EliGE: "This was a really disappointing result"

EliGE is hoping to "just get anything going" in his team's remaining two events of the season.

Hometown heroes Complexity faced an unfortunate bump in the road early into their IEM Dallas campaign after a 13-6 loss to Liquid on Dust2, the former squad's debut on the map.

This loss quickly segued into a disaster, as Complexity faced off against top-ranked side MOUZ in their lower bracket match. The result was akin to their previous meeting in the semi-finals of ESL Pro League; Complexity ultimately faltered after a hotly-contested three-map series, sending them packing from IEM Dallas on the first day.

Shortly after the loss to MOUZ, Complexity's Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski spoke regarding his team's disappointing results in their two matches at IEM Dallas, the difficulty in preparing for the event due to the additions of Dust2 and a newly-tweaked Vertigo, and how the team plans to approach their final two events of the season.

---

EliGE, commiserations on the loss. You had two tough rematches that didn't end up going your way this time. For IEM Dallas I want to start with Liquid; it went your way at the RMR but it's been a little while. What do you think was the issue on Dust2?

I think that we're just a little bit inexperienced on Dust2. It was going well on scrims, but overall we didn't have a deep enough book. I mean, it is very hard because Dust2 just came out. There were just a lot of micro mistakes that went wrong with a lot of the rounds, and they're obviously very coordinated, they're very experienced at Dust2.

I was gonna ask you a little bit about prep, because before EPL, where you made semis, you had about a month of prep time after the Major, but not so much this time around. Do you think that was a critical factor in this result?

No, it didn't really have any effect. I would say the biggest thing was having to get everything ready for Dust2 and then Vertigo, all in time for the tournament. Just having to get all that stuff done in time made it difficult. We knew the veto against Liquid, we were specifically practicing for it, we just didn't get good on the map in time.

What went wrong against MOUZ?

Overall in the whole series, we didn't win pretty much any pistols, so that was really difficult. We also lost both pistols against Liquid. In MR12 it's very very difficult if you don't win both pistols, or any pistols at all, so that just set us back from winning pretty much any of the maps. We were just on the back foot.

Against MOUZ, we were down pretty hard on Ancient on CT-side, but we actually came back and had a good run on T-side. It just came down to little details; I think the 10-11 round was really important when they were ecoing, and not winning that was unfortunately pretty big for us. Then on Nuke, I think that we lost a lot of clutches, which was tough. I think that Nuke was a lot harder, Ancient is kinda where we had to win it.

I know you were pretty vocally receptive to the Vertigo changes, but I'm curious about how you feel about ESL implementing them into IEM Dallas so quickly. Do you think it was reasonable?

From my understanding it was a technical reason for why they couldn't do it; they wanted to make sure that they had the new patch because of the NVIDIA bug fix. I think Valve didn't upload a compatibility version of Vertigo, so they just had to push the whole update forward, because I don't think that they would normally do that. But because there was no compatibility version, we just were forced to play it, because they obviously don't want to have us losing rounds from us crashing and everything like that.

I think it's completely too early. I think it looks messy. I don't think fans like watching messy CS, even though people think that it's fun to see new things that are popping up and all the craziness, I think it's better to watch good Counter-Strike. I think it's going to be harder to see good Counter-Strike on that map because it's just going to be extremely messy. Teams have had max two days to talk and think about it, and ideas that people have are not gonna be able to come through enough to know if they're good or not.

You guys have two more events after this, YaLLa Compass and ESL Challenger Jonkoping. What is the mindset heading into the last two events of the first half of the season?

The mindset is just to get anything going pretty much, because this was a really disappointing result. You could say what you want about us getting a tough draw for MOUZ, but the result is what the result is, and this was not good for us. Super disappointed about it. We just have to get better for the next two tournaments, and hopefully finish out the season with something to our name.