No problem. Let's go ahead and set the stage for the definitions of each from Riot.

Definitions from Riot for Sentinel and Controller:

• Sentinels are defensive experts who can lock down areas and watch flanks, both on attacker and defender rounds.
• Controllers are experts in slicing up dangerous territory to set their team up for success.

I think where a lot of people get caught up is when what you see is the only way you can play an agent. One of the unfortunate things about the educational community in Valorant is that they are linear. I think people believe that pro players are just players with a longer list of rules than them. That's simply not even close.

There is literally so much space for creativity that we miss this and shun people who think differently. Some of the most interesting esports experiences have been creativity driven. I'm not sure if you know about Brax but he's from Counter-Strike and is known for throwing his pistol up and pretending its a flash. I don't think you could find a single pro at the time who would think that was a good idea. Same thing with Stewie2k, I don't think you could find a single person who was throwing flashes throw smokes like he did. These are expressions of creativity and not rules.

And while there is a lot of value in learning the basics, you shouldn't let that be the end all of your journey. The truth of the matter is that once you get to the pro level, you punish people based on rules you think they follow. Sometimes plays look absolutely dumb but they work because the opponent literally thinks you would never do something like that, because it's so dumb.

All this to say that Sage being a Sentinel is murky by design. It is an expression of creativity from the Riot devs on the concept of a Sentinel. We saw the same sort of rejection of Deadlock. When Deadlock first came out the whole scene decided she was bad because her Sonic Sensor didn't act like a Cypher trip. That's the whole point. Developers do not want to copy and paste the same designs over and over. Sometimes they overdo it and need to tone it back but in general, I don't think people want Cypher coming out 100 times as a new agent when there is simply nothing new about it.

The reasons I would consider Sage a Sentinel are her wall denies space and vision. She can control space with her slow ability. I think those are the two things that make her primarily a Sentinel. Her Resurrection and Heal are more selling points for a certain type of playstyle. A playstyle for playing passive.

For me, controllers offer a gamble and don't lock anything down. Pick any agent and their abilities offer you the chance to attack or defend an area but at a price. Those price points are vulnerability and damage. Outside of Astra's slow, most controllers are there to make it risky for you to attack. I know this seems similar but controllers don't focus on attacking your movement, they focus on attacking your health pool.

But I think at the end of the day, the beautiful part is, you can choose to play any agent the way you want. I think that the base of this game is essentially Counter-Strike and the agent is just a flavoring or an enhancement on top.

Hey, I know that you're really trying here and I definitely support your journey. But you are confusing the role with how you play her.

Just to spot check your video, you don't view Sage as a Sentinel because you don't use her as intended. You mention in the video that she doesn't provide intel. Well that's just because you relate the word "intel" to agents that trigger something that let's people know. But the inverse of that is her wall.

If something placed on the map tells you where people are then a wall can tell you where people are not. If you block off a certain direction the enemy cannot come from that direction unless you have an agent that can get above the wall. You might think you've have a gotcha moment with this but all Sentinels can be avoided.

But once again, I think we need more people like you trying to come up and rationalize the game. Keep at it and feel free to argue with me as that is how I learned a lot of the time.

No other rankers? Doing a survey for school.

Do you think that the matchmaking experience for everyone is the same?

Do you think that groups have the same experience as a solo player?

Do you experience the beginning of the season 70% winrate?

We gotta start calling out weird people.

This is made up. This person is just saying words. He is living in a pretend world where he knows things no one else knows but him and FNS.

What is this obsession with past coaches... you realize if they were good they would never be let go? You understand that right? I totally do not understand how your brains work.

He was let go because he wasn't good.

They could all be Radiant if they kitten.

Overwatch, Deadlock... It's pretty simple devs, if it's a first person SHOOTER, we don't need rock paper scissor mechanics. The person with the best aim deserves to win. Every time you move from this idea your game dies. RIPiss.

PERFECT PI

Dude has never heard of money. Make sense when you take a month long vacation every year.

i swear boostio is the scumiest of the scum

-Zikz... Dude won a championship like a bench player on any sports team.

Get's dominated... to have an extra timeout... im sure it was some audio issue that is just working again

How dare you guys question Potter. She won a championship and you can't question how to do things. She's better and smarter than you.

Yal just post the same lame stuff every day.

Unlucky this is more of the same. Keep the cope guys. EG + YAY energy has no limits.

c

Two things I cannot stress enough. One, the coach. Imagine trying to come up with clever ideas when you're not even in the rank your players play in. Second, because they are not at a high enough level (which I don't think is achievable anymore without a cheater to help you rank) you imitate what you think is the correct way to play. Where do they get that information, the players who play ranked or watching other teams who run their teams like ranked teams.

I cannot STRESS how the current ecosystem is fraught with frauds. We refuse as a community to acknowledge it. We pretend that the people who are gatekeeping the entire community are the best we have. We rotate them in and out of other teams because tier 2 cannot reach the viewership of tier 1 and these coaches literally look at tournament stats to pick up players.

I challenge any pro to show me your old stratbook and prove to the community that it is longer than 5 pages and doesn't have spelling mistakes.

We need to demand better. The org owners listen to the community. We need to voice that we want better.

Not to be racist but this is not an American account. This looks like bait from a certain country that is always on vlr.

There is this huge campaign for casual players where because they have numbers they complain and devs ALWAYS OVERREACT. I'm tired of this we gotta make everyone feel good about themselves at the expense of everyone else. Skill is dead. If you spend all your time playing these games you literally are going to hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with you. I'm soooooooooooooooo tired. It's every game now.

Sensationalism by the media is on full display sheeple.

It's not close. Riot Studios is on Olympic. Pacific Palisades is like 4 miles from there. Not to mention about 4 miles of concerete.

Just getting tired of casualization of video games. They are turning it into mobile games. They legit casualized rank with engagement optimized matchmaking. The best players in the server are not always the winners. And that's dumb.

They nerf Hawkeye but he has zero counter play to like... half the roster. Don't worry we prefer button mashing to skill.

Abu getting upset is hilarious.

Or we can call out garbage when we see it. Baaaaaah sheep Baaaaah!

We are Overwatch 2.0.

You're just idolizing a person with no formal education and who has been perpetually been on the internet since 2010 or before. You think he has good takes because he's a pro who had a really bad career with one major win. The same thing with XQC. But whatever, your tastes are your tastes, they're just not tied to logic.

do you pay for blue checkmark? they dont see your message if you don't

Twitter. Get over it.

It's cool, it was more of a rant of frustration <3

It was a pretty insane double standard that was applied to him. Top 500 is essentially which other top 500 players are you networked with and it's like a 50/50 situation on whether they got there by cheats or someone cheating to boost them.

His advice was based on logic most of the time, not authority. We live in a backwards society that would shun someone like him. There are so many fraudsters in top 500 and t2, to target the one who was trying to help people for money was wild.

There is such a bizarre fascination within the esports community to find some sort of rookie prodigy that is going to change the landscape of Valorant forever. And some how we can't find that person. And the reason, honestly, is that we are too wrapped up in results to see the forest for the trees.

Every single prodigy in the story of esports has some sort of personal struggle attached to it. Some dark piece of history that we leave in the dark. Faker lived with his grandparents and his father. Doublelift's family was massacred. Rapha's comes from a divorced family situation. And yet we want to ignore these details. We look at only the championships and ignore the horrific conditions they had to go through to achieve them.

The internet used to be a place of refuge. That concept is dead. No longer can a person who is bullied at school find a safe space on the internet because the bully is now on the internet.

I think this just has a profound effect on the search for your rookie prodigy. If you cannot go into Valorant to escape the terrible situation you find yourself in reality then it is harder to spend thousands of hours getting better and becoming a prodigy. If Valorant is now a social event then a person like the pros I mentioned above, wouldn't want to spend time in that place. The more we curate, the more we protect, the harder it will be to find the truly special players who need safe spaces to grow.

People already out here with nostalgia yearning for Yay and TenZ.

I know this community isn't very smart so let me help you out... LLMs or AI aka Chatgpt is trained on user data. Specifically Reddit user data. The reason they choose reddit data is that the "Right" answer is usually upvoted.

Still with me? Okay now, the million dollar question, would you ask someone from /r/valorantcompetitive who wins kickoff emea? Exactly...

It's the coach. Don't blame the pieces.

Franchise system is working fam. 100T losing to Tier 2, SEN losing to who? Franchise system needs to go away for a couple years then come back when you have established teams and coaches in the scene already. Not a group of grifters all using "map meta" to protect their jobs as rich old weirdos watch their money go byebye.

Did I miss that day of drama? Did the assistant coaches not work out? I mean really? A professional org lost to Trust in Plug? https://www.vlr.gg/423186/100-thieves-vs-trust-in-plug-for-those-who-dare-2024-sf

Name checks out.

Thinks rules are optional. Worst.

Doesn't go outside.

You know what's super fkn sad... FNS being the biggest brain you're aware of... The bar is so low you can step over it.

He's a kid and is probably just happy to be well paid to play video games.

This is all very dry. I want to re-asses franchise and open it up to more people. I am falling asleep.

v1 don't take no shit.

yal are being wild.... they might actually do something drastic

"You're stupid" x 2

Big Brother is always listening. Be careful out there fam.

mmw, poppin and eggster never go to lan. We're gonna get some sort of "We just wanted to see how we would do..." type shit if they haven't already.