Time is money

Should rosters be given more time?

That titular question is one that TLDR alumnus Harry set out to answer, in his — by now — famous mix of fancy words and fancier graphics.

Thankfully, as he’s a very clever little boy, he answers a lot more than just the original question. We’ve often said that the reason teams who don’t make roster moves are successful is because you don’t need to make roster moves when you’re successful.

It’s not just a case of teams who don’t make roster moves are successful, it’s a case that successful teams don’t make roster moves. Of course, Harry mentions this.

A lot of truly great teams peak very, very early. The Astralis core clicked immediately. NaVi with b1t immediately started winning. FaZe with ropz took a few months to take over the whole world.

As such it would be easy to answer the question with a simple no, but it’s not that easy.

How does one account for teams like Gambit - either roster, but specifically the now-C9 quintet - who took a while to start going crazy?

One of the important takeaways from the article is that swapping IGL or two/three players does, obviously, change how long it takes to peak. Changing IGL can take an extra 50 days or so, on average, over other moves.

The final conclusion suggests that if you were to learn from history, you should just add a great player to a great team.

Very big ‘how to draw an owl’ vibes, that.

Just add a great player to an already good team. Just have a good team, idiot. Simple as that.

So should teams give rosters more time? Probably depends. Seems you might actually have to watch and understand Counter-Strike while using the data on a case-by-case basis.

Sounds dangerous. We’ll stick to HLTV forums.