G2's move for r1nkle over SunPayus makes no sense

G2 have benched SunPayus and brought in r1nkle in perhaps the most confounding move of Rostermania yet.

G2 finally looked like a potentially elite team in Cologne, and went toe-to-toe with one of the best in the world, losing only in an overtime marathon, just to kick the AWPer who was their second highest rated player.

Genius timing as ever.

Alright, he wasn’t brilliant or anything, but G2 had bigger problems throughout the tournament than SunPayus and have done all season. SunPayus is good without being truly elite (though certain members of rdy.gg rate him much higher than that), and would not have been our first choice of player to replace. We’re not sure we would have replaced anyone.

We definitely wouldn’t have swapped him for r1nkle, who is relatively underwhelming.

We definitely wouldn’t have swapped him for r1nkle, who is relatively underwhelming.

It’s not that r1nkle is terrible. We actually quite like r1nkle. He’s a fun player to watch, very talented and at one point we really thought he was going to go on and be one of the best AWPers in the world. Hell, the model quite likes r1nkle too.

Although, please note that we've had to set the 'notable events' to zero just to even see him on the list. Which says a lot about the tier he's playing in.

It’s just… he wasn’t particularly consistent in the lower tiers, and often flattered to deceive on NIP. While he just about edges out SunPayus in our little tool, SunPayus is doing it against Vitality and Spirit, not GamerLegion and EYEBALLERS. Rifling translates a little easier than AWPing - AWPing in tier one is practically a different game to tier two. It’s more about reading the game two steps ahead than it is the core mechanics of AWPing.

SunPayus is experienced and hardened in that atmosphere, where r1nkle will have to learn and learn fast. He’s a talented kid, and in another world a move to G2 would have made perfect sense, but he stagnated at NIP and is replacing a guy who is nowhere near as bad as people might have you think. SunPayus is a very serviceable tier one AWPer, and that’s a far cry from where r1nkle has been of late.

He’s had some incredible games in the last six months, and been a part of most of G2’s good results, whereas NertZ in the best roles on the teams has not settled in at all. We don’t want to point fingers (although we explicitly are doing that here), but if you’re trying to find the ‘problem’ on G2, it’s not the AWPer.

Your anchor is topfragging most games while your star is lagging behind. Must be the AWPer’s fault.

NertZ has been disappointing so far, despite the expectations. He’s generally a very good player, and we’re not going to write him off, but his time on G2 has not gone to plan and it’s not entirely obvious why. huNter- has even backed off his roles to give him more space, and they’re just not getting the production they’d hoped for.

We even wanted to make a counter-argument against ourselves here, because we were trying to figure out why you’d want to make this change - so we went and found the last event the two both played at.

r1nkle had a higher rating at this one, so we were thinking that maybe there was something in our data that would suggest there was an inkling of an idea, but no.

We were informed in no uncertain terms that “GOATPayus still lowkey mogs”.

What remains is a question mark, and one that is probably filled with a reason that comes from outside of the server. SunPayus is one of the most talented snipers in the world, and has come into some decent form of late, and there’s no real gameplay reason to replace him with r1nkle - who again, we like, but isn’t ready for this move yet.

It’s likely a personality clash, or some sort of intra-personal conflict within G2 that has made them make this switch.

(Even then, we probably would have gone with kl1m over r1nkle.)

At least, we hope so. Otherwise they’ve gone a bit mad.