floppy: "The game isn't in its most polished state and it doesn't feel as rewarding"

Ricky "⁠floppy⁠" Kemery discusses the current state of Counter-Strike 2 and Complexity's first win at IEM Sydney.

As one of the few teams to play both the ESL Pro League playoffs and the BLAST Premier Fall Showdown and have travel days in between, Complexity's preparation for Counter-Strike 2 was understandably scarce.

Despite that the North American side have stepped into the first big LAN in the new game, IEM Sydney, on the right foot with a victory over Monte in the opening round of Group B, setting up a match for a spot in the playoffs against G2.

Following the match, HLTV spoke to floppy about all things Counter-Strike 2 and IEM Sydney. The 23-year-old did not try to hide his dislike for the new game and outlined why it currently feels "unpolished" and like "rolling dice."

He also gave praise to two of his teammates, Johnny "⁠JT⁠" Theodosiou for his performance in the opening match as well as Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski for his contribution to improving communication overall.

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You just beat Monte and got revenge for EPL a bit as well. How did that feel?

That game I felt kind of useless, I wasn't really doing anything and I was more focused on trying to hear what was going on with the in-game audio the whole game. For me personally, it doesn't really feel that rewarding at the moment with the state of the game, it just doesn't really feel that cool.

What do you mean by that?

The game isn't in its most polished state right now and it doesn't feel as rewarding because of that. There's so many things that can be improved upon in my opinion. It's not like it's unfair, but it's more just... I don't know, it feels kind of lame to me the way the game is right now.

Basically because [you feel] it isn't ready for tournament play, the win means less?

Yeah. Like this game is not going to be ready for another couple of months, in my opinion.

How much time did you have to practice, considering you were in the Showdown before as well?

We scrimmed a bit of CS2 and CS:GO during the BLAST Showdown. We definitely haven't had that much practice in CS2, but we've done all we can do so far considering the schedule. It is what it is.

What are your impressions so far, both based on that practice but also now with your first LAN game?

Not really a fan right now. The three main things for me are that I can't hear anything, I can't hold angles, and it feels weird to spray. Those are the main points for me that make the game not feel as good.

Any difference today on LAN versus the practice online?

Well we scrimmed here in Sydney on the Sydney server, so it was as close to LAN as we could get with 0 ping on the scoreboard. I think I need more reps in different games, so we'll see over time.

JT seems to be doing pretty well-

Dude, Johnny is owning! Did he actually drop 30 that game? I'm not sure if he dropped 30, but it felt like it. This guy was winning everything, it was really sick to see.

The desk beforehand said that Monte were favorites, did you feel like that going in?

No, I mean... I feel like with this being the first LAN in CS2, anything can happen between any team. This is anyone's game at the moment.

I'm not sure about now, but I know that your team used to do quite a bit of prep going into games when AntO_oNNN used to do whole sheets for you and whatnot. Not much material for a lot of teams to go off here, but Monte are one of the few who've played an official CS2 game. Did you end up looking at that going into this, and what did you take away from it if you did?

We watched what we could. It's kind of hard because at the moment when you want to watch a demo, you can't if the map is updated at any point, like the game just doesn't let you. Your game literally crashes if you try and watch an older demo, so the most we could do is watch VODs on Twitch and just watch the radar and watch what the teams are doing from the first person. In that sense it's a bit annoying, I think it'll probably get fixed over time hopefully, Valve Time, but we'll see.

Your last time in Australia didn't go so great, you played in Melbourne before the Major. How does it feel to come back and start with a win here?

It feels good. We didn't play up to our expectations back in Melbourne, we did win our first game back then too, but we'd like to continue the run after having a good first game so it feels good.

We've heard a bit from EliGE and Grim, Grim more specifically, about playing with EliGE in this team. What has it been like for you in terms of how things have changed or how you feel on the server, since especially at EPL you were doing really well individually?

Playing with Jon gave us a really good system of naming stuff, and it makes things faster for how we want to react to what they are doing. Every team has a really similar stratbook, so if we recognize what that team is doing, we have a name for it and we can just say it so we all know, we're all on the same page. We're painting the picture in our mind really easily with just a simple keyword, so I think that helps a lot. Jon is really easy to work with in terms of talking about mistakes and coming up with solutions. Having Jon on the team is really good for us.

Going into your game tomorrow you have G2, any early thoughts on that match?

Like I said earlier, I think anything can happen in this game right now, so I think I'm just going to treat it as such. I'm not going to say it's completely random, obviously they are a good group of skilled players, but I just think the game at its current state really feels like anything can happen, you can roll a dice. When I'm trying to shoot my gun and I see other people just spraying their gun down for five seconds and nothing is happening, it's just a bit ridiculous, so anything can happen.

Date	Matches
IEM Sydney 2023
17/10/2023	Complexity 04:30 G2	Match

Not afraid of any nerdy nades or plays from m0NESY?

Uh, not yet. Nothing that hasn't already been posted, so we'll see.