Obviously the CN haven’t really been competitive for the past couple of tournaments and there’s a couple reason why in my opinion.
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Macro and strategic play
Even though China obviously joined Valorant late and it did affect their development for the last few years, at this point it’s just embarrassing how poor our macro is compared tot he rest of the world. We keep getting the little things wrong, like utility, trades, and lurk timings, and strong fundamentals teams like NRG and VIT have a field day with the information game. And it’s not a problem with isolation or a lack of practice either. Chinese teams practice for very very long hours, 12+ hours a day, and they have consistent scrims with top Pacific teams too. This leads to my second point. -
Meta development
If you go through and watch the CN games last stage you would notice that the CN meta was completely different from the rest of the world. The agents CN played most consisted of Neon Waylay Skye comps. This pop heavy, fast pace was largely due to Riot nerfing waylay in the middle of the stage, and left CN teams no time to change their comps mid stage. This left them ill equipped for the meta they are currently playing, as the best teams on maps like Pearl and Lotus have extremely good understanding of the macro game, which require agents like viper and Vyse that can control entire sections of the map and dictate rotations. CN teams also left for London late, so their extra two weeks of prep wasn't with international teams but domestic teams. Instead of the fast pops they were doing in stage 1, they just look scared to take the fights and peeks necessary to gather information or gain space. I don’t want to hear anything about stage nerves or anything because if you take a look at some of the venues the CN playoffs played in, the audience was insane. -
Talent spread
There is a reason why people called vo0kashu vgod and stating that China has aimers, and that’s cause they fucking do. Like if you go back and watch some of the highlights there are some fucking incredible shots from players you never heard of. The problem is that you don’t hear about them because they are on teams which have no chance of making international stages because of their extremely poor coordination and macro. China has extremely good aimers like Pacific, but with 10 teams, the promising talent feels like it’s spread extremely thin. Some of the players we send to the international stage aren’t international level players (LIFE!!!).
Fixes:
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Take a chance on importing T2 coaches. There’s no fucking way we are recycling disfunctional old coaches, instead of taking a chance on promising coaches of t2 teams. Multiple teams have swapped coaches from the t2 scene (nrg comes to mind), with great success. T2 teams scrim a lot with t1 teams, and their coaches can bring strong fundamentals from other regions.
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Reformat VCTCN. With the introduction of the new format next year, hopefully top teams can pick up new talent with proven experience, instead of reusing old (washed like Life) players. More extreme would be merging the region with Pacific (hard because of Chinese laws) but currently it feels like the talent pool is spread too thin and emerging talent gets beaten down by strong established teams.
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Gain international experience. In games like League of Legends and Counter Strike, teams sometimes travel to more competitive regions (like Korea in LoL or Europe in CS) to get scrim experience with international teams or play solo queue to improve their skills. CN teams continuing to scrim with each other with little improvements and playing a stagnant meta, just to get shit on internationally and learning little to nothing.
That being said XLG is STILL winning this event and EDG will be the runners up (DRG is going 0-2).
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