Gentlemen and Gentlemen, you are done with VCT EMEA league for the year. The team has now been officially relegated after amassing a cruel 3-10 record all through Kickoff, Stage 1, and Stage 2, with one series still to be played. Yep, that bad.
For the uninitiated, Gentle Mates was one of the teams that had to fight entry into the league through Valorant last year. This season? Disastrous on a big scale. Couldn’t even finish matches on home soil. In fact, one player put it this way: “They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory.” Ouch.
Initial reactions to the one side brought forth: Nimrod Grinberg among others averred their map scores weren’t as bad as the record would really indicate, while folks like STEALTH1X considered it utter disgrace, gleefully saying Gentle Mates and Apeks (the other relegated squad) were the worst teams this year in EMEA. And honestly, can we blame them on the 3-10?
The one that’s going to hurt is that Gentle Mates will not even have a chance to get to Ascension to fight their way back in. So no second chance for this year. According to Riot’s rules, since both non-partnered teams, Gentle Mates and Apeks, finished in the bottom four, they’re outright dropped. The two open slots will now be awarded to the top two teams from Ascension instead.
But wait, there is more: Some insiders, including Twitter user Theyy, say Gentle Mates may now refocus completely: leaving Valorant behind and trying a fresh start with CS:GO and Call of Duty. If true, this is a wild turn of events after one messy season, but hey, maybe being stomped to oblivion that hard may well be worth a consideration for a fresh start.
That said, some of these voices still haven’t dismissed them altogether. At some point, Equinox DFS suggested that if they dropped to Tier 2, it would be outright unfair to the competition, because everybody knows that they are still better than most of the amateur teams. But for now, they’ve entered the history books. No more VCT in the present or in the near future, no Ascension, no nothing.
And what would this leave for the org anyway? Rumors then surfaced claiming that they might be quitting Valorant altogether, which…would you blame them after this year? And then the rest of us get to watch and see which two teams emerge from Ascension to take those empty spots.
The only thing for sure though is that this season has mercilessly shown the world that there’s no safety in esports anymore. Not even the slickest branding (seriously? Gentleman Mates had one of the best merch lines in the league). With that spirit though, maybe they come back and do better. Or they totally change lanes and put on a show in COD. Either way, we’ll be stalking.
And so another chapter is closed in the chaotic history of VCT EMEA. Here’s hoping someone a little better than these season bottom-fraggers puts up a fight next season.
