Valorant Premier Season 2

ITL’s Valorant Premier Season 2

Season 2 was a very good time to be a part of ITL, especially for the first half, everyone was performing better than ever and coming back with improvements week to week. We had a bit of a struggle in the last couple of games before qualification but we pulled through. We ended up playing on a map that we hadn’t played or had much time to think about, with a team comp where some people would be playing certain agents in a premier setting for the first time. I think this provided a valuable learning opportunity, and we did end up promoting at the end of the season so honestly our performance was pretty solid and we now have a benchmark to improve upon for next time.

I think we might have become a little too confident after sweeping so many wins so easily and I think some of us neglected our practice at this time, I also think that once we took our first loss morale was much lower than in any other game. I think it’s a necessary experience to lose now and again, it’s better to lose when we are smaller and lower in the brackets so we can get used to feeling and learning how to bounce back and come back even stronger in the next game rather than letting our losses be our weakness. We also implemented more practice schedules and feel that the practice days officially hosted by Valorant Premier are very helpful to just having people online more often. A lot of our issues this season seem to stem from the amount of hours put into training or the effectiveness of training. We now have a much better understanding of what it means to plan our executes in advance and we’ve begun playing our ranked games focused solely on improving and playing a good game of Valorant, rather than playing for the win necessarily, I feel that this will not only grant us more wins both in Premier and Competitive modes over time, but will also strengthen our teamplay and cause less of a rank discrepancy to be formed like we saw this season. I can’t ignore that part of the problem is that the lobbies that some of our players were placed in weren’t exactly conducive to a learning experience. We hope that Riot will work harder in the future to address the toxicity and rampant throwing problem that the community seems to have.

I think the idea of our team comp was really good, especially for that Playoff match, but our execution is what was lacking there. Blade hadn’t played a duelist in a Premier setting and due to having picked up the agent he was playing recently found it difficult to take the space and entry which caused us to struggle to find our way into the site on attack quite often, the team as a whole wasn’t well prepared to deal with enemy utility either often leaving Blade to be shut down if he could pull something off. Chaos was the star player as the controller as I had predicted, and my aim was not on point for the day I feel like if I practiced and played a couple more warmup comp games with the team I would’ve been a bit more confident there. Demon had a difficult time on Skye as since we kept leaving our duelist out to dry or the enemy making it impossible for us to enter safely there was no opportunity for him to really “do his job” in the most optimal manner. Also, we didn’t have Haunter who we had planned and expected to be there, he had to call in and we had to find a replacement in Sircruise meaning that it was going to be the first time this team ever ran a dual controller comp in any setting. This led to even more confusing amounts of utility cluttering up the map and I don’t think we were ready for how much utility was dumped by defenders. Defending went a little better for us and is probably where we had our best performance, but the offense side was where we really couldn’t pull it together.

Overall I think we learned a lot from this experience and we have a lot to bring to our next season, we’re excited for everyone to see what the future of ITL will look like! Until next time,

ITL Supress