top DoA rookie. Unfortunately PL wasn't able to back up everything he said prior to the season, but he is currently 2-1 over the second ranked DoA player, NinjaCW.

KreeganBG - Why wouldn't he protect Kreegan? The guy won WCG, second at the combine (only two the current #1 ranked Eafra) , and after the combine, he followed that with going undefeated in the training camp. Lake knew before the draft that Kreegan was going to get scouted by another team if he had not protected him, so he did. Nobody in a million years would have predicted Kreegan to finally get back into the swing of things so late in the season.

Counter-Strike: Source - Despite the franchise's 5th place overall finish, they're Source team was top notch. Not only did they win every single tournament they touched in 2007, they took it to the next level winning the CGS World Final. Just a week before the CGS season started, zet was replaced by hanes to play the 2008 season. It would be ignorant of any true analyst to say that one player is bringing down an entire team. If you ask me, zet was the worst player on coL last year, and I really wasn't sad to see him leave.

With that said and how everyone needs to back off Lake for his 2008 draft, I'll get back to this season. I read the coL members, staff, Assistant GM, and even GM talk about how the luck just wasn't on their side. No, this goes SO much farther beyond luck, fate, or even a higher being giving Lake a sign of where to go with his career.

If you actually watched most of coL's matches, you would see that a LOT of them came down for one of their players, or teams to step it up in the last game of the night to pick up their first win, and they didn't. From forza, to dead or alive, to most disappointingly their CS:S team, they have all dropped the ball for their team. Most of these matches have been so close, the team can taste it, but not one of their players have just emerged to win one for the overall team like we've seen from so many other franchises this season.

It really isn't fair to put this kind of blame on belle either. Belle has only been 5-0'd in two of her 10 matches this season, so she is giving points to the team, and it's hard to say any one loss was completely on her shoulders. In both matches that coL lost when belle lost 5-0, the overall team lost by a large margin (one being by 13 points to Carolina). And surprisingly enough, in both of their matches, the team that was able to make those points up the easiest, the Source team, lost.

Unfortunately, the stats on the website don't show the game order of the matches, but the scenario has happened too many times for coL this season. Off the top of my head, I can think of two , their last two matches against the optx. In the last match vs. the optx at the EA studios, it came down to Forza. All coL needed was a first place finish to send the match into OT where they would race one lap, but they lost the race 5-2. The next one, was tonight.

Before I get into tonight's loss to the OPTX, I would like to state that in my opinion, a blowout win in DoA is probably the hardest game of them all to do it in. Games that come down to a player giving up 1 or less rounds is almost unheard of. DoA is probably the second most strategical game in the CGS, and it isn't fair to any player to be asked to have a flawless win against any opponent. Look at last weeks match of Master vs. Cheppelle to win the match. Master had to 5-0 Cheppelle in order to tie the match. Cheppelle won the first round, and lost four straight after pulling some unorthodox moves in the first round that Master did not expect.

Now, going into tonight's match. It seemed as though nothing was going to stop coL from winning this one after the first two games. coL was off to a huge lead with an amazing 6-1 race over the OPTX and Kreegan's win over stermy separating the teams by 6 points in two games that usually come to the closest scores. Next up was the split source game and belle taking on Vanessa. Many thought belle was going to lose 5-0 to Vanessa, and the Source team would ultimately have to compensate for it, but it was completely the other way around. Belle managed to get more rounds than she ever had on Vanessa with only losing 5-3 making the overall score of the match 10-6 in favor of coL.

Jason Lake must have been jumping up and down like a school girl after getting asked to prom at this point. His former world championship source team was playing the last place team in the league, the OPTX, and they didn't even have to win for PerfectLegend to bring it home for the team. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. We saw another huge loss from coL, similar to their Core match, and they lost it 13-5. Had they lost 10-8, or 11-7, or even played like the team we all know they are, PL would have had a great opportunity winning it for coL seeing as how NinjaCW and himself are very evenly matched. But no, the Source team dropped the ball big time.

I've watched the coL CS guys play for YEARS, and this was a huge disappointment. Not only do they have the raw aim and skill, this is their second match in a row where it's safe to say that they lost it for the franchise. After dropping 11 straight rounds to the Venom, and now this. There is no reason in a million years that the OPTX should have beat coL tonight in Source. Just based on coL's experience as a team and their overall knowledge of the game, it should have been a free match for them, but they couldn't do it.

It's at this point...wait, no...it should have been weeks ago when Lake gave the entire team a gut check. He needs to stop letting the team feel sorry for themselves or thinking that they are cursed, they need to just step up and do what they were hired to do as individuals and answer when duty calls. It's far beyond a point where there needs to be calm and mellow talks with the team about how "this just wasn't their year", it's really at the point where they need to just be put in check and step up to the plate.
I do agree with a lot of people in the theory that the teams that kept the most original players made an unforeseen bad did not see it coming. For coL, I really don't see that as being the case. I don't know what the next move is for Lake, but if for some reason he does keep anyone from this roster besides the protected players, they all need to get their acts together, because luck is no longer the issue with the team.