I had the pleasure of talking with Robert “RaMz” Rockhill about both the old and new BeastCoast rosters, coaching, and the role of In Game Leaders in a game like Siege.
This is a big question for the Org as a whole; why rebuild almost completely with four new players? I’m sure BeastCoast had and had the ability to stick with the core of last year.
Well, we initially were going to continue with the old group. And Mark contacted me and told me what he needed help with and what he felt like I could bring to the table and I said sure, I’ll come help out. I needed to take some time to evaluate the team and see where the problems really lie. Because until you’re actually working with a team, you don’t really understand what the problems are. Basically, after a few weeks and playing the Invite Quals with that group, we just didn’t see what the roster could actually do to achieve the goals that we wanted.
This is just my opinion, but I think that they were the worst team last season and last year of NAL. I know that they weren’t the team that technically got relegated, but SSG could have thrown that game, and it would be the other way around. And then I wouldn’t even be here, because the stipulation that I gave to Mark was that if the team was put in a relegation position, I wasn’t going to take the role to then just get potentially relegated with that same team. That would, that would just be a bad decision on my part.
So your participation on this team as an assistant coach is based on the fact that if we do not perform, if we do not succeed, I’m not here essentially. You’re here to win, That’s your intention?
Well, that’s obviously my goal. I think everyone’s goals are different. My goal is to one day, lift the hammer. I know that it’s a big goal, and it’s probably it’s never it’s never gonna happen. But it’s like, you have to shoot for the stars to land on the moon.
I’m not going to sit here and say that the team has to win for me to stay. That’s not the case. I just knew, based on your previous question, that the team needed to be functioning at a certain point for me to say, “This is worth the risk”, because it’s always a risk. You have to evaluate it, not like a cold, cut and dry business decision, but you have to evaluate and say, “Does this team have potential?” You don’t know until you look at what the potential for improvement is, and what you’re working with in terms of players and the way that they work. The old roster just wasn’t that group.
We had less than favorable results during the Invite Quals and I’m not going to say that was the last straw. But when you look at scrim determined data, meaning data that’s compiled across multiple weeks to a month of practice and trying to get the players to play better. You see deficiencies and not just in their statistical standpoint, but as their roles in their communication and their reactivity, their awareness. Things that you need to be evaluating at all times with any player on any team, regardless of level.
So from that Invite Quals match that we lost, we literally pulled up the scoreboard from that match, and looked at the scoreboards and compiled data from scrims and said, these are in line with what we saw. These players in these specific roles are not doing their job. They’re not doing them in practice, and they’re not doing them on game day. So that wasn’t the last straw, but it was like the catalyst that brought on like multiple changes.
It’s just that there was a lack of what seemed, in my mind to be, I don’t want to call it motivation, everyone’s motivated to a certain degree, but there just wasn’t enough motivation where it could actually be pointed in a direction towards improvement.
So kind of a come in honing in on the players of the [new] roster. I know Drip and Slash were on the FPL Queens team during the Six Invitational Qualifiers. Did their run at that, in that bracket bump up your opinion of them as potential pickups?
Well, before I was even officially on the BeastCoast staff, and I was just kind of talking with Mark, I was putting together a team with Gotcha, before he went to TSM. that team was going to be, Gotcha, Barring, Surf, Slash, and Oasis.
We were going to put together that team and say, “Let’s go to Challenger League, and let’s just run it back, but with a fresh new look.” I had already told Gotcha what I was doing, because he and I were always really close, and he told me what he was thinking about doing with TSM. At that point, that’s when that roster dispersed. As BeastCoast’s situation was evolving, and we were thinking about like, “Okay, maybe we need to replace more players than just one.” Once that idea got kind of thrown out there. I was like, well, who can I grab?
Well, Surf is right here and we need the role that he’s playing currently. So we’ll give them a try out. Then we also tried out Slash, and Slash saw what I was seeing of what was wrong with that team in general as a whole. And I told him, I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to pick up Surf, but we might make more changes. So just don’t think that like we’re we’re not interested in trying you out again. So then after we made roster changes, then more people started coming in, and, you know, showing what they could do with a newer identity to themselves.
It’s kind of like you can’t always take a car that’s a beater and make it make it a racecar. Sometimes you just have to create a new build for the car. That’s kind of like where we were going with, if picking up one person on BeastCoast was putting a pair of shiny new rims on a rusty El Camino. Like, what’s that really do to the value of the car?
Swapping from the players a little bit more to the coaching staff, like, how does that dynamic with you and Mark play out?
Well, we’ve known each other for a really long time, basically, the entire time the game has been out. We’ve been teammates before, in Pro League. You can call it what you will back then. It was different, obviously, but nothing’s changed. It’s still the same old. So he would say I’m the same as I used to be and I’d say he’s the same as he used to be and we bounce ideas back and forth off of each other.
When our team is having a problem in a scrim or we’re trying to learn something new. We’re trying out a new strategy, new map, new, whatever it might be. If it’s anything new, we try to write something down for the team to try, they go out and they try it. And then we kind of evaluate it, a basic basic trial and error process. But the solution we come up with for the trial and error is a collaboration between him and I and other staff members, and maybe some players’ opinions of like, how it can be improved upon. Even if it’s something that works statistically, 70% of the time 80% of the time, there’s always room for improvement, there’s no way to make it perfect, but how do we make it even better.
We’ll say, like, hey, we like it when you play this position, we like it when you do this. But when the other team is doing this, and they see you’re playing this position, and they just ignore you, you need to move here, you need to get more active, you need to understand it. Get your awareness higher and understand that something isn’t the same when they send one drone at you and they’re not sending another. And they’re just real quiet for 30 seconds. It’s kind of like, okay, read into that a little bit, say to yourself, “Is this guy just holding me here? Or can I just leave? Am I holding anything anymore? Because they’ve changed their focus.” That’s just an example. That’s kind of how we go about things like we try to delve a little bit deeper into what you would consider just like the typical gameplay aspects of things.
With Mark as a head coach, what would you say his strengths in this position are?
As a coach, Mark is really motivated and he wants the team to win. Those are, I think those are the two biggest things. He’s not just sitting around and hoping that the team wins. He’s actually, you know, on the edge of his seat, saying the team needs to be better, the team needs to do this. He is identifying deficiencies just like I am, we’re on the same wavelength on that. We have a very high standard of the team and ourselves and being less than, at least on par is frustrating for us. And so and that’s something that he and I need to work on together as a duo is sometimes the team can get, you know, there’s a process the team isn’t going to be as good as we think they should be.
And more on Mark as a coach, what his strengths are, what he’s really good at is he also has the player experience of playing in multiple LANs. He’s won an event, you can call it what you will. People nowadays might look at that and say, like, “Oh, that’s not the same as it is now.” It’s obviously different. The game is evolving, the scene is evolving, it always changes. But certain things don’t. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. I’ll just say this, because I think it’s relevant to a lot of people’s thought processes.
There’s a reason why there are still so many Year One pros, whether they’re from Xbox or PC initially, that are still playing the game. They know how to do certain things, I’m not talking mechanically, I’m talking about match preparation, team communication, team understanding. There’s something that we all learned in year one that they continue to do, and they’re not going to tell you what it is because they don’t want you to know what it is because it’s what gives them an edge.
He’s really creative. He’s got great ideas, and my kind of practicality and dedication and work ethic grounds it in reality, because sometimes Mark has very ambitious ideas that could work in theory, but they need a little bit more analysis. So that’s what I bring, but on the exact same side of it, I feel like I’m not a creative person. So Mark balances that out in me because he has the creativity to think about certain situations differently than I do. That’s how we work together to balance things out between us. And it’s interesting, because we’ve always worked well together, no matter what capacity. Everything is usually pretty straightforward like, “Can we try this?” “Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s try it” or “maybe it doesn’t make sense. We got to change this and maybe we have to move that over here.” That’s kind of more than nitty gritty stuff, but that’s why we work well together as a duo. I think that those are a lot of Mark’s strengths. You can call last year for Mark. Coming up to this point was like his rookie coach season.
What are your expectations for this team in the first stage of 2022, and kind of the year as a whole, because, as I said, it’s a new team, it takes some time to get up to speed and get that cohesion.
I definitely believe that we could, if everything goes the way that we predict it to, we could look at ourselves playing a match somewhere towards the end of the season that could determine us being in the Top Four. I really wouldn’t be surprised that we were in that position in Stage One. This definitely is not a last place team. This is a team that is going to really surprise a lot of teams and players, and other people watching. Spectators, observers, casters, they’re going to see us go toe to toe with one of what they consider to be the favorite team that might have a 99% prediction on Twitch. And we’re going to take them to 7-7 match point and everyone’s just going to be like, “Holy moly, what’s going to happen? Can they win? Are they actually going to do this?” And I think that’s going to happen more than once before people really get a read on how good this team actually is.
I’m always curious about the kind of role of In Game Leaders in Siege, it seems like a much more loose role in this game as compared to Valorant or Counter Strike, where you would have a dedicated In Game Leader. Could you comment a little bit on the structure of BeastCoast in that regard? Who’s leading the squad when it comes to calling the shots?
I’m going to answer your question like one one part at a time. So when it comes to the actual IGLing role in Siege, I think that right now and definitely when I played and for a long time after, the IGL was a micromanager. Someone that literally calls a push and then you see things, and you tell people what to do, where to go, and why. Sure you have a strat, but at a certain point sometimes you have to say “alright, we need to nade this guy out and then you’re going to run in and then I’m going to hold this guy here.” That’s the IGLing l was doing. IGLing, in my opinion, used to be much more micromanaging. But I think now that the game has evolved to the point where everyone needs to be contributing in some way to the ideas and to the things that they’re trying to do. If you had to guess what the two biggest, most important fundamentals of Siege are for improving as a player, what would you guess it to be?
It would have to be probably positioning and communication as my two
You’re half right, it is communication and intel gathering. These are just my opinions. But basically, if everyone on your team is able to gather intel and convey the intel together and understand what it means for each person at the same time. You might have an In Game Leader who’s the most experienced player, who is dictating calls off of it. But sometimes that call that the IGL makes is not being made off of 100%, reliable intel, because they can’t see what you’re seeing. So everyone needs to contribute in the sense that if the IGL says, “Well, we can plant here, and I’m covering this.” And then one of your teammates says, “Well, I have to destroy this, I have to get rid of this guy, and move them out of this position. Because I know for a fact he’s not gonna let you guys do that plan.”
And the IGL is not calling that, I’m saying the IGL can’t see that, from their perspective. Maybe they do see it. And maybe that’s just a measure of how good certain IGLs are. But I know that in general, if everybody can communicate, and gather intel, and talk through the problem correctly, within the three minutes, one person telling everyone where to go, isn’t the right way to play it. It’s yeah, make sure you have five players that all understand what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it all at once. So, yeah, that was something that we definitely were taking into account in building this team. And Slash is our primary IGL. But, you know, he’s not the only one making decisions. He’s not the only one that’s facilitating things.
And so and in order to bring some of that out of some of the other players sometimes Mark and I have to tell them, “You’re, you’re playing this like we tell someone like you’re playing this operator in this position.” “At this point in the round, you need to be asking your teammates questions” What do you need to be facilitated for a plant? Like you need to identify where you want to plant the bomb, and what you need to what needs to be done to do it.
One IGL isn’t calling all of these things because they can’t, they’re not every player. Right? So you need each player in certain scenarios at certain times within a round to be a little bit more of a leader than they’re used to. Because if your flank watch is calling out that there’s one guy flanking from here and one guy flanking from here and it’s like a really pivotal moment. They might have to tell somebody to stay gun up watching this, they could be telling their IGL to turn around and don’t stop watching this corner.
That’s part that’s what I’m saying, the IGL is not hearing that call out from the flank watch and then telling his teammate to turn around and watch something. The flank watch has to tell his teammate to turn around and watch this and then the IGL can say “Alright, everyone else hit the site.” Depending on the man count and stuff. That’s how it all kind of ties into each other as everybody has to be contributing towards the victory in the comms and the intel gathering and understanding what’s happening around the map at all at all times in different instances.
So Slash is technically our primary IGL. Because he’s the most experienced player, he’s been to the biggest tournaments, he’s had the longest running success minus the last year with OXG. Because that was just that was kind of just a ridiculous team in general, in my opinion. He’s not the one that’s just telling everyone what to do. He makes great calls when he’s alive. And he makes great calls for everyone else when he’s dead. But there are certain instances and around where he’s just holding an angle, and someone else has now taken the reins and say, “All right, now it’s my turn, like, I’m in the spotlight. This is my IGL time,” you know what I’m saying? It moves, because this is my specialty. Now, like your specialty was getting us to this point. Now it’s my turn, you know. Yeah, because they’re in the better position to do it there. If your IGL is not going to play your hard support, you can’t have your IGL telling your support player to go plant and the support players like, “But there’s a guy here, and this angle is not covered. And there’s whatever here,”
The IGL can’t watch everything and have all the information to make the perfect call, it’s on the individual teammates to communicate that as well as be able to kind of almost ask, not ask, but almost demand, the resources they need to succeed as well.
Yeah, exactly. And that hard support player, once we get to that point, if no one’s listening to them, and people are just yelling at him to go plant. It’s like, what are you really doing? What are you actually accomplishing, you’re not doing anything, you’re just getting to a point and then thinking, “We should be able to plant now,” but you’re not listening to all your resources. So the IGL role exists, but it needs everyone’s mentality behind what it means. I think it needs to be adjusted a little bit. And not every team functions the same way. That’s just in theory, you can say that “Oh, the old G2 team had one IGL.” But in reality, like they were all contributing, and you can tell by their game.
Yeah, you can listen to all those old voice recordings that Ubisoft provided, every now and again, you could really tell everyone was providing input, even if Fabian was the one who made the final call on what they did. Everyone was contributing to putting information in there so that he could make that final call.
Right. And not everyone has to create some kind of complex IGL system behind what they’re doing. All it needs to be is that up to a certain point, when it’s like when it’s the support player bomb planters time to shine, they’re the one that needs to tell you “I need you to run in and die so that I can refrag you in plant.” They need to be able to say that, like they need to be able to confidently say that and you need to confidently believe that what they’re saying is what it’s going to take to win based on what they’re seeing from their position, and how we’re going to win the round.