Image taken from Team Empire's website
Amidst many memes and pictures of Johan ‘N0tail-BigDaddy’ Sundstein, the Team Empire Twitter feed was lit up on the 3rd of November by the announcement that they would be announcing roster changes.
The tease was soon resolved, with the new Team Empire lineup announced four hours later. The changes see Maxim ‘yoky’ Kim departing the team, replaced by Victor ‘GeneRal-qw’ Nigrini.
Team Empire performed well in October, winning 63 percent of their games. Despite this, Empire felt that a change was necessary to take their play to the next level. yoky has put in solid showings in 6.85, with an average GPM of 529 and XPM of 524 on the patch, with a KDA ratio of 3.85. However, in the team's match against Alliance in the WCA Open Qualifiers yoky was consistently outshone by Gustav ‘s4’ Magnusson, playing a major role in the Russian outfit’s downfall in the series.
Their defeat at the hands of Alliance meant that they did not qualify for the WCA event in China in December. The final series that yoky played for Empire was against Alliance once more, this time in the Starladder i-league. s4 won the mid lane again, helping Alliance to win the series 2-0. After these poor results against a top team such as Alliance, Team Empire decided to replace yoky with General-qw.
Team Empire’s roster is as follows:
Aryat ‘Silent.’ Gaziev
Victor ‘GeneRal-qw’ Nigrini
Roman ‘Resolut1on’ Fominok
Ilya ‘ALOHADANCE’ Korobkin
Alexsander ‘NoFear’ Churochkin
In their two series since then, Team Empire have managed to defeat SCARYFACEZZZ in a 3-0 whitewash in the CIS playoff for the upcoming Game Show GIS, and claimed a 1-1 draw against Team Alternate in the group stages of The Defense season 5. This shows that the new roster has potential, but the upcoming weeks will show with more certainty whether GeneRal-qw is the new blood that Team Empire needed to rise to prominence in Dota 2 once more.
