December 1st is rapidly approaching and with it comes VALORANT’s final tournament of its first full year of esports, VALORANT Champions. 16 teams look to battle it out over the course of eleven days with one team taking home the title of champion. As exciting as the event can be, it does induce a bit of sorrow similar to when your favorite sport approaches the offseason.

In preparation for the final showdown, we took the time to talk to VALORANT caster, coach, and analyst, Donnie “Elevated” Chell (most recently known for his work in the Community Gaming $25K VALORANT Elite Showdown), about his time across all of those mentioned roles, Chamber/potential meta changes, and his thoughts on VALORANT’s first full year of esports competition.

You fill multiple roles in the gaming scene; you create very well done VALORANT content on your YouTube channel (Valorant Ascended), but you’re also an analyst and a caster having most recently casted in the VALORANT Community Gaming 25K Elite Showdown featuring a lot of well-known teams in the scene. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started in the scene?

Elevated: First of all, thanks for the compliment. I've been working really hard to improve my presentation. Getting into esports was a bit of a whim for me. I've been gaming all my life, and after leaving a job and moving across the country, I found myself having a hard time finding a new place of employment. After failing in the job search for several months, I started asking myself “What was it that I really enjoyed doing?”. Since I didn't really have anything going on, I started reaching out to random gaming and esports related companies and landed a couple of unpaid gigs. From there, I began writing for Liquipedia to cover Dota 2, and since I was local, I made it onto their team to cover The International 2016. I had also been posting my resumé on various esports job boards and ended up getting hired by a premium content startup to manage their creation of premium video guides.

The company folded after about a year, but I learned a lot about video production, and I started a Dota 2 guide channel on YouTube with one of the other content creators that we called Dota Alchemy. We produced nearly daily content there for almost two years, winning content creator of the year from r/Dota2, before selling the company and going our separate ways. I was pretty burnt out after this whole process and took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do next. Around this time, I got into the VALORANT beta. I instantly saw a lot of potential in the game and transferable skills so I started experimenting with Valorant content and have grown Valorant Ascended over the last year or so. It's been an adventure, and I've been able to parlay my content creation into casting gigs for many Dota and Valorant tournaments as well.

Speaking of coaching, a surprising piece of news was that Sentinels found their coach for Champions in former FaZe clan member Shane "Rawkus" Flaherty, who has made it clear that he’s there for strats and helping with ideas. What was your thought process on the addition?

Elevated: One of the very first articles I wrote for Liquipedia talked about the importance of coaching in esports. I come from a traditional sporting background (I played baseball in college), and I've noticed the lack of respect and appreciation for what a good mentor can do in a competitive environment. Gaming tends to be a bit more individualistic, so I understand why there has been hesitancy to ask for outside help. That being said, I think a good coach is vital to continued growth since they provide an outside perspective and can help alleviate many of the pressures that players tend to carry with them.

I'm glad to see Sentinels picking up someone like Rawkus who not only adds a huge amount of positive energy but also can give a wider perspective of the game. Most of the Sentinels players come from a strict tactical shooter (CS:GO) background, and it's pretty clear that VALORANT is evolving to be much more complex than that. Adding a coach who has competed at a high level in a hero-based game like Overwatch and also translated some of those ideas to Valorant could be more valuable than people think. For Rawkus, I think it's the perfect move since he gets to stay active in an analytical role while also essentially studying with one of the best IGLs in the world right now under ShahZaM.

Going back to your YouTube channel, you have a very well done analysis on how 100 Thieves players Hiko and Asuna use the newest Chamber in their ranked matches. Given the nature of Chamber’s kit, when we start to see him in professional play next year, what sort of agent lineups do you think we’d see involving Chamber?

Elevated: Personally, I have been a bit disappointed in the pro scene's integration of new Agents. It's unfortunate that playing professionally incentivizes you to avoid experimentation and focus on consistency which has led to slower meta changes than I expected. However, we have already seen the pattern of pros and analysts writing off Jett, Reyna, Skye and KAY/O throughout the first year and a half of the game. I expect a much bigger presence of KAY/O at Champions, and I expect a similar slow adaptation into explosive popularity with Chamber. Jett's Blade Storm has already given us the template of how incredibly powerful a free weapon can be. I honestly think that Chamber may need to be significantly changed once pro teams start to exploit his economic impact on the game. Between his ultimate (Tour de Force) and Headhunter, he can enable his team to almost entirely avoid having to fully eco buy. This fact alone fundamentally changes VALORANT.

December 1st-12th brings the final event for VALORANT this year: VALORANT Champions. The matchups have been set and the groups are looking very good and spicy. What are your thoughts on how the groups turned out?

Elevated: I'm actually pretty happy with the groups. There is a nice spread of favorites and underdogs plus plenty of interesting storylines and matchups. Group A, for example, is all about the Jett play with cNed (Acend) versus Heat (Keyd Stars) versus Yay (Envy) versus Patiphan (X10 CRIT).

I'll also be keeping a very close eye on Group D where Cloud9 and FULL SENSE will likely bring out the KAY/O. The matchups are particularly interesting since their respective opponents, Vision Strikers and Fnatic, tend to be some of the most set-up and timing-based teams in the world. I think this group may make or break the KAY/O meta that I believe is developing.

A big news bomb/leak in the esports scene as a whole was the OpTic/Envy merger. While this was big in regards to the Call of Duty teams, future esports teams under the merger will be branded under OpTic. Envy owner Mike “Hastr0” Rufail was asked how the merger could impact the Envy Valorant team and he was quiet, which makes sense as any big changes prior to the biggest event of the year could mess up traction. The word on the street is that the merger will not affect the team. However, do you see a universe where Envy’s VAL team rebrands under the OpTic banner, and if they did/do, how big do you think that would be for the VAL scene?

Elevated: It's pretty clear that the OpTic name still holds more weight than almost any other brand in esports. Even with all of their success, it's pretty clear that Envy has been the least popular of the big North American teams all year and a potential rebrand to OpTic could potentially catapult them right up to contention with the likes of 100T and Sentinels. I can't pretend to know the behind the scenes workings of the organization, but I'm a big believer in Hector and the OpTic brand's ability to deliver content and eyeballs wherever they go.

Riot Games just released information about the CHAMPIONS 2021 skin bundle, and a very nice surprise is 50% of the proceeds gets split evenly between the teams at Champions, which was a nice surprise to close off a full year of incredible competition. Looking back at VAL esports in 2021, how would grade Riot’s performance in running VAL’s first full year of competition? What would you like to see improved in year 2?

Elevated: Coming from the Dota 2 universe, where crowdfunding for the pro scene has essentially carried the game for the last decade, I think the Champions skins are a no brainer from Riot. A 50% cut on a $62 bundle is going to amount to an absurd amount of money for the teams and, honestly, I would be surprised if we ever get data on how many bundles get sold because it might turn people off a bit to see just how big of a number it is.

That being said, by sending the money directly to the teams evenly it avoids the Dota 2 problem of a public and wildly inflated prize pool that makes the rest of the year irrelevant. I think Riot has done a very good job of using 10+ years of data from games like League of Legends, Counter Strike and Dota 2 to inform their decisions about the pro scene. I like to refer to VALORANT as the first real next-generation esport because it is the first one that is being managed by a company that has already built a massive infrastructure of experience and ideas from another successful esport. There are still plenty of issues with regards to third party tournaments, lack of opportunity for regions like Oceania and even the equipment standards at events. However, it does appear that Riot is determined to drive VALORANT towards the top of the esports scene by any means necessary, and I believe it will probably overtake League as the #1 global esport in the next 3-5 years.

For all the aspiring individuals who seek to follow in your footsteps of coaching/analyst/commentating, do you have any advice for them and how they can breakthrough or even get their first start?

Elevated: On the internet, content is king. Especially when it comes to being talented in front of a camera or as a personality in the ecosystem. Building an audience and leveraging it into opportunities is the most reliable way to get to where you want to go in that regard. It's not an easy or simple process and requires a huge amount of uncompensated work, but there is no better tool available than content. That being said: just streaming to three viewers for eight hours a day is not going to get you anywhere. YouTube is the best platform for discoverability and can spill over to other areas and platforms. Also, it's worth mentioning that not every job in esports has to be as a talent or player or content creator.

Esports is booming in growth and companies are springing up everywhere. All these companies need to build out their backbone with all the classic positions at non-esports companies. There are going to be so many options to work in esports for people with backgrounds in Human Resources, Law, Healthcare, writing, editing and more.

Anything you’d like to conclude the interview with?

Elevated: Thanks for the interview and keep up the great work at Dignitas. I hope everyone enjoys Champions, and I can't wait to see what the Valorant scene has in store for us over the next several years. I'll definitely be doing my best to cover it on my own channel as well!

We want to thank Elevated for taking the time to participate in this interview. Be sure to check out his YouTube and other socials to keep up with his work, and we wish him the best in his journey covering VALORANT!