The FACEIT Global Summit stage
© FACEIT/Joe Brady
esports
Cloud9 and ENCE on their FACEIT Global Summit: PUBG Classic performances
The FACEIT Global Summit capped off Phase 1 of PUBG’s first esports circuit – we quizzed Cloud9 and ENCE on how they found it, and what they’re aiming for next.
Written by Matt Porter
5 min readPublished on
With the FACEIT Global Summit capping off Phase 1 of the inaugural PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds esports circuit, it’s easy to see how far PUBG esports has come over the past year or so. Most of the major esports organisations now have teams, and we’re starting to see those teams push the boundaries of professional play. The FACEIT Global Summit was the first truly global event where teams were there based on being the best from their individual regions, and as such, the competition was extremely tough. Checking out the festivities, we caught up with Cloud9’s Ben ‘Nerf’ Wheeler and ENCE’s Saku ‘SKUIJKE’ Sajakoski to find out what it was like.
ENCE were on the cusp of making it to the grand finals throughout the elimination stage, but ultimately fell just short. Cloud9 made it through, and squeaked into the prize money places in 12th place overall. There’s room for improvement, but both players have taken positives from the week’s event.
“Of course we feel disappointed when you have high expectations and you do kinda bad, it takes a toll on your brain,” SKUIJKE tells us. “But in the end, our team took it really good. It’s a good experience, you have to learn from it.
“Playing against Asian and Oceanic teams, it’s so different from playing North American and European teams. I wouldn’t call it tougher, it’s just different styles. When you play against mainly European teams, you have certain expectations of how the game’s going to go, and who’s going to play where.”
Cloud9 were also caught off guard by the different playstyles of other regions, but Nerf felt they handled it pretty well, all things considered.
A photo of Cloud9’s leader, Ben ‘Nerf’ Wheeler
Cloud9 have learned a lot from the event© FACEIT/Joe Stephens
“We were contested in our loot city and the teams weren't leaving so we had to adapt. We didn't want to try a 50/50, there's a lot of RNG [randomness] in PUBG, like someone gets a gun first and they kill you, so we decided to go away from that,” he says. “We tried looting different spots, playing the edge of the circle instead of centre. It was a different game.
“I think after all these things, we're looking back at it and honestly we came in this tournament and we didn't even do our usual strats. We looted new places, we had a different playstyle, we were trying to adapt to what the other teams are doing. Going in, not doing what we normally do, I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished. We learned a lot. Going back for Phase 2, we should be a better team.”
Not only was it the different play styles of other regions ENCE had to contest with, the pressure of performing at a huge tournament, with a large crowd at the ExCeL in London and thousands watching online, also got to them.
“Normally we have a happy atmosphere,” says SKUIJKE. “We laugh and chat inside the game even while we’re playing. Here it felt a bit stressed, having to do well. The pressure really hit us on the third day. Normally in past tournaments we really didn’t have pressure on the last day because we did great in previous days. You never want to have that pressure at the end.”
At the elimination stage on the Friday of the tournament, it was the top eight teams who would be going through to the finals. With ENCE hovering around 8th place for most of the day, the pressure really was on. In the end, it all came down to the final map. Every time the circle shifted, it seemed to move away from the Finns. Eventually they got sandwiched between teams as they chased after the circle, and ended up losing out. Fans would’ve been tearing their hair out, but SKUIJKE knows it’s all part of the game.
ENCE’s player, Saku ‘SKUIJKE’ Sajakoski
ENCE want to come back stronger© FACEIT/Joe Stephens
“Of course it was unlucky, but you can’t blame one game when you had 18 games. Sometimes you have a good circle and you have a good game, I’m not blaming circles at all.
We had maybe five or six good games out of 18, so that tells the story. We shouldn’t have qualified for the finals, we played so badly. Sometimes you play good, sometimes you play bad, you just have to learn.
“Sometimes we would just die one by one, or if someone calls ‘look east,’ and then two guys call ‘look east,’ and there's someone west, you get surprised. We just didn’t play our normal game. It felt like everyone was doing their own thing, not together. Not good decision making.”
It was a similar story for Cloud9 in the finals. A few good games here and there, sometimes helped out by circle placement. “We got some circles in the game we got second place,” said Nerf. “Those games we played well were the games we probably talked about before and we said ‘Let’s go into this next game and try our best.’ It was little sparks of hope where we just played well, and there was some circle favouring as well.”
In the end it was OP Gaming Rangers from South Korea who came out with the victory, but it really did come down to the wire. For ENCE and Cloud9, a global tournament victory isn’t necessarily that far away. They’ve grown and become better teams even throughout the span of a week by playing teams outside their comfort zone, and even with just a little more luck on their side, it could be only a matter of time before they’re lifting the next global event trophy.
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