Sentinel's Valorant

Sentinel VALORANT Champions Tour Stage Three Challengers One | Photo from: Google

With such a brand new sport scenario in VALORANT's infancy, there are still only a few full rosters with this game being started on the early day of publication of this article, on June 2nd 2020. Among these, a number of teams have shown promising achievements and promises, giving us something to look forward to, but it wasn't the lists we were excited about at first. No, we saw a list of Arial's names on a single red and white website for the first few times and felt a great rush with T1 and Sentinels star-studded rosters.

The signing of Brax to T1 was the first for a VALORANT team, but Sinatraa was the biggest publicity bomb for the Sentinels. Sinatraa was the MVP and champion of both the Overwatch League and the Overwatch World Cup in the same year, and despite appearing less on stage in 2020, he showed no signs of slowing down. When the news broke that he had been signed to the Sentinels' VALORANT team, both worlds were rocked, either with disappointment at losing one of the greats, or with excitement at seeing what the young gun could do.

Sentinels, on the other hand, did not stop with star power. Very few VALORANT teams can afford to entice Tier 1 Counter-Strike talent away from the thriving game with a storied history, and the best teams in the early stages of the esport scene appear to be made up of the cream of the crop from CS's Tier 2 scene. Sentinels, on the other hand, has managed to score not only SicK but also ShahZaM on the Complexity roster, both of whom have shown face and even performed respectably in Tier 1 CS events.

They didn't stop there, either, signing Zombs, their own Apex Legends pro, and dapr, another Tier 1 CS pro with mediocre results, putting down a roster that, on paper, has the most star power of any other team except T1. But what difference has that made on the server? Not much, unfortunately. To be fair, every new team requires some time to adjust, and the Sentinels have no reason to be any different. Some of the teams that have been doing well, such as mousespaz, do have pre-existing synergy from previous rosters, but these aren't the only teams that Sentinels have been losing to in tournaments.

In reality, they lost to streamer teams in the T1 x Nerd Street Invitational and were annihilated by mousespaz in the Elite Esports Rivalry Bowl. Some Sentinels players, such as Zombs and a few of the stand-ins they had before signing dapr, have also had poor individual performances. Some of this is due to Zombs' lack of competitive Counter-Strike experience in comparison to the rest of his team.

The most concerning aspect of the Sentinels' performance thus far is not that they consistently lose to other full-fledged rosters; after all, some teams will always be better than others. The real concern is that they are losing to teams that were thrown together at the last minute, full of streamers and older, retired pros from other games. Teams that don't scrim together like Sentinels, teams with players like Shroud who openly admit on stream that they play VALORANT for fun. To be fair to Sentinels, they are already on the right track.

The game is new, and they are new as well, and they are improving and putting up better numbers every day. Rather than scrim top teams privately behind the scenes, Sentinels initially chose to 5 stack in ranked games, with each player streaming their own perspective. Now that the scene has been fleshed out, they can hone their skills in a more competitive environment without risking their strategies being leaked to thousands of online viewers.