Evil Geniuses, who are currently 6 - 9 in the EU LCS, have announced the recruitment of nRated & Shacker and that Snoopeh will temporarily be stepping back as starting jungle.
"Going forward, we look to alternate between having me [ Snoopeh ] and Shacker playing jungle, Krepo and nRated playing support during practice – this will allow us to evaluate each others performance, identifying strengths and weaknesses. The idea behind this is to improve our performance as a team, not to act as a threat to the starting line up (even though this added pressure can result in people stepping up their game, which is a good thing!)."
Here's what Snoopeh had to say over on reddit:
"I wrote the following for our fans and my fans specifically as I feel I owe them an explanation.
Some of you may have expected some form of statement from ourselves; while some may have feared it, some may have desired it and some may have have called it a necessity. While this won't be as drama filled as an episode of Gamecribs, it will aim to provide an insight for our fans who have loyally supported us for almost two years as a team (and to the fans we have acquired along the way) the situation in our team and where we want to be in the coming months. I hope to provide you an insight into the most stable roster in competitive league which has been through trials and tribulations at the bottom and the top of this scene even if you're not rooting for our team specifically.
Over the past two years of being a team we have lived together in Korea, America and Germany making us more than just a team, but also good friends and that friendship is testament to how long we have stayed together as a roster despite the ups and downs of our history. We had incredible success in 2012, reaching 3rd/4th behind Azubu Frost & TPA (ps: still bitter about losing to Frost, we almost had them in OGN!). While friendship is one of the core values of our team and our popularity in the community – we are at heart competitive players, and as any competitive player (in any sport), we want to win. We don't play League of Legends 10 hours a day and think about it in our sleep, critiquing each other and ourselves as individuals because we want to participate – we do this because we want to win and unfortunately that is not the case right now.
“So what gives?” - A good question, going from a world class team the previous season to a mediocre team.... something has to be wrong, right? Well obviously, but it's not a simple fix and we have come to the point now where we are running out of time. We are currently bottom of the table and only a month away from play-offs which we won't even qualify for if we are not top 6, never mind making it to World Finals.
We never really needed a manager, what we needed was after being together for almost two years – was someone else.. someone we can respect to objectively look at our games, a coach/analyst. However finding someone like that is not easy, believe me.. I looked! After our weak performance in the opening of the second split, we witnessed considerable roster changes from other teams who were facing a lot of internal and external pressure at the time. Consequently, Christoph 'nRated' Seitz was released from Fnatic and while we found this surprising news, we saw this as an opportunity to pick up the analyst we always wanted. Not only is he a very capable player in terms of skill, he has a sharp mind when it comes to decision making in game and as he is a friend, we are able to respect his opinion and observations of our team both in and out of game.
"What role will nRated play in the team?" He will play several roles, but primarily he will be the Analyst of the team, filling a hole which already in the short time he has been with us has made a considerable impact in decision making and highlighted things which we were previously ignorant of.
Is it enough? Will it get us from the bottom of the table to the top? Obviously it's not the answer to all of our problems, however it will help considerably coupled with the following change.
I've taken the decision to take a step back temporarily. While my performance has been scrutinized, it's not as a result of any external pressure – Evil Geniuses has no impact on this, in fact I have a very positive working relationship with Evil Geniuses (which will continue..). However, as a team we realize that we are running out of time, it's 4 weeks until play offs, we are not where we need to be and we cannot tolerate being anywhere else but Worlds. I don't know and we as a team don't know if substituting me will be beneficial, but we want to try it out now.. rather than later.. (as we need results now).
We depart for LCS Tenerife tomorrow, with our first game being against Fnatic on Thursday. We will have Mojtaba “Shacker” Aflaton, previously of team Animate eSport substituting in place of me in order to see how he performs at an offline event. We will have Shacker and nRated taking the role of substitutes and instead of having substitutes because it's a requirement, we want to have them to actually utilize them actively.
Going forward, we look to alternate between having me and Shacker playing jungle, Krepo and nRated playing support during practice – this will allow us to evaluate each others performance, identifying strengths and weaknesses. The idea behind this is to improve our performance as a team, not to act as a threat to the starting line up (even though this added pressure can result in people stepping up their game, which is a good thing!).
I'd like to thank the fans for their continued support and express that we do understand their frustration. I hope you understand my decision for doing this, I'm not giving up on playing – I just want to see if the ability to have a better overview of our team and focus more on practicing myself to refine certain aspects of my play will be more beneficial to me as a player and our team moving forward.
I won't be disappearing, I will be actively streaming solo queue and you can find me on Twitter/Facebook - I will also be attending LCS Tenerife where I look forward to meeting all the fans there :)
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/snoopehTwitter - https://twitter.com/snoopehStream - http://www.twitch.tv/snoopeh"
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