The fifth map, downtown Busan. Match point. The Los Angeles Valiant won the Sanctuary map, the Atlanta Reign got MEKA Base.
Inside the Blizzard Arena, often filled with Valiant supporters, cheers of "Wings out!" grew steadily louder from the audience. The Valiant flipped the point after winning a teamfight and began building on their 90 percent. In the end, no one from the Reign could make it back to the point in time.
"It sort of came out of nowhere because of the boop," Valiant support Scott "Custa" Kennedy said. "I was expecting them to touch. But I don't know, it's weird when you go from Season 1 where we had a lot of success, winning was just something we did, for the most part, and then you go on such a big drought of not winning."
It wasn't on par with the Shanghai Dragons snapping a record-setting 42-match losing streak, but a weight had been lifted from the Valiant's shoulders as they picked up their first win of Season 2 of the Overwatch League on Friday after starting the season 0-8.
"To finally get that win, especially coming back in the way that we did, I think was really important to the players," Custa said. "Hoping that it helps the mentality moving forward."
"I felt good because we won and it was the first time, so we were happy. But in-game our play and our strats and the game was not that good," main tank Koo "Fate" Pan-seung said. "So another part, it was happy but kind of frustrating."
This was evident on the players' faces: relief, not joy. As the arena camera panned to the team, various Valiant members stood up, taking their headsets off but leaving their exhausted smiles. Flex tank Indy "Space" Halpern stumbled up first and gave Custa a hug. Walking to each other like zombies, albeit happy zombies, the team shared hugs all around before walking to the Reign's side of the stage to shake hands.
Prior to the start of the Overwatch League's 2019 season, the Los Angeles Valiant ranked fairly high in most preseason rankings. The worst they fared in the public's estimation was a middling, mediocre team.
With triple-tank, triple-support, or GOATS, as the primary meta composition, the Valiant seemed poised to do well in Stage 1 due to preexisting synergy, especially with their strong tank line of Space and Fate.
Fate had looked good not only in the Valiant's successful 2018 Stage 4 playoffs championship victory, but also on the South Korean Overwatch World Cup team during the offseason. Space turning age-eligible in the middle of last season and joining the Valiant onstage was one of the reasons why the team turned a mediocre season into a fairly successful one, despite losing to eventual the London Spitfire, the inaugural season champions, during the season playoffs. Due to these factors, and despite losing DPS player Terence "SoOn" Tarlier to the Paris Eternal, most expected the Valiant to look good immediately, then fade later in Stages 2-4.
Yet rather than helping the Valiant, the communication nuances of triple-triple compositions stymied them instead.
"If you listen to our comms, one of the things we talked about was just communication," Custa said. "That is probably one of our biggest flawed things right now. We have [Min-chul] "Izayaki" [Kim] coming in who doesn't speak a lot of English, we have Kyle ["KSF" Frandanisa] who is generally a pretty quiet guy, so the dynamic of the team sort of shifted."
"The problem that got accentuated is that when you get onstage, everything changes," Custa said. "When you're playing scrims it's very easy to say, 'This is what we do. This is how we do it.' And then you get onstage and people start calling things that they never usually call. People don't say things that they usually do say and you're falling out of rhythm, which just makes communication worse. I think that's one of our biggest problems."
"GOATS meta is like, everyone needs to do well and get a good combination in GOATS comps," Fate added. "Everyone got nervous, even me, and we were all nervous onstage. That's why we were different in practice and then did worse onstage."
With two players in the lineup who are quieter than their 2018 Valiant counterparts and a short stint with main tank player Kim "KuKi" Dae-kuk flexing into the support role, the team's in-game communication has suffered this season. At first, the Valiant's close 3-2 Week 1 loss to the Hangzhou Spark seemed like little cause for concern. Then they lost to both the New York Excelsior and Toronto Defiant in Week 2. Week 3 was another winless run for the Valiant with losses to the Vancouver Titans and Guangzhou Charge.
"When you have players like KSF, Izayaki, both of them are incredible players but haven't really been able to show that your debut season and you're going 0-8, it's really hard to not let that affect you," Custa said. "And the same thing with all of our veteran players. We have Fate and Space, both incredibly successful players throughout the league and they just can't get a win, so it adds that extra toll into everything."
With each loss, the pressure built. While the Valiant did face some of the league's toughest teams, come the end of a winless Stage 1, it was obvious that something had to change. The departure of coach Moon "Moon" Byung-cheol and in-house interpreter Andrew Kim precipitated an overhaul of the team's entire communication structure.
"The team has moved [to be] a lot more Western-orientated," Custa said. "What that does is that now we communicate in almost purely English outside of Izayaki, who we do have a translator for from time to time. But for the most part, we want to talk in English. What that does is it forces the Korean players to be able to communicate their thoughts about the game in English, which is very hard at times, and translators, that's what you need them for. But I think it's going to help us bridge that communication gap."
There's no quick fix for the Valiant, but winning their first match of the 2019 season is a starting point. Talentwise, they're not as bad as their winless record suggests. Their victory over the Reign takes some of the pressure off, but they still have a lot of work to do.
"This win, as much as it's going to feel good and it's going to lift that weight, I don't think anything changes," Custa said. "I think our team's made a lot of amazing steps to improve ever since Stage 1 ended. We've been doing a really good job of practicing, trying to focus on the issues and being like, OK, these are the players that we want to play with. How do we improve and how do we fix a lot of the problems that we're having right now?' It's been a step-by-step process, and I don't think that changes moving forward."