coolio on cmtry: “The community destroyed him”

I had a bit of a hand in him becoming a rifleman. Because, in my opinion, he wasn’t really a sniper. If he tries his hand at being a rifleman, he might get a better sense of where he stands. It’s not like he needs to switch to the rifleman role 100 percent. In a way, it sounds crazy—he’s switching roles, moving from one to another. But when you think about it, I think other players switch roles too. I don’t think it’s that big of a risk for him, because I think he actually plays really well as a rifler. He was very good in clutch situations. In my opinion, he was one of the best clutch players in FUT, to be honest. So I don’t think he’s that bad as a rifler, even though it’s a new role for him. Yeah, it sounds like a gamble: it might work, or it might not.

When it comes to playing with the AWP, I think he’ll still dominate against Tier 2 teams. In that case, he’s not a bad sniper—he has the necessary skills. ...> He became a sniper because he was forced to do so. At least, that’s how I see it. Obviously, we worked a lot on this. My assistant spent a huge number of hours with him: they watched demos together, tried to coach him, and helped him improve. <...> We also realized that against stronger teams and stronger snipers, it was harder for him to outplay his opponents. Either he missed more often, or he ended up in positions where he couldn’t get kills. It all comes down to this: he needs to position himself correctly to get frags. And it seems to me that he had some minor issues with that.

It bothers me that everyone will remember that match against Team Vitality. To be honest, in about half the cases when he died, he didn’t stand a chance at all. In some rounds, in my opinion, he made the mistake himself by taking a bad position. In a sense, he played poorly, but once he found himself in that position, he had no chance of surviving. That’s exactly how I saw it, both during the match and afterward. And when people look at his stats, they see that we started playing against top-tier teams, and his stats there are poor—I don’t remember exactly what they were, something like 0.97 or something along those lines, it doesn’t matter—people will remember exactly that and decide, “This guy is a bad sniper.” But he’s playing against ZywOo, and before that he played against HEROIC. 

Especially young players: they open HLTV, listen to podcasts and interviews, and read comments. And they see a whole thread on HLTV where people are writing: “cmtry is a bot,” “cmtry needs to be cut from the team.” That doesn’t help the player. He’s only 18 years old, and everyone needs to understand that. I mean, we can try to boost his confidence, tell him he’s the best player. But the thought still lingers in his head that everyone thinks he’s a damn bot. It’s really hard to go through something like that. And then he plays another match—and especially in that game against Vitality, he was… I don’t know, I’ve never seen him like that. When we lost, he just walked over, got in the car, and said: “Guys, I’m sorry, I lost this match.” But it’s not just about him. And then he gets a wave of hate on top of that. I watched those clips, and I understand how psychologically tough this is for an 18-year-old guy. It really is very hard. And yes, that was also a serious problem on our team, because everyone there is very young and, in a sense, everyone faces similar challenges. We tried to support each other and help each other get through these difficult times. But when the community turns against us like this—especially against a young player—it’s insane. If he’d been playing at Tier 1 for five years and delivering those kinds of results, I’d understand why people are complaining about him and insulting him. But it all happened too fast. And, essentially, the community destroyed him.