biscu on Verdant’s 2024: “I’ve seen the team return to the trajectory that’s supposed to be on.”

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After a difficult start to the year, Verdant coach Ciarán “biscu” King and his team realised changes were needed. Lacklustre performances precipitated the removal of Andrew “Wolfie” Allan, before Verdant’s woes were further compounded by losing a core part of the roster as Matas “Extinct” Strumila took a step away from the game to focus on his studies.

Despite a year that tested the team both in and out of the server, biscu believes they have come out of that period back at their best due to roster changes, which saw the additions of Mason “Vacancy” Haines and Remi “Diviiii” Alexandre, as well as a grinding mindset that saw Verdant play over 200 official maps in 2024 alone.

At QUBLAN 2024, biscu took a break from Verdant’s relentless schedule to return to the server in a victorious run which saw his team – No Idea – lift the trophy. At the event, the Belfast native sat down to talk to UKCSGO in a wide-ranging discussion, which touched on how Verdant saved their season, the trials of coaching at Tier-3, UKCS’s propensity for drama, and his pride in QUBLAN – his hometown event.

First of all, how are you finding the event?

I have been to two events now from Queen’s University Belfast and it just impresses me every time, the first one was impressive. The fact they managed to make it non-BYOC, they’ve continued that, improved it. It’s impressive. The only thing they need to do now is show how people “Hey this is going on. Come over, come and play,” right? It could get outta hand *laughs* I think it’s really good.

I couldn’t really say much more glowing about it to be perfectly honest. It makes me proud, that this is where it’s happening, in the UK and Ireland. It’s happening here. That’s impressive and it’s something to be proud of, that we’re contributing to sort of the sustainability and the future of the scene.

I have been to a few BYOCs and non-BYOCs now and this is one of the best if not the best non-BYOC I’ve ever been to.

You mentioned [not having to] bring your own computer, what do you think is the benefit of that?

BYOCs, they tend to incur more costs on the player because they have to travel, they have to bring all their stuff with them. There’s a lot more labour involved and careful thought and planning to actually travel there with the stuff you need, and then to play and then to come back. So, it’s just an extra consideration and a potential barrier to stop people coming in and playing so non-BYOC is kind of essential if you’re trying to capture as wide an audience as possible. I have been to a few BYOCs and non-BYOCs now and this is one of the best if not the best non-BYOC I’ve ever been to.

We’ve been to a few over the years in casinos, Grosvenor Casinos in conjunction with EPIC.LAN. This is better than that. That was very popular in the UK. If you ask people who participated in those events, they would speak very highly of them and would like to see them return, as would I, but this is more impressive and it’s better.

I think if more events can do this sort of thing, incorporate spaces that already exist or make them like Queen’s University have here to encourage more non-BYOC events, whether it be in CS, VALORANT or whatever esport, I think that’s brilliant.

You mentioned promoting the event, do you feel like it didn’t get enough reach this year? Do you think it could be better?

Yeah, I think that’s just the case with most things, Queen’s University Belfast obviously don’t have a marketing team and they’re not paying them loads of money to get it in front of people. I know there are plenty of people in the UK, now that they know the event is on by word of mouth and seeing on Twitter that it’s happening, they’re like “Oh, why didn’t we go?” It’s only 30 quid to fly over, it’s non-BYOC, happy days! A weekend in Belfast and I get to play a LAN. It sounds like a great time, because it is!

Queen’s University just needs to, or the people who are running the event, just need a little more effort on that side of things. They’ve done a very good job actually making sure the event runs well rather than focusing on getting people to come which is important and that’s actually the priority, so they’ve done well there. As long as they can improve on that, make sure there’s no craziness with the servers, perhaps bring in a bit more experience to deal with stuff like that, because, you know, that’s LAN 101. That’s gonna happen. The server isn’t working? Get the server guy to fix it, he’ll fix it in five minutes, right? You need that, they’ll learn from that.

If everyone that’s going to EPIC.LAN, for example, in the next two months knew that this LAN was happening and it was non-BYOC and there wasn’t a team cap, it could have been three or four groups. Then this would have been packed out with UK players wanting to play and Irish players and just mixing together.

I think a lot of the stuff that ends up going on social media from the UK, it gets whipped up into this hysteria and I just don’t think it’s necessary.

I saw you on Index’s stream and there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect between what the teams want and what the orgs want or need, do you have any reflections on that?

I think the conversation is an interesting one. I actually thought from the get-go that it wasn’t a necessary conversation. I tend to think that these are like storms in a teacup. These things get whipped up on social media about this or that about the scene. I felt like when I was asked to do it “Right, I’ll go in and I’ll pop a few ice cubes into that boiling hot soup,” so to speak and I feel like I did that. Just to remind people “Hey this is happening everywhere, it’s not unique. We’re not special in this regard.” In fact, Uni in the UK does very well to mitigate these things and are already doing stuff and we talked about that. I just wanted to dispel a few commonly held beliefs, in my opinion, or assumptions about this or about that.

Guys just relax, this is not a thing. This is a total fantasy.

What did I think about what we spoke about in reflection about the disconnect between teams and what the organisations want? I don’t think it exists, I think at the level that we’re at, Verdant, EXO and Endpoint, I don’t think that is there. But if you go down a level to the trying to make it into the level of being a professional, then yeah that’s going be like that. But that’s going to be like that in any walk of life, where it’s not at that professional standard yet, it’s gonna be a little bit weird or inefficient or wrong perhaps in the way you do this interaction that you would do at a higher level more simply or straightforwardly.

I think a lot of the stuff that ends up going on social media from the UK, it gets whipped up into this hysteria and I just don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t really tweet that much or comment even though I really want to say, “Guys just relax, this is not a thing. This is a total fantasy.” It often boils down into some sort of pointless argument and so it’s useless, but that was the right venue and avenue to actually talk about things and to tell people “Just relax.”

Do you think it’s detrimental to the scene?

Yeah, I do think so actually. I think bringing attention to these underlying problems in esports [is detrimental], because it’s a very new industry; it’s less than 20 years old. If you think about other industries like football or other competitive industries, they’ve been going for decades so they’ve had time to iron out kinks and be very meticulous in how they set things up right? We’re just at the start, so it’s like the wild west, people have to remember that, things are going to break, things aren’t going to work and that’s okay.

We built it, we put blood sweat and tears into it for years. We’re all friends.

Verdant as a core, as a team, has existed for a long time now and as an org you’ve been going since last year. It seems like you’re stable both in terms of core and org. How do you think you’ve managed to get that stability?

I would say the reason for the stability in regards to the core is purely down to the fact that we built it. We built it, we put blood sweat and tears into it for years. We’re all friends. What does it mean that we built it? Some teams will come together, get a bit of success and then they’ll stick together, and then that becomes a core or what have you. But our core did not start like this.

Do you know what’s actually really funny, the American player DaZeD, you might remember him, when he was kicked from iBUYPOWER he did a stream, because it was sort of the end of his professional career, and he sort of acknowledged that. He was just talking about how he thought about things, and he talked about “If I had the chance to do my professional career again, I would choose 4 people I know I can work with and that want to be there and want to do it and regardless of what their skill is or their mechanical ability right now. It’s okay, because that’s more important.” He said he wishes he’d have done it that way, because he thinks that the problem he faced in his teams was instabilities in their cores, and it led to the rosters blowing up.

They didn’t care about each other in that way. We do.

You might remember not too long ago when DaZeD and co. were all playing, that was the problem in America. Their rosters were blowing up and players were going everywhere. It’s because they didn’t do that, they didn’t build a core — they weren’t actually friends outside of the game, right? They didn’t care about each other in that way. We do.

We’ve been playing for years now like you’ve said, and we’ve built the core so we did it that way — not because DaZeD said so — but by happenstance, but I kind of think about that when people ask me that question and I think DaZeD had a point. Not everyone has the luxury of doing this, but if you’re able to, and then spend far too many hours trying to make it happen, then you may just be successful or be able to do something like we’ve done.

About Verdant, in tier one it’s the player break, but you guys are still playing. I just want to get your feelings on how you feel about this half of the year.

We’re actually taking the player break, we’ve had, since two months ago when we made our most recent change to bring in Diviiii. We’ve played over 250 maps of Counter-Strike including practices and officials and the vast majority of those are officials, I’d say well over 70 percent. So, the team’s exhausted, so we’re actually availing of the player break. Obviously we’re here having a bit of fun, but this is fairly pleasurable but we’re also playing in “Into The Esports.” It’s a Serbian LAN and there’s prize money up as well but that’s very sparsely throughout the player break but we are actually using it.

How do I feel that this half of the year has gone so far? I feel like it started off, at the start of January when we lost UKIC we needed to make a change, big time, and we did. Then unfortunately we lost Extinct because he needed to focus on his final year of university. So, it was very tumultuous and it wasn’t very clear how we would go, so there was a period of a few weeks where we were tinkering with the roster and then we realised with Matas’ departure, with bringing Vacancy, the team could look very different and it might have to, to be as competitive as it has been before.

So, we made the big decision, “let’s get Tom [arTisT] on a rifle, get him involved in the play directly, and let’s bring an AWPer in”. Always the problem has been for us, Tom loves rifling and AWPing, but it’s very hard to IGL and AWP at the same time. There’s very few people who do it at the high level, there’s some notable examples of course but Tom wasn’t feeling as much impact as he was in CS:GO with CS2. So he wanted to come back [to rifling] but we’ve never been in a position, thanks to Verdant for this [bringing an AWPer in], to actually go and replace Tom on the AWP, adequately.

We’re proud to welcome our new AWPer, @Diviiiicsgo!

Rémi joins us from Lausanne-Sport and will be taking over the AWP from In-game Leader Tom ‘Art1st’ Clarke who moves onto the Rifle.

Welcome Rémi!🌿

— Verdant (@VerdantEC) April 23, 2024

 We’ve always put it the context of “well if Tom’s an eight out of ten on the AWP and x player is a six out of ten on the rifle, but Tom comes through on the rifle that’s a seven and we get an AWP in who’s a seven then we’ve maintained the same aggregate, that’s how we would look at it. Getting that guy that’s just one below Tom on the AWP, that’s not actually easy and it’s very hard because all the AWPers that are worth their time, who are good, are either on teams or way, way too much money.

So, we are really fortunate that we actually knew Diviiii. We’d played against him a year before when he was in LDLC and we were in Viperio – we were actually boot-camping in Poland for the RMR and we played him a few times that week. I was reminded of his free agency in January so we moved in, made that deal happen and ever since then I’d say definitely I’ve seen the team return to the trajectory that’s it’s supposed to be on, that is top 100, beating good teams regularly and making good runs and threatening to win.

 

What can you do as a coach when you’re playing three times a day?

What you can do is say goodbye to regular sleep, you know only getting about four [hours a day]. You just have to work, there was a point halfway through this season where I was under the water with the amount of maps I had to prepare, three this day and then another three that day and different opponents here. Even if you’ve done an anti-strat for a team two weeks ago you have to update it because that team’s playing as much as you are and that means they’re changing stuff because if they’re a good team, they’re going to, so you have to go back.

I got a bit of help with that though, TIMMO, just out of the blue, was like “Listen I’m looking to get into a bit of analyst work” and I was like “Happy days, come over here I’ve got a few maps I need you to do for me.” So yeah, I would say he actually reduced my workload quite a lot there by about 30 percent and the quality of his work was pretty good as well, so I was very happy with that.

Kind words from my King https://t.co/udqyS8k9nw

— Tim ‘TIMMO’ Musters (@TIMMOcs) May 15, 2024

 You just have to watch demos, you can do it more efficiently, but I like to actually watch the demo in CS2, go about the place and no-clip and that sort of stuff, just to see, how does he rotate how does he peek things. You kind of lose that in the 2D overview in my opinion, I mean you definitely lose it but what you gain is speed and efficiency, you’re able to bang the notes out fast, but you might lose a tell because you didn’t watch it in the demo. If he does a little movement this way or rotates that way and if you see it, then it means this, and you might not get that in the 2D demos.

You just have to do all the work; I mean if you don’t then you’re just sending in your players blind and that’s not necessarily the worst thing especially if your players are intelligent and well-experienced. Sometimes that’s preferable if the opponent is a lot weaker then you don’t want to think about the game too much, “Just play.” That happens sometimes fortunately enough for me but for the vast majority of games, you will need to do preparation, even at Tier-3 or whatever tier you’d like to place us in you need to against equally skilled opponents you’re missing out on a massive part of the game if you’re not doing that and you’re doing yourself a disservice.

 

• Transcribed by Thomas Parker