Now, we know what you’re all thinking: “How can they claim Complexity is best when we also have Cloud9 and Liquid?” But considering Liquid are dutch and Cloud9 haven’t been around in NA since their only good lineup nuked itself, we’re being serious.

Complexity are the greatest organisation in the history of North American Counter-Strike.

An organisation that is foundational to the idea of professional esports within the continent, they were there from the very early days, and they were very good too.

So good in fact, that they’re still the only NA team to ever win a Major outside of NA soil. It might not be the Valve-sponsored Major most of you recognise, but ESWC 2005 was a seriously big deal, and the achievement of sunman, Warden, Storm, tr1p, and fRoD is not something to brush off as irrelevant history.

They would win big again, at CPL Summer 2006, and remained a top team within CS: Source even if CGS would ultimately damage the NA scene - but more on that later.

In later years, as success with an NA lineup became harder to come by in the fallout of CGS, Complexity would briefly become Brazilian, calling itself home to familiar SA names like fnx, bit, nak, and a certain all-timer known as FalleN.

Eventually, though, they would transition back to their roots, signing an NA roster that consisted of Hiko, n0thing, swag, seang@res, and Semphis. The roster would see them place top four and top eight at the first two CS:GO Majors, but would eventually move on and head over to Cloud9.

From that point up until the Juggernaut was formed, new faces in the NA region would often find themselves honing their craft wearing the Complexity jersey, and players like autimatic, SicK, oBo, ANDROID, ShahZam, and stanislaw would all see themselves shine for the team. They weren’t always there at the beginnings of their career,

And we get it, you might want to laugh at some of those names, but one of them went on to win a Major and three of them played for Complexity in a Major quarter-final. We won’t laugh at that.

Fast-forward to the collapse of the failed Juggernaut project, and Complexity once again made itself the home of a North American Counter-Strike roster. A long and arduous road followed, with many players coming and going, but it was a lineup that allowed the organisation to stay true to their core values and history.

And that’s just it. Complexity, for all of the times they may have given us a reason to laugh at them, have always been the NA Counter-Strike organisation.

Whenever they could be, Complexity have stuck by the region they call home, and given everything they possibly could to try to get that region back to the highs they enjoyed during the formative years of the esport, even if it meant that they would eventually have to exit the game altogether.

And that’s where, for now at least, this story ends, with the North American Counter-Strike organisation departing the game it was founded in because the ecosystem no longer allows them to operate within it.

It’s a sad week, and not because one of our favourite modern punchlines is gone, but because some things are bigger than our jokes – it’s a really small list – and this is a gut punch to a region that could really do with being helped up, not kicked while its down.

But we really do feel like this isn’t the end of the Complexity story, so we look forward to the day we get to tell it again.