Week 5 - Ascent vs Generation - Match Preview/Predictions

   sigafoo   - 11/8/2017

Clean win and in



This season has gone bye quickly, a little quicker for Ascent. As two of their koth matches were played (in full, including half times) in less than thirty minutes. The ESEA-I team who is currently in 2nd place in that league is looking like a shell of itself in 5th place this season in RGL. Generations, last season’s 4th place finishers, seems to have improved since last season and is sitting in 4th place.

Everything is on the line in this final match of the regular season. Generations is currently sitting at 4.3 points, Ascent only has 3 points. Meaning that in this match, the only way that Ascent can move on to the playoffs is to not only win this match, but they must not lose a single round. Can Ascent rise to the occasion or will Generations ride in on their dark horse to keep their spot in the playoffs.

You can watch the match live this Sunday @ 9:30 Eastern on https://twitch.tv/extvesports.

Ascent



In writing this section, I feel like I’m going to have to go to thesaurus.com to look up synonyms of awful, because that’s the only way you can describe Ascents season so far. Having watched most of their games, it seems they’re just not comfortable with the fact that there is nine classes in the game, not just four. Or understanding the basics of the most popular gamemodes in tf2, payload and koth.

I think the best example I saw of this was in the first week on pl_upward where yomps on scout was defending last. His team was down a couple people, but easily could of held on to the point. He then decided to try to make a 1v5 play outside of main and got destroy. Which put him on 20s respawn and was one of the reasons faint was able to push them so easily into last, which is a very defendable point.

It’s thoughtlessness, it’s not understanding the gamemode and it’s why they’re losing. If you look at their roster yomps, showstopperk1ng, Bdonski, Nursey,Paddie,ma3la. You probably know every name on their and you know them to be quality, but if you look at the logs from their most recent match against Velocity. They were out fragged 55 to 28.

Ascent also has been running Uncle Dane on engineer and I would say that he reminds me of Dave+ from way back. He looks great when his team is up, but struggles to contribute when his team is behind. And some of that is just being engineer is hard when down, but the great thing about Prolander is you can switch off any class to something better. He’s been playing more spy, but it’s clear he’s still not comfortable on it.

Ascent is, simply put, is failing to meet their potential.

Generations


After having some roster issues late last season, I was happily surprised to see Generations reform in season 2. It seems they’ve also gotten better with the new players they picked up. Bowl is a hard working, up and coming demo main and it shows. Such as in their Borneo match against Froyo where he top damaged that round. Shotaway plays full time spy and does well with it, often finishing in top half of his team in terms of frags. In the match vs Faint Gaming he out fragged most of the Faint players.

The rest of the is made up of Jaaay, Freelander, Alto, gert and wax. Coming into this season I would of placed them as the 5th with not having a good chance to make playoffs, but now they are in control of their future. What really separates out this team of up and coming players is the passionate that they show on the field of play. Even in matches against the top teams like Froyotech and Velocity. They are full of fight and refuse to go down without taking a few swings first. They even came close to an upset again Faint Gaming on viaduct, but lost in the overtime round, final score: 3-4.

Generations is, simply put, exceeding what I thought their potential was.

Prediction



With this being a payload, I question whether or not Ascent will have learned from their mistakes earlier in the season. Though they have a team of great players, can they match that with their play. Will they have the coordination in their pushes? Ascent does not have a strong sniper main, nor spy, so I expect gert to be able to help out his team a lot since he shouldn’t have much pressure on him.

Nursey is a long time highlander player and might be able to help her team understand how they need to push the different areas of the map. I wouldn’t be shocked if Generations goes for a ban of the Crusader's Crossbow, to limit how much Nursey can help her team. Shotaway on spy should continue his strong level of play, as Ascent has shown themselves to not always be the most spy aware.

This could be the game where Ascent turns it around. Where realize that they can’t just randomly suicide in and objectives are more important than frags. However, Generations doesn’t need to turn around they just need to keep rolling forward. I think it’s very possible they might bagel Ascent, but they have to be careful to not be cocky and to not try to force the win. If they get too spread out, they might struggle in the pure 1v1’s. If they play smart and as a team, I think they’ll win the match.

My prediction - Generations 2 - Ascent 1

Watch the Match Live


Sunday November 12th @ 9:30pm Eastern


https://twitch.tv/extvesports