Danish powerhouse team Astralis has, as usual, been at the forefront of the news recently in the professional scene of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This time, however, it isn’t due to more record-breaking streaks or acts of absolute domination; it’s due to players becoming exhausted with the constant stress of needing to perform daily in a wide variety of situations.
Star players in the Astralis roster Gla1ve and Xyp9x have both announced taking a leave of absence to recover from the exhaustion of maintaining their high pedigree through constant practices, scrimmages, and tournaments.
This decision has resulted in Astralis needing to fill a two-man sized hole in their roster, which they did with players Jakob ‘JUGi’ Hansen and Marco ‘Snappi’ Pfeiffer. Unfortunately, as is also expected, two players suddenly arriving in an established team with the task to get up to snuff within a week prior to competing in a relatively large tourney hasn’t gone to plan.
Astralis has been dealing with some fan backlash as the two new players to the roster, who are temporary as Astralis have noted as both Xyp9x and Gla1ve have a standing offer to return after the leave of absence, haven’t performed up to the standard that fans expect from Astralis, leaving ‘dupreeh’ to offer some choice words of wisdom on Twitter towards their fans.
The saga continues this morning as Astralis continue to suffer from unfortunate fallout for caring for their players, although the ruling is directed at ensuring unscrupulous teams can’t hot-swap their rosters around weekly.
Due to penalties that can be incurred via Valve’s Regional Major Ranking system (referred to as RMR colloquially), Astralis have opted to skip the upcoming cs_summit 6.
As they’ve changed their roster by swapping two players, Astralis (if they opted to compete in the upcoming RMR tourney) would drop 40% of their gained points (20% per player) within the RMR system. Astralis could opt to use a coach’s rule which would drop the score loss to 20% if they so chose to.
Still, that would bring their current lead of 720 points down to 432; 576 with the coaches rule. Alternatively, skipping the tourney entirely would still leave Astralis firmly in the top bracket of the RMR.
Some critics are claiming that the opting out of the tourney is more so due to Astralis being relatively unsure if they could bring both new players of the roster, ‘JUGi’ and ‘Snappi’, up to par prior to the tourney.
Frankly, even if Astralis were to come out on top of cs_summit 6 with their current roster configuration, the change to RMR wouldn’t be drastic enough to merit the attempt, along with the additional practice time that would be necessary to ensure the opportunity. And right now, Astralis could clearly benefit from some much-deserved time off. cs_summit 6 is slated to begin on July 22, and Astralis can rejoin the final RMR tourney with no penalty assuming they reform their classic roster.
