Dignitas – Do or Dead?

The history of Dignitas goes back as long as CSGO, both as an org and as a roster.
But this story began (with an asterisc) in 2019 when Fifflaren decided to create a roster from scratch. Friberg was free agent and both GeT_RiGhT and Xizt were put on the bench by NiP and Fnatic, respectively. With 4 of the 5 original ”87-0” players they decided to buy out f0rest as well from NiP. This lead to them opening up the Fifflaren AWP spot to bringing in a player of their choosing. Numerous times have the original NiP lineup talked about the 5th spot being an issue due to the org picking players that the others werent completely comfortable with.

So, with the original 5, having a huge org and the power to pick-and-choose whoever they want, they started to go through potential lower tier talented AWPers. Nawwk was too expensive, and below him, they couldn’t really find any Swedish talent with huge impact and free flowing style. So they decided to go for a Scandinavian roster, and scoured the scene for a competent AWPer with a personality that would fit the roster, and preferably someone in the beginning of his career. Fifflaren talked to his former colleague and friend Halvor ”vENdetta” Gulestøl (who later joined Dignitas as an analyst), as well as some Norwegian players, to get a firm understanding about who Hallzerk was as a person and a player. They were happy with what they learned and brought him in and announced the roster in January 2020.

As a new team you don’t get invites to big events, not even with a legendary roster as Dignitas just acquired, which meant they had to start with online qualifiers for all but Flashpoint, of which they were a partnered organisation (more on that later). This meant gonig through the long road to Rio (back when we thought ESL One: Rio de Janeiro would be a $1M Major LAN in May) and started off with decent, almost good but shakey, results against MDL teams.

They were one of the two teams coming out of the first European Minor Open Qualifier, together with a restructured BIG, only losing one map in six, and surpassing teams like CompLexity and Sprout. In the European Minor Closed Qualifier they opened up 2-0 against Movistar Riders (16-10, 16-14), lost 2-1 against Fnatic where their map win was in OT and the decider map was a 16-3 loss (this is a recurring series result for them) before they finally qualified for the Minor (that never happened) by winning 2-1 against Nodavind, with only an 8 round difference over three maps. But they did qualify, which later meant they got an invite to ESL One: Road To Rio in April, as well as CS_Summmit 6 Regional Qualifiers and the upcoming Dreamhack Open Fall Closed Qualifier.
If that Minor would have been played, they most likely would have had a different approach and confidence throughout the spring, since the other teams were a rollercoaster-performing CompLexity, a Fnatic which they always got decent results against, NiP – their former employer with a match filled with emotions, Movistar Riders and Nordavind they already beaten in the qualifiers, semi-known Godsent, Heretics and Copenhagen Flames, teams they should have beat early in the year.
They also decided to sit out on a number of qualifiers and smaller events, just to get their gameplay in order for the bigger events later in the season. This might have taken a toll on their ranking, their draw in certain events and have other impact on the team. But as a rich org, with huge expectations, it looked like the right decision at the time.

Shakey start perhaps, but now they got into their issues. From the team was announced they were a part of the B Site Inc semi-franchise league; Flashpoint, and went to the nice LAN in Los Angeles. They had something about 6 to 8 weeks planned of games and bootcamp in a good setting in NA, but couldn’t utilize it when their AWPer didn’t get his VISA sorted out on time, and before it was done the Covid-19 issues had locked down travel to USA. Instead they loaned in GuardiaN from Na’Vi, who is almost as legendary as the rest of the team. This meant they couldn’t even focus or rely on their results from one of their biggest events of the year. But luckily for them, they didn’t have to pay the Flashpoint fine for first season, because the event became too affected by the Covid-19 spreading over the world during first week of the event. But remember here: They didn’t care for rank before this event, which means they actually accounted for the fine, since they were ranked #42 in the world when the event started.
During the Flashpoint event, they won twice 2-1 against Orgless (who got such a big asterisk it might need its own post), lost 2-1 once against the same Orgless, and then lost twice against Gen.G and once against Cloud9. Just watching that you can say it is a bad, but not horrible result at the time. But if we take the map scores into count, you start to see alarming things, that at the time was blamed on using a stand-in, but haven’t been improved now, six months later. They never once won with more than six rounds in a map, while they lost three maps with single digit score.
If we also go into the map pool we start to see a huge issue.

• Nuke – 2 win, 0 OT, 2 loss, 54 rounds won, 54 rounds lost
• Inferno – 2 win, 0 OT, 2 loss, 46 rounds won, 55 rounds lost
• Train – 0 win, 1 OT, 3 loss, 48 rounds won, 63 rounds lost
• Dust 2 – 0 win, 0 OT, 1 Loss, 13 rounds won, 16 rounds lost
• Vertigo – 0 win, 0 OT, 1 loss, 10 rounds won, 16 rounds lost
• Mirage – 0 win, 0 OT, 1 loss, 4 rounds won, 16 rounds lost

That ends up with 175 rounds won and 220 rounds lost. This is against Flashpoint teams, and not one of the teams they lost to played either Upper bracket final nor consolidation final, and Dignitas themselves were eliminated before the playoffs. At the time, you could just blame the stand-in, and that they didn’t have the time to practice or scrim enough to be at their best.
In Flashpoint we also find a thing that is an issue looking into the future, but that almost nobody really anticipated affecting them in the long run: Since GuardiaN is Slovakian they started calling in English, to make it comfortable for all players. But it turned out they weren’t comfortable enough so they went back to Swedish calling, since GuardiaN speak basic Norwegian, thanks to his wife, and they continued to do that throughout the rest of the event. Might seem like a minor thing – But this limits their options for their inevitable roster changes.

Coming back to Europe they had to start all over, just because of COVID-19 and the VISA issues for Hallzerk. But it might also be seen as a blessing in disguise (if the results would’ve worked out for them) because they were able to attend Dreamhack Masters Open Qualifiers because they were eliminated in group stage of Flashpoint. If they would have been in Flashpoint playoffs, they wouldn’t get home until after the DHM open qualifier would have started, and only get two or three days before their Road to Rio started.
But that only works if you win your series, and they got eliminated in last round against LDLC. Sure, LDLC is a legendary org and got some decent players today. But they did lose to Gringo and Logan, who later got replaced by Afroo and Bodyy.

Their next event became the ESL One: Road to Rio – The first RMR event of the year, which is in some cases replacing the EU Minor that they qualified for six weeks prior. Just FYI – If they even had an idea or even went for a deep run in Flashpoint, they would barely get back home before the Road to Rio would’ve started since the Flashpoint Grand Final was four days before their first match in RTR EU.
Only winning four maps in seven series, only picking up one series. That was against their historical rival Fnatic where the total scores were 17-19, 25-22 and 16-14. That is a total of 30 rounds in one map and 4 OT’s accumulated in the other two. Not a strong suit even though they did beat a much better team. This was also at the beginning of the Fnatic ”demise”, so it looked a lot better at the time, than it does in hindsight. Both the other maps they won, but lost the series, were 16-14 against Heretics and ENCE, while having 3 lost maps not even reaching double digit score.
Finnishing last place in the group, and with no placement decider match, made them tie last place with their Flashpoint ”partner” c0ntact, but it gave them 150 RMR points, which more or less saved the rest of 2020 for the roster. That online qualifier in early March meant they get invited to main events and closed qualifiers with the best EU teams out there, and that they don’t have to struggle through the rough open qualifiers that are so deadly in EU.

Amidst the disastrous experience in ESL One: Road to Rio, they had a parallel qualifier for Blast Premier Spring Showdown. It was with teams such as Godsent and the best Norse teams that waeren’t invited to the real event (I decided to not call it main event, since Showdown is a qualifier in itself, in some ways).
They started with a 2-1 scoreline in a BO1 round robin group stage against ENCE, Godsent and Apeks, and the map they lost they got double digit scoreline.
The loss was against ENCE on Dust 2, and they met again in Road to Rio the next day, and lost 2-1 where each map was at least 26 rounds.
They followed up with two good results against the Danish duo Heroic (who only been playing together for a month) and North (who more or less played 4v5 due to Kjaerbye’s health issues), where the map scores were quite decent, even though what I mentioned above is a huge caviat.
But these results made them qualify for one of the bigger events in the latter part of the season.

They got put into a group where not a SINGLE TEAM came top 3 (qualified for the real event Blast Premier Finals) and they had a horrible result in such a weak group.
Opening up a 16-10 loss against the free-falling Mousesports, who didn’t even win any other map than that in the group stage.
They had a 16-8 win against the new VP lineup, that had formed a week before this event.
The other maps they managed to get 14 rounds aggregate against Fnatic and MAD Lions, two teams they know really well.
That is appalling, and in a BO3 quarter-final against Vitality they magically won D2 16-8 (one of the best performances on a map by this roster), but lost out on the other two maps 16-5 and 16-11, which made them eliminated in 7th-8th place out of 10 teams. This actually gave them plenty of ranking points due to placement, by only winning 2 out of 7 maps. But the head-to-head rules, that are most common in round robin systems, made them qualify for the playoffs. But if Mousesports would have lost 16-14 against MAD Lions, instead of playing 15-15, that would mean a Head-to-Head betwee 3 teams and VP would play the playoffs instead of Dignitas and they would have ended in last place. Close call and a horrendous performance.

Following up the disappointment of the Blast qualifier circuit, they got invited to regional closed qualifier for the summer RMR event CS_Summit 6. They got their invite, together with Fnatic, CompLexity and c0ntact due to their RMR points. As I mentioned before, those RMR points came from winning a qualifier back in early March, and CS_Summit 6 qualifier started June 22nd. That is 3,5 months between the games they played and the event they got invited to.
The event had the four afformentioned teams invited due to RMR points, but also seven other teams invited due to rankings: BIG, MAD Lions, OG, Heroic, Havu, Endpoint and Sprout. The qualifier was filled out with 5 teams who came through open qualifiers.
To qualify you needed to be top 5 out of these 16 teams, and going into the event Dignitas were ranked 9th, so it didn’t look good going into the event.
It was also a semi-weird setup for such an important qualifier, where the RMR invited teams met the worse ranked open qaulifier teams and then the other invited teams were matched against the highest ranked open qualifier team and eachothers.
To qualify you needed to win the opening match and either win the 2nd match, or win two consecutive matches against other teams within a decider playoff (lower bracket).
Needless to say, Fnatic was the only RMR invited team that qualified. Dignitas opened up against Fate and somehow managed to lose 2-1 against the Bulgarian roster.
Fun fact, the notable teams (Dignitas excluded) Fate beat to get all the way to the CS_Summit 6 was PACT, Izako Boars and Adaptation, and it was mainly in close maps.

This meant an early summer break from professional play for the Scandinavian roster and since the summer they’ve only played three versions of Eden Arena Malta Vibes, a qualifier for a LAN in 2021 and one NineToFive. This means a lot of lower tier CS. Their first fall season map played was 5th of August and since then they have played 36 maps against lower tier CIS and EU teams and have only won half of the maps.
So they opened up very selecive and only played prioritized events, but quite quickly realized they had to qualify for events they wanted to play. Then they failed the qualifiers and didn’t break into top 30 even though they gained placement points from playing events with high ranked teams.
They changed approach and started to play open qualifiers, parallel events and lower tier cs just to gain HLTV points and be able to go through their issues and strat book, but since the results still are horrible, they can’t improve and show no sign of becomming the team they want to become.

I read somewhere (sadly I lost the link) that Dignitas got a 200 IQ play becuase they have signed 4 big sponsor contract, connected to their CSGO roster, just the past three or four months. But how is that possible to be a positive when they have to pay $100k for being outside of top 20. I can’t find if the fine is once per season, once per week, once per month or once per year, but it is still quite significant amount of money. So how many sponsors do you have to get to perpetually be outside of top 20 just to keep this dinosaur roster together?
We also know that from multiple interviews with Fifflaren, the general manager and coach for Dignitas, that they wanted to create a combination of the 87-0 NiP together with the Vitality style, where you build your roster around one star AWPer that more or less carry you. The difference, in my eyes, is that Vitality got role players who still play on t1 level, while Dignitas doesn’t have anything except 2 t1.5 players and GeT_RiGhT, who can play decently in t2 and then two plummets.

Let us go through the players performance over time, since it is a little bit more than a month since they came back from their break, I will divide the overall player performance by each month.

February. Minor open qualifier, 4 maps won and 1 map lost

March, Minor closed qualifier, 5 maps won and 3 maps lost

March, Flashpoint opening with GuardiaN, 3 maps lost and 2 maps won

April, Continuing Flashpoint with GuardiaN, 3 maps won and 7 maps lost

April, Dreamhack Spring qualifier, 1 map won and 2 maps lost

May, Road to Rio + Elisa Invitational, 10 maps won and 15 maps lost

June, Blast Premier Showdown + CS_Summit 6, 3 maps won and 7 maps lost

August/September, Eden Arena Malta Vibes + FunSpark qualifier + Opening match NineToFive, 18 maps won and 18 maps lost

You can always argue that an entry, a support, an IGL and lurker always will have bad stats, especially in a team that builds around one or two star players. But at this point they can’t seem to get positive scorelines even if they had a good run with multiple wins, or that they lose because one of the two stars are having a bad performance.
Another thing I find checking their ratings, statistics and their maps is that GeT_RiGhT might actually be the player Fifflaren talked about when the team got together. ”I don’t think GeT_RiGhT is done yet! He still got a lot to prove” and I agree. If GeT_RiGhT would be the fourth or fifth best performing player, he still got a part in this team. But as a third best player something is extremely wrong. Sure, his role isn’t really suited for a fifth best player, but with modern CSGO you could get a fragging IGL, and some supports are somewhat carries: just look at Krimz and Coldzera. But with Friberg and Xizt in the team, GeT_RiGhT isn’t impactful enough.
Just go through the team, it is weirdly skewed, and if it was just for fun, playing with your friends and get a lot of money in sponsorship, it would be fine.

But that is not all. From the get-go of this team they have been a Flashpoint partner. As a Flashpoint partner they agree, and also suggest, rules for the league/franchise. Which means that when they signed this roster they thought it was going to be a top 20 team in the world and that they would compete on the same level as the future Cloud9, the Flashpoint 1 MAD Lions, the Gen.G and build for a two year project.
The only 3 other Flashpoint teams they compete with is MIBR, c0ntact and Envy. But here’s the kicker – MIBR changed IGL, from the Brazilian Godfather to kNgV-, c0ntact have changed players left and right and currently got players on trial basis and have gotten a bigger staff as well as a new IGL and Envy have released two players, added a placeholder position for Legija, because they want him in the org but currently don’t got a position for him, and then they will go for EU talents to fill out the empty spots to find what they need to be as good as possible, as well as bringing in legendary coach Kuben.
All other Flashpoint teams either are better, or do changes to grow, but when it comes to Dignitas, nothing seems to change. I know they did change strats and had some smaller improvement because of it for the first few maps. But yesterday they lost to Imperial and went 0-3, got eliminated, from NineToFive, an event where you were 5th best ranked team but ended 15th-16th place.
The only real thing coming up for them before Flashpoint 2 is Dreamhack Closed Qualifier, and since it is/was a RMR event, they got invited to the Closed qualifier instead of having to go through the hell that is Open qualifiers. So once again they got placing points and favorable draw because of a result made in 8th of March, for an event that is starting September 22nd. This means that their 2-1 win against Nordavind six months ago is enough for them to get free HLTV ranking points.
Compare this to other teams, who have done better than them for the rest of the year: OG missed out on Road to Rio after losses to Heretics and Godsent, Heroic missed out after losses to Heretics and Copenhagen Flames, BIG missed out after losses to NiP and Movistar Riders and Sprout missed out after losses to CompLexity and Copenhagen Flames.
So Dignitas is more or less staying withing the t2 for having a lucky draw in a Minor Closed qualifier that happened half a year ago, and after that they haven’t really done anything.

But one change in approach for them is quite obvious, since they during the Spring were extremely selective with only playing the big prioritized events: Minor Qualifier, Flashpoint, Dreamhack Masters Qualifier, Road to Rio, Blast qualifier and CS_Summit 6 qualifier, to what today seems to just be any possible match they can find with multiple Malta Vibes Eden arena, NineToFives and the qualifier for a LAN that will be in Asia early 2021.
It is a decent approach if you wanna grind through the Rankings to get invites, get recognition and get some proper practice that you can’t get in Scrims. This is a strategy that was done by Heroic, BIG, CompLexity and other teams who now are getting deep in big events. The differences between those teams and Dignitas is that those teams are young, they tried to deepend their map pool and they won their matches to improve. Dignitas lose their maps, they are among the oldest rosters in the world and they don’t seem to adapt quick enough to fix the issues they find.
Just check their matches and you see that they mainly play the same CS as they did when NiP got together in 2012, and back then most teams didn’t know how to use utilities and players didn’t enjoy using the molotov.
I also wanna add that Dignitas right now is the 4th highest rated team in Sweden, being surpassed by Galaxy Racer, and another big thing that happened within their scene is that GamerLegion had a fully Swedish roster for 6 months, they lost to Dignitas in a BO1 on overtime and then missed out in MDL playoffs and that was enough for the much smaller and newer org to not get into the top 30 and compete on the highest levels. Out of that team Draken went to Valorant, FreddieB retired to go back to university and Dennis ended up in Apeks. This is the state of the Swedish scene right now and yet somehow Dignitas seems to be fine to be on this level.

I got a huge issue with Fifflaren being both coach and General Manager. To me, he should only be one. For a roster filled with his friends, I doubt he can be at his best as a General Manager, and as a coach he would be decent, but with the current plays and lack of development, I just imagine his time away from CSGO was too long for him to follow up on the current meta. The other day I noticed that their analyst vENdetta was in the coach slot for Dignitas, which could mean multiple things: 1) Fifflaren has admitted to using the coach bug. 2) Fifflaren is too busy trying to do some roster changes. 3) they are doing staff changes and Fifflaren is taking a step back.
Could mean a lot of things, but it is worth noticing that something might be changing. Whatever the reason is doesn’t really matter, I just think a change in this department would be a good decision from the ORG.
But as a General Manager, we know that either now, or in the future, he will have to bench one or more of his close friends, and it seems like that benching will mean their career is over. How do you tell one of your closest friends that you will murder their livelyhood?
This is one of many reasons why you shouldn’t work with your friends.

In the inaugural season of Flashpoint, which obviously have been their main goal besides Majors, they were close to hit playoffs, but is that their goal? Or is it to actually win Flashpoint? The current roster can’t do it, and with the lessons learned from Flashpoint 1 it seems like they can’t go international. It means they have limited their possibilities.
So what can they do? Considering the rating and impact the different players have had during their 9 months in the roster I would say they could start one by one change, and give it two to three months to see how it develops, what each new player bring in as a strength and what holes and weaknesses is needed to be accomodated and fixed with the next roster change.

My suggestion would be to take away IGL role from Xizt, because I haven’t seen anything that suggest he still is a good IGL, and the interviews with Fifflaren, they were supposed to share this duty. So why do they look so shit? They need one voice that is more competent regarding the current meta.
One of the reasons I do this approach is because if you go through the more potential talents in the Scandinavian scene you mainly find AWPers or players that would contest with f0rest for the different roles and positions.
Going through the scandinavian scene, I will just mention a few players I think could replace Friberg as the entry and the pushing factor, opening up space on the map for f0rest and Hallzerk to operate, as well as having more potant calling than Fifflaren and Xizt.
In Sweden we got Tabz in Galaxy Racer, Robiin in Endpoint and RuStY in GamerLegion. In Norway I would consider Akez, who just got benched in Apekz, and is a decent caller, but not a good fragger. But considering the roster of Dignitas they might have to go for anyone at this point and RUBINO who is free agent. He was released by Nordavind due to a wrist injury, that should be sorted by now, and he is comparable age to the Dig players, which means he would fit in quite well with the players outside of the game, as well as being young enough to have 2-3 more years left than the majority of Dignitas players. In Denmark I would go for Torben, but that is not necessary, because in Denmark there are a number of competent IGL’s and players that would fit in with the DIG team.