100T Meteos says “Focusing only on Worlds is really, really wack”

A close back and forth battle between 100 Thieves and Dignitas finally resulted in 100T breaking the tie for sixth place in the LCS. For William “Meteos” Hartman, this was a possible turning point for his team, who he feels is continuing to improve each week. 

Meteos sat down with WIN.gg to talk about their victory and why the Spring Split always matters no matter the format. 

How are you feeling after your victory today?

Meteos: It feels pretty good. I don’t think we would have been able to win the game if we were how we were at the start of the season. We used a lot of the concepts we talked about and got a better understanding of after practice. That’s really satisfying to me.

It’s playing to make the game hard for the opponent. We don’t have a guaranteed way to win, but ways to make them make a mistake. 

What are some things your team has improved on since the start of the spring split? 

A big one is trying to improve everyone’s overall situational awareness. Rather than being a team that has a really rigid way of playing, like “this is what our set role is…” that’s kind of troll. Instead, our movement and decisions are entirely based off of what the enemy is doing and what we think they’ll do afterwards.

We’ve come a long way when it comes to identifying what the other team wants to do and recognizing all of the options. We don’t feel we have to do something 100% of the time. You always have multiple options. It’s not perfect, but we’ve been doing better. 

At the beginning, it looked like Dignitas’ game to lose. How were you feeling during the early game? 

I didn’t feel too bad about it. A few things went wrong but we were able to get the first dragon. We were against Lee Sin, who has a lot of dragon pressure. We made a lot of our own mistakes, which we through our execution, not things we were forced into.

The first dive on top lane should hae been a kill for us, for example. Ssumday started tanking accidentally, hitting Aatrox before I could. We ended up dying when they collapsed on us.

We were at a disadvantage, but in my mind, I wanted to just think about we should do next. 

There was a long pause during the match. How were you feeling about that? Do pauses annoy you during games?

Pauses like that are really annoying. I do feel bad for Dinitas, because those long pauses hurt the winning team more. It stops your momentum and gives the team that’s behind time to recuperate. It was helpful for us. They had time to discuss what they wanted to do too, so it wasn’t a straight advantage. 

The past two weeks the internet at our facility has been going down every single day, multiple times. We’ve been having to cancel scrims early. As soon as we lost control of our characters  [today], we were like, “It’s just like in scrims.” We’ve been having to deal with that for a while. So we have experience dealing with that and were able to handle it better than they were. But we would much rather play a game without that.  

Did you have a chance to talk strategy during the pause? 

Both teams are able to talk when there’s a long pause like that. If it’s only a couple minutes you can’t talk. But that was a longer one. We discussed how we would change our gameplay from what we normally do. The normal macro plays weren’t working well for us. They had Zoe, who has a lot of pokes. She can chunk you out, which she had been doing pretty well up until that point. We figured, “Okay, maybe we can’t play the game how we normally would.”

We have this tongue-in-cheek term on the team called “alternative macro.” It means doing random stuff to make the game really annoying for the other team to play. We want to string them along and give them opportunities to mess up. Splitting them up. Make them commit to an objective or go for really fast picks on people. We realized we had to make a shift towards that.

I think we would have done the same thing without the pause, but it gave us more time to think about it. 

When were you sure you guys finally had the game in hand? 

When the Baron situation went really well for us. It was a weird play. We actually did it in scrims this week. We’d go for a gank on bottom side of the map while Baron is up. They’ll start Baron. Then we just killed them because they didn’t have picks that put them at a good fighting position while going for Baron. We were able to kill the Baron after. We were feeling pretty good from there. 

100 Thieves is now in sixth. What do you think it will take to climb up the ranks and make it to the playoffs? 

I don’t think it will take anything different. Just keep building. One of the risks of when teams start winning more is getting complacent. We just need to not lose focus. Winning or losing, you always need to work on things. 

If you qualified for MSI, what team would you want to play the most? 

Oh man, that’s not quite on my radar yet, but SKT, playing against Faker. G2. International is always fun because you get to see what they are doing. It always tests you really hard. Playing in NA, it’s rare that you see something completely new. Usually you’re aware of what the other team might look for. When you play an international team, you’ll be surprised how they handle situations. They do a lot of unexpected things, which improves you in return. 

Doublelift said that the spring split isn’t very important this year in the LCS due Riot removing qualifying points for the World Championship. What is your take on the spring split now that there are no points available for World Championship qualification? 

I don’t think I weigh in that differently from summer. I view it all as, “How good am I?” and “How good is my team?” You can always improve.

If someone only tunnels in on the results and they’re only looking at Worlds, that’s really, really wack. To me, it doesn’t mean anything. Even if there was no Worlds at the end of Summer, I’d still continually try to improve .That’s the most fun part about it. If the format changes, it won’t change much for me. I just enjoy playing.