Vitality, ZywOo and the GOAT question

The fallout from Vitality’s second consecutive Major win, and ZywOo’s record-breaking MVP haul has seen the drawing of battle lines over two important (at least, in discussing Counter-Strike terms) debates.

Are Vitality the best team ever?

And did ZywOo really deserve that Major MVP, and has he been the best player in the world this year?

We’re going to discuss both sides of each argument and give you THE definitive conclusion to both. No fence-sitting, no BS, just the cold hard truth (our opinion. Same thing).

Let’s start with the team as a whole.

Until this year it was largely accepted that the greatest team of all time was 2018/19 Astralis, with an unsaid understanding that they were essentially untouchable and would never be topped. Tuning in to an event with Astralis in it back then was essentially a waste of time past the group stage, because the rest was inevitable.

At least in the groups there was a bit of tension as to who would be the ones to lose to Astralis and Liquid en route to another one-sided Astralis-favoured final.

That feeling of invulnerability was something Vitality had at the start of this year, but perhaps not quite to the same degree of inevitability. Even though they never lost, they didn’t quite have the same unbeatable aura that Astralis did, and we can’t quite quantify that, but we think it’s still reasonable.

However, maybe that works in their favour.

The reason Vitality might not have felt quite as insurmountable is because the other teams were actually really quite good this year. Astralis, in comparison, had Liquid to contend with, but nobody else even felt like they were playing the same game as them. Vitality’s ‘Liquid’ was MOUZ, who in fairness were quite similar, but Spirit, G2, Falcons, The MongolZ and later FURIA were all excellent teams who would be consistent tournament contenders in most other eras of the game.

The fact they weren’t really winning any events is due to Vitality, and Vitality alone.

Anyway, we’re hamming up the ‘felt less unbeatable’ bit for narrative - they basically didn’t lose for months. They won Katowice, Pro League, BLAST Lisbon, Melbourne, Rivals Season 1, Dallas and the Austin Major. In that time, they lost one ‘series’, a BO1 to Legacy.

They lost 16 maps from February to July, out of 92, an 82.6% win rate. That’s absolutely absurd. They had the highest round win%, 4v5%, 5v4%, Op.kill rate, multikill rate… you’d be hard pressed to find a stat they weren’t the best in the world at.

There was talk of them going on to beat NIP’s 87-0 record at one point, but the loss to Legacy ruined that a bit. They were incredibly dominant.

The second half of the year has been less extreme, with a loss in the IEM Chengdu final, top four at Cologne and Rivals, and a loss in the final in London, too. Their untouchability was starting to fade, but they still had it in them to stay in the mix and peak at the perfect time and win the Major.

What makes them so good? Quite simply, you will struggle to find a more stacked yet selfless roster in history. When your third and fourth men are flameZ and mezii, you have a depth of talent that makes the French national football team blush.

When one of those stars is as consistent as ZywOo, your floor is essentially top eight at every event, and there’s no better player to add to a team if you want to win trophies than ropz. History suggests adding ropz to your team leads to silverware almost immediately, and pretty consistently thereafter.

But it’s not just as simple as that; they have a style that allows them to abuse that advantage by getting everyone involved, and they make very few silly mistakes. You rarely see anyone on Vitality dying in a stupid way, and that’s in a team including flameZ and apEX, who love to be aggressive.

There have only been a few teams in history as stacked man for man as Vitality, and none of them were as cohesive and selfless. ZywOo is nowhere near as selfish as one might expect of a player who is consistently topping the ratings, ropz does his thing and rarely imposes on others, and mezii could be a star for someone else and is happily playing like interz for this team.

Are they the best team ever, though?

They’d smash Astralis on any map in the game, but that’s not really a fair way to judge this. Astralis and Vitality were about as dominant as each other in terms of trophies, but Vitality arguably did it against a better field - and we don’t mean in terms of the fact that the level of play is higher, just that the third best team in the world is actually a team capable of winning an event now.

Astralis were dominant because they were so far ahead of the curve that it felt like they were playing a different game. Vitality feel like they’re playing the same game as everyone else, but just better. Everyone has the same knowledge this time around, but apEX is still leading his team to as dominant (or nearly as dominant) a run.

We’re erring on the side of yes - Vitality are the best team ever.

What about ZywOo?

The Astralis comparison is interesting as the parallels between ZywOo and dev1ce are unignorable.

Both racked up MVPs, trophies and big ratings like Erling Haaland does goals, but neither has the same impact on the cultural zeitgeist as their flashier, more aggressive counterpart. Everyone loved s1mple (well, except Woro2k), and everyone loves donk, but ZywOo and device don’t seem to have the same universal acclaim.

At least in the fans’ eyes - HLTV can’t stop giving ZywOo the MVP, even when it’s a bit controversial to do it. Vitality won the Major, but ZywOo was relatively quiet in the final (quiet by his standards, he was still excellent) and ropz and mezii both had bigger moments in the final. ropz’ final map was extraordinary, and highlighted that actually, he’d been better in the semi-final and the final than ZywOo by rating, and sort of by feel as well.

mezii had an unbelievable map two, as well as a sensational performance in the semi to keep Vitality in the game, but his overall rating was lower than ZywOo’s by a bigger margin, so was never really getting MVP. ropz, though, probably had an argument.

The conversation felt like it should have been about ZywOo being back-to-back Major MVP and his third overall Major MVP - the first player ever to do so - but instead it was about whether or not he really deserved it.

HLTV pointed to his kills per round win, an unusual choice of stat but a fair one to choose. ZywOo was contributing massively to round wins, more than anyone else, according to that stat, and that was enough to tip the scales it seemed. It does seem unusual for them to move away from the rating 3.0 and round swing they’ve spent so long creating, but Striker suggested that the gap between ropz and ZywOo in those two series’ wasn’t as big as it seemed.

We… disagree.

Like any stat, kills per round win is not worth anything on its own. The team is set up in a way where ZywOo is in the most important positions, and as such his kills are likely to be the most valuable. The team is created in a way where ZywOo has to make a crucial difference a lot, and as such, will always come out well on that stat.

In fact, how many more rounds might they have won against Spirit on map one, or FaZe on map one, if ZywOo had been getting those important kills?

Not every kill is equal, as HLTV so astutely point out, but neither is every death, missed kill or underperformance. When ZywOo isn’t at his best, it matters more because he is set up to succeed, and that ropz and mezii bailed him out multiple times in those games means he did not play up to the level that he can.

He was in no way poor, and he did absolutely farm The MongolZ, but he was not better than ropz in those two games (he wasn’t better than mezii in those two series either) and those were the big ticket games.

The thing about the term ‘MVP’ is that it’s meant to be the most valuable player, not even just the best. ropz and mezii were more valuable because they contributed more in the bigger games, the more valuable games.

Anyway. Enough about that.

Is ZywOo the best player ever?

No, he’s not. Even if you think he deserved this MVP (it’s not wrong to think so, we just disagree), he’s never truly been the best player at any given time, bar a small pocket where s1mple fell off and donk was still in nappies.

He’s not a better player than donk, and he wasn’t a better player than s1mple. We’ve written at length above about how stacked that Vitality team is, and ZywOo has far more to rely on when he’s not dominating. donk doesn’t have that, and puts up absolutely incredible numbers consistently.

ZywOo has won more, and that is a fair point to make, but it’s not like donk hasn’t won trophies. donk has already won everything there is to win, and he’s not been playing as long as ZywOo either. By the end of his career - or the midpoint - you’d expect he might have matched this haul of silverware.

The Frenchman simply has too many big games where he hasn’t been as good as he can be, and while he’s extremely consistent in group stages and has had a lot of high quality playoff performances, he’s never quite had a ‘donk at Katowice’ performance. He’s been consistently the second best player in the world for a long, long time, and will go down as one of the absolute best to ever play it.

But for us?

He’s not the best ever.