Snappi on the VRS grind: "It's a slow climb where you need to take every step"

Ninjas In Pyjamas IGL Marco "Snappi" Pfeiffer spoke with Dust2.us Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" after their victory against Sharks in the Fragadelphia Vegas final. The Dane commented on the playoffs, NIP's fight for VRS points, the tech issues at FRAG, and the overall state of the team heading into the 2nd quarter of the year.

The full interview can be found below on YouTube, with key snippets underneath.

Does it feel good to finally get that LAN win with this new NIP team, considering it's been a struggle to find your way in the rankings?

I'm happy because it's a step in the journey. We need to build NIP back to be a high enough rank so we get into the tournaments. Luckily, we qualified for PGL Astana, which I think was a --- no offense --- bigger win than this, because that grants us a tier-one tournament where, if we perform, we can establish ourselves.

This was a nice step on the way, because obviously our goal is to be top-30, top-20, top-10, and grind our way in. I think this was a nice first step, so obviously it's always nice to have success, and we could have gone out in the semis, so I need to be happy.

We saw NIP at Level Up LUND! in Sweden, where the team finished 3rd-4th but ended up losing to TNL, so does it feel good to make up for falling short in Sweden?

Yeah, because we needed these points. We went to these LANs to boost our rankings before going into Astana, so we can have a good rank going into the summer rank. We fucked up the first one but this one was fine so it was a good step.

Have you been surprised by how hard it has been to find your way in this scene? This NIP roster was formed with no ranking points; you had to use JACKZ for some time there, even to get some closed qualifier invites, but it was a lot of open qualifiers for a while. Were you surprised by how hard this process has been to get back in the scene with a new core under the VRS?

No, it was expected. I also said in an interview in January that the goal is to build the team into a top-30 team before the summer, so that we have a better starting point from the summer going forward. I think now we are getting close, I think maybe just in the top-40, if we do well at Astana, we can end in the top-30.

It's a slow climb where you need to take every step because until you're in the tournament, you can't really climb. So, yeah, kind of expected, we also fucked up because if you saw teams like PARIVISION, it was possible to switch a core so the whole JACKZ expiriment was a big mistake because we could have played CCT with our full team and we abused another loophole that was way, way better.

We could have potentially been in the MRQ. We didn't do it the correct way but this system is about gaming the system and we were bad at it compared to other teams.

You did reach the top 40 with this event win. You started the event in 89th place before playing your first match, and now you're in 39th. Does that feel correct to you? Do you think the system is working as it should?

It seems maybe a little bit too much, we can see the tier-2, tier-3 scene is a little bit challenged with potential cheating, so I think it's a good thing that LAN ranks much higher, and it should also open up the space for a lot of tournaments.

You can see a lot of the local LAN scene is coming back, and I think that's a good thing for CS, so it's probably a double-edged sword, but I think there's a lot of positives for seeing all these tier-2 LANS coming up.

NIP will be back in action at PGL Astana 2025 in May.