GMT Coach Raven On Scrimming In Walmart And The Spicy ALGS Championship Meta
“I would take scrim results with a grain of salt,” explains ‘Raven’, the coach of EMEA Apex Legends team GMT. “Unless a team is truly dominating every single day of scrim. Context is important.” I’m talking with Raven by DM ahead of the ALGS Championship, the pinnacle competition of Apex esports that boasts an impressive $2 million prize. The unspoken elephant in the room is TSM, as the fan-favourite team has been dominating pretty much every day of scrims ahead of the tournament.
But Raven provides some of the invaluable context that he mentioned. “It partially depends on the conditions they played them under,” he says. “For example, we were playing on terrible setups that would dip below 60fps.”
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The options in Raleigh, where the Championship is being held, are sparse. “[GMT scrimmed from an] esports arena inside a Walmart that were bitcoin mined and unoptimised, but we’re out of there now,” Raven explains. “We were at another place but there were screaming kids at a summer camp and no privacy.”
The videos of children running around the so-called ‘esports camp’ in Raleigh and using high-end gaming chairs as bumper cars have been circulated widely since Apex teams started arriving in North Carolina. But when the only other option is a 60fps rig that’s been hobbled by mining Bitcoin in the back of a supermarket, you can see why Raven might not pay the most attention to scrim results. However, analysing these lobbies is a big part of his job, despite the potential misinformation from teams on poor setups.
He won’t have any input mid-match during the ALGS tournament, but before competitions and between rounds Raven directs the team on what he calls a philosophical
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