Millenium joined the Rainbow Six scene at the beginning of Year 2 of Pro League picking up the most successful French team, Yunktis, and has since been a staple of European Pro League. Most recently though, with the addition of Crapelle to the team as a coach as well as creating a newly remodelled roster of Joghurtzz, Renshiro, Liven, Hicks, risze and Sparxo (their analyst), Millenium has been able to push to be one of the best teams in the World once again by winning DreamHack Austin 2018 and almost defeating the World Champions, PENTA Sports, twice during the Pro League Season 7 online season.
Millenium’s coach, Crapelle, has been integral to the team’s many recent victories so we spoke to the man behind the players to see his and his team’s thoughts about the games:
Firstly, for those unaware of a coach's role in a team, can you explain what you do for the Millenium roster?
My role is to think about strats (with a huge help from sparxo who does most of it these days), to work on the team cohesion, and to make sure the mental stays strong. I also work on specific in-game features such as the op/ban maps in which i take a pretty big part.
Last month your team won the first international title by a French team in 2 years; how did your team prepare for this event to win the DreamHack Austin title?
The Millenium team in their post-game interview after winning the DreamHack Austin title.
We worked a lot for Atlantic City, implementing new set ups but keeping the same core as we did throughout the season. Right after the Pro League Finals, a player left for a week of break, as the team agreed to. We all took a small breather for a week between the two events. We didn’t scrim between the two events at all. Sparxo and I worked on analysis though.
In the grand final of DreamHack Austin you played the probable favourites of Evil Geniuses whose coach, BKN, was unable to attend; how much of a difference do you think this made to the game itself?
I actually have no idea. We couldn’t talk with the players during the map, we couldn’t have tactical timeouts or anything alike. The only thing I could do at the DreamHacks was to brief the players with the analysis Sparxo made, and same between maps. Otherwize apart from screaming encouragement from behind them I wasn’t much of help in-game.
After this victory and your performance at Atlantic City you went into the Coupe de France as one of the favourites, however, went out earlier than expected after losing to both DeathroW and Mock-it Esports. What factors led to these losses and do you think you’ve improved on them since?
Millenium’s route through the Coupe de France via Liquipedia
We came in the Coupe de France with the same game we developed for the whole season. We didn’t have much time to practice on the new meta since we had to go through a qualifier which was played on the old rules, and old map pool. We took the cup too lightly and that costed us a lot. I think we’ve improved. We had a very long discussion about what we should do, and how we should do it for this first half of the season. It lead to the gameplay we developed last week, and it’s not perfect yet. We have a lot of work to do if we want to continue being a strong team.
Your first Pro League game of Season 8 saw a draw against Orgless, the first draw of the European Season. What do you and your team think of this new match format?
We don’t really like it. Bo1s are boring and there’s no risk, you’ll always end up playing the same maps. I wished we had Bo3s with the league format. But if we’re stuck with Bo1s, I believe it’d be a lot more fun to watch and play if we had infinite overtime then just going into a draw at 5-5. It’s really frustrating.
Your next Pro League game will be against Chaos, a team which recently beat “i don’t know” in the OGA Pit tournament and drew against your regional rivals of Team Vitality in Pro League. How do you think this game will go?
We scrimmed them a lot during our preparation for the PL. I’m confident we can beat them, but they are not to take lightly. They are a very strong team, and they can come up with efficient strategies to bother the teams they play. I don’t give that much attention into the OGA PIT game because none of the teams played their real game, keeping it for Pro League.
Concerning “i don’t know” the team said prior to their OGA Pit match against ENCE eSports that they weren’t running strats; will Millenium be doing the same for your matches or can we expect some new and different strategies to be deployed?
We will probably do the same. It isn’t really worth it to use all your strats on an online tournament when you still have 4 games of Pro League and one DreamHack to play in the weeks after the cup. But not using strats means you might see some fun stuff too.
Your first OGA matchup of the tournament will be against Vitality, the Coupe de France finalists, with a possible semi-final matchup against PENTA Sports, a team in which Millenium has never defeated. How confident are you going into these matchups?
Millenium’s Quarter and Semi Final matchups in the OGA Pit tournament via Liquipedia
Both matchups are tough. We feel confident we have the capacity to beat both teams, but again, is it worth it developing your whole panel of strats for an OGA, when you have to play both teams in the same month. We will see what comes out of it.
Also coming up is the defence of your DreamHack title in DreamHack Valencia; are you doing any extra preparation for this event now that your group stage opponents have been confirmed?
Millenium’s DreamHack Valencia group stage opponents via Liquipedia
We have changed the way we play the game the day before we played against Orgless. We’re focusing on perfecting it, and finding new ways to play it. The priority is to feel confident on how we want to play the game more than trying to counterstrat teams. We’ve always prefered developing our game instead of adapting everything to the enemy.
Finally, unlike many other teams Millenium has three members of staff in total; yourself as a coach, Tapis as a manager and Sparxo as an analyst. How much of an advantage do you think this gives your team over some of your counterparts?
Everything is separated into three very specific lines of work. Tapis focuses on everything that concerns the « paper » part of the team. He’s the one booking everything for the team (scrims, trips, etc). Sparxo, on the other hand, focuses only on the game. He does a lot of strategising for the team, as well as a huge quantity of analysis. I’m kind of in the middle. I’m mostly the one in talks with Ubisoft, I’m making the decisions (with the team of course), and I do strats and analysis too. I’m also the one spending the most time with the team, trying to fix every problem that can occur, or that players come to me with.
You can watch Millenium next when they play Vitality this coming Wednesday in the OGA Pit quarter-finals or against Chaos during Pro League Season 8 this coming Thursday.