PCK CL: SC vs JG
Project A runs twenty-four rounds in all — twelve in the first half, twelve in the second.
Every round you win is a point, and the side that reaches thirteen points takes the map. Depending on how the wins fall, the game can be over 13–0 on the first round of the second half, or it can finish the half 12–12 and spill into overtime. That is Project A. Three currents, then: first half, second half, overtime.
If someone asked whether those three currents can be split even finer, I would answer like this.
The round that begins the instant the defense buys an Operator.
The Operator. At 4,700 credits it is the most expensive gun in Project A, and the damage is obscene — 150 to the body, 255 to the head, 120 to the legs. An enemy behind a medium barrier still dies to a single body shot. An enemy who bought nothing dies even if you only clip a leg.
Right-click zoom stretches the scope from 2.5× out to 5.0×, so it simply owns a long fight. Penetration is top tier as well. Hide behind a wall and a wallbang can still erase you for nothing. It is the defense's decisive weapon, and not only the defense's. Attack can turn it into any number of off-angles. The best gun in Project A — that is the Operator.
Put it that way, though, and someone always has the next question.
Fair enough. Of the two rifles in Project A, the Outlaw Rifle deals 160 to the head at any range, enough to drop even an enemy behind a medium barrier in one shot.
But the reverse has to be considered too. The player holding the rifle is a pro — and so is the player holding the Operator. Hit the head and a rifle can kill an Operator, sure. Sorry. Against a pro-level AWPer, you will hear the Operator's report before your eyes even meet. What you see next is your own character lying peacefully on the floor, and up in the right corner a kill log announcing that you are dead.
FPS pros are already spoken of as having reaction times past the human range and into the superhuman, and those are the players on the Operator. How are you supposed to beat them with a rifle that loses on both damage and range?
Those strengths are why the pro scene rates the Operator so highly, and why a team hands it to the player with the best reactions on the roster. It is that important a role. Holding an entire main lane by yourself is already plenty. On top of that, given time, you can take ground alone and widen your space. The merit is enormous.
So the scene overvalues the gun, and teams will pool money just to buy that one rifle. That is how much it matters.
Which means...
Which means you absolutely cannot...
"Wow. This one's cooked."
You absolutely cannot drop a weapon like that for nothing.
Fifth round of the second half, and Pola had finally bought the Operator. He didn't get a kill with it. He died to the other guy instead, and of all places he died on A Short, a spot where picking the gun back up for a save is nearly impossible. That one was simply lost.
An absurd whiff threw away an Operator they had scraped the money together to buy, and chat filled with criticism of Pola.
A few of them crossed the line, but the mods cleaned those up well enough. Why did he even swing? Pola's mistake was fatal, but the decision itself hadn't been bad, and I wanted to point out what was actually wrong. Back in my own pro days I'd had my fill of chat from people who talked without knowing a thing.
"Swinging Short was a swing you can take. The mistake before that was the fatal one..."
Peeking out A Short, up to that point, is not the problem. JG doesn't even know Pola bought an Operator this round, and even if they had expected the buy, pinning the exact angle is hard. In fact, until that first Operator shot left the barrel, JG hadn't expected Pola's Operator at all. He had set up on A Short, where the duel distance is short compared with A Main. From SC's side it was a trick look that sold JG completely.
"The whiff itself was a shame, sure..."
The variable on SC's side was simply that Pola missed. The whiff gave the Operator's position away, and JG's answer turned it into a dropped Operator on top of everything else. No — there is a more fundamental problem, from before the whiff. The most basic thing anyone who plays Jett already knows.
"Bigger than the whiff is that he went in without pre-charging Tailwind."
He never used Tailwind, the E on the Jett he was playing. In the pro scene, to cut down the Operator's weaknesses, teams hand the gun to an agent with an instant movement skill. Chamber, with that S-tier teleport, fits the Operator so well people say he was built to use it. Jett, who can Tailwind out of a bad angle, is counted in the same class.
"Even if the peek was greedy, JG hadn't read Pola's position at all. If he'd only pre-charged Tailwind, he could have gotten out the instant he whiffed."
Jett's Tailwind ignores Project A's slow-on-hit entirely. In that moment he had every chance to live.
"Then you Tailwind off onto A site and open the Operator angle a second time..."
He had taken a forward position, so if he had only gotten out, a second Operator angle was there. He died, though, so the assumption was meaningless. In the pro scene there is no hypothetical more useless than an if.
"Spike down on A. What does SC do here?"
"The Operator's already dropped, and Breach is holding Rolling Thunder, so a retake is ugly. Even with all four of SC still alive, a cold save looks perfectly fine."
Breach's ultimate, Rolling Thunder. On cast he fires a quake charge straight ahead that punches through walls. Anyone it hits is Dazed and lifted into the air. The crowd-control lasts six seconds, and for those six seconds you can only tap-fire. The radius is huge enough to blanket an entire site, so on defense it is miserable to dodge. Once the spike is down, as it is now, Breach can ult off nothing but the defuse sound and still win a one-versus-many. That is how strong it is.
"Honestly, I think the save is right too. SC's money isn't exactly comfortable..."
JG had the numbers as well. SC had dropped two rounds in a row and was short on cash, so saving these four guns looked better. One step back to take two forward. Think of it like—
"Huh."
"SC goes! They're not backing off!"
"Recon bolt sticks, and they push straight in!"
SC's Breach spent Aftershock, his E, into the pocket under A site, and at the same time Omen's smokes dropped over A Main and A Short, cutting the dangerous angles. The enemy had hit site so fast that those skills had never gotten used on the way in. SC threw them now, hard, and went for the retake.
Pop. Then a ripping spray of rifle fire.
Inside A site both sides dumped crowd control, and a frantic brawl broke open.
"Nebula!"
"Is Nebula completely out of his mind today? How did he just win that one-versus-two?"
SC won the fight on site. The count came out even, two against two.
But.
"Rolling Thunder is still up."
SC had retaken the site so cleanly only because JG's Breach and Ground had left it entirely. JG was swimming in money anyway, and for a round this secure, Breach could not be allowed to die.
"JG still has Rolling Thunder. How do you answer that, Nebula?"
"In the end you have to leak a defuse sound and force the Rolling Thunder out."
"If one of them slips out Short while Main is smoked, baits the defuse, pulls Rolling Thunder, and then they fight — I think it's doable."
A Main was already shut behind Omen's smoke. From JG's side, the only information past that smoke was the sound of a defuse. Leak the sound, pull Rolling Thunder, and have the teammate waiting outside the radius collapse in at once for a two-versus-two. That was winnable enough...
A soft click.
"Wait — what are you two doing—!"
Against everything I had expected, neither of them peeled off. Both of them pressed the defuse. Both of them, standing inside Rolling Thunder's radius.
"Rolling Thunder!"
The instant the defuse sound played, Breach cast it. Of course he did. The blast caught both of them — Nebula, and SC's Omen.
"It lands clean! Both of them are lost in the quake!"
Caught in the crowd control, the two of them died absurdly easily to the Ground and Breach who peeked them after.
"Huh? Why would they play it like that..."
The viewers couldn't have seen it. I did. On the player cams, the moment Breach's Rolling Thunder went off, Han Seongun's face went blank with panic.
Nebula didn't even check whether they had their ultimate?
"Hah... he's really struggling."
Before the round had even started, Breach's ultimate points sat at six. Rolling Thunder costs eight, so he was two short. The problem was that he finished them — one for killing Pola, and the last when the spike went down.
No matter how chaotic a round gets, failing to notice that the enemy ultimate is even online... that wasn't the Nebula I knew.
On the player cam, Han Seongun's face was half gone. No. It was gone entirely. The look of someone whose mental had left the building, soul knocked clean out of him.