motm on the future of Marsborne: "I highly doubt you'll see the same roster next season"

Marsborne's run at Circuit X Mayhem São Paulo came to an end today following a tough loss to Galorys, definitively marking the end of the team's chance of making the IEM Cologne Major. The group stage exit is a brutal comedown for the NA squad after doing everything possible to qualify to their first Major, investing heavily in attending five South American LAN events this year while spending weeks away from home.

As such, a single top-four finish and the prospect of missing the Major have seriously hurt morale and confidence in the future for the team, something Ian "motm" Hardy wasn't shy in expressing during an interview with Dust2 Brasil's Vitoria Von Bentzeen after the loss. He plainly expressed that he expects changes to come to Marsborne next season if the team continues together at all, while pointing to a troubled team environment and an organization that seemingly went for broke in trying to get to IEM Cologne.

This result was not what you guys were expecting to end your time in South America, but overall what did you think of your time overall in the region?

I think very highly of South America. For a long time the Brazilians and all of the South Americans came to the United States to play as our scene was stronger for a long time but in recent times it's absolutely not the case. These guys are better and their team depth is way deeper than ours.

Our scene is disintegrated and it even shows in our play when we come here. We spend most of our time back home in the Untied States and we're not as strong as we need to be. The practice is very weak [in NA] and it's hard to even get a full day of scrims with teams.

So we come here and its an uphill battle all the way. It's a very rough challenge. Our team is equally as skilled and perhaps even more skilled but we crumble in high pressure situations. That's absolutely what happened here against Galorys.

As professionals and as people who have been playing for a long time we can't be doing that and if we want to have a better chance next season that's something to work on.

Next season do you guys plan on coming back to South America and playing more tournaments here or doing longer bootcamps in the region?

Yeah if our team is still alive. If we're still a team. Team is kind of a shit environment right now. We've done a lot of enduring of each other and the organization has allocated a lot of resources and we didn't achieve our goal.

That's how it is in North America. It's not a lot of time to invest, there's less resources, and when you don't achieve the goal then there's return for the people investing into you, it is usually time to wrap it up.

I'm worried about the resources and I'm worried about our team and the team environment.

So you think the team will not be together after the season is over?

It's absolutely a possibility. I think no matter what happens we will try to maintain our team. We have a strong VRS position and we're a good team but if we don't like each other then we're not going to play good. I highly doubt you'll see the same roster next season.

Do you think more North American teams will start coming to Brazil to bootcamp and play tournaments here?

Yeah I'm hopeful more North American teams come [to Brazil]. They absolutely need to, but as I said earlier in the interview we just don't have as many resources and there's not a single facility in the entire United States for any of our teams and you guys have several of them in different countries.

It's honestly astonishing the scale of it here. I didn't expect to come to something nice like this all the time. Not for any reason just it's the Americas region and I come here and I'm like 'wow these guys have everything we don't, no wonder we suck.'

There's so few organizations [in NA] and the ones that do exist that aren't tier one just have such a hard time funding five, six people to come down here.