Steven R. July 23, 2019
Overwatch doesn’t seem to think all that much of Michael "shroud" Grzesiek.
The popular streamer and former Cloud9 player decided to take the hero shooter for a whirl in recent broadcasts and showed off some of his signature gunslinging skills. Despite being a legitimate professional talent, he was surprisingly handed just a 2,589 skill rating.
That places him at the lower Platinum level which is unremarkable in the grand scheme of Overwatch. Though rankings distribution vary by the source, most suggest that he would be in the upper half of ranked Overwatch players by a modest margin. That isn’t bad for a relatively new player in Overwatch and is a fairly strong first rating on the whole, but it is a far cry from what one would expect from such a mechanically skilled player.
While Shroud’s visibility and popularity have peaked over the last year during his time as a full-time streamer, he was a legitimate force in professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In 2014 he was signed to Cloud9’s roster and helped the organization become one of North America’s top teams. He retired from pro CSGO in 2017, but remained with the organization as a streamer until 2018.
Getting surprisingly low ranks isn’t necessarily all that strange for Shroud these days.
In May, Shroud made a less than triumphant return to CSGO during a stream. After spending a session in competitive matchmaking, he was handed a Master Guardian Elite ranking. That’s very solid for the average CSGO player, standing around the 86th percentile of players, but it is well outside the professional level.
So is Shroud going to try and scratch his way to Diamond in Overwatch or try and return to Global Elite status in CSGO? Probably not.
Shroud remains a full-time streamer and he continues to bounce around between any shooter that catches his fancy. It would be interesting to see him dedicate himself to a single game again, but the Twitch life seems to agree with him.