RE: VCT CN from my experience. I saw China was having some rough games in Champs with lots of people talking about ‘how could this happen’. I wanted to give my 2 cents from not only watchpartying CN and talking to the players/coaches a lot but also from briefly coaching there over the past few years. To be clear I love the teams still, the players are all absolutely lovely and the Chinese region as a whole is still incredibly close to my heart. I’m just adding my BRIEF observations. One of the most standout to me from the players POV is how much they are convinced that ‘aim beats everything’, if a player had a bad game or scrim, instead of feeling like it’s to do with utility, decision making or general game sense, they’ll go queue aim trainers for an hour straight or do deathmatch and I think a lot of that comes from the GMs too. There’s so much innate talent in China so the overfocus on aim means that players feel convinced to focus on that alone otherwise they’re likely to be replaced, especially when in game stats are constantly used to measure a players value, ‘if you’re not hitting 20 kills a game you’re underperforming’ like yeah no shit you have players going for silly peeks when that’s drilled into their brain. It’s been well over a year since I coached in China so stuff may have changed but especially with initiator utility being nerfed and the game requiring more ‘CS’-esque map clearing, it just feels like the higher ups in China are still just focussing on the wrong things. Again, I love the region and I know they can be a powerhouse in VALORANT when we learn the lessons here.