Valorant: Hiko talks about what happened to the ‘100Thieves 1.0’ roster

It came as quite a shock to the North American Valorant fans when 100Thieves decided to drop their entire line-up on the 15th of August and just keep Martin “Hiko” Spencer on their payroll.

Though 100Thieves went on to sign the likes of Steel and nitr0 to the side, it wasn't exactly clear as to why the org made the move that they did. However, Hiko has recently shone some light on it.

In an interview with the 100Thieves roster on the 23rd of September, Dexerto’s Andy Williams talked to the Valorant pros about why 100Thieves decided to drop the entire roster.

In the debut episode of the ‘Curveball’, Hiko talks in detail about the reasons behind the decision, thereby clearing up a lot of speculation and rumors in the process.

Hiko talks about what happened to the first 100Thieves 1.0 Valorant roster

Image Credits: Dexerto

When talking to Dexerto’s Valorant lead Andy Williams, Hiko said:

“I think at the time of when we were looking to, you know basically, around the time when I signed with them, the 100Thieves wanted a team to play in a lot of the tournaments that were going on. You know they wanted to be in all the invitations, they wanted to be in all the early early tournaments, and realistically like players were already signing with orgs, for big buyouts. Big crazy contracts and the four of those guys (the initial 100Thieves members) were not signed to a team and they had a lot of chemistry together. And they were winning maybe not the tier one events but they were winning the tier 2 events together and they look like they were ahead of the competition.”

Hiko said that initially, the 100Thieves roster, with “Yaboidre”, “Pride”, “Venerated”, and “Valliate”, were doing rather well, especially in the tier 2 events.

So what went wrong?

Hiko continued by saying:

“Now you know, whether it was me joining them and them having to cut a player of theirs, and one of their coaches or just maybe we didn't get along...I mean we all got along personally but it just seemed like our roles and everything weren't really working out as well as they should have. So you know, at the time they were probably the best that we could have gotten for you know, without going through and trying to purchase some you know, franchise players from tier one organization, no one's gonna buy it. Some of these players can't even bother even if you wanted to, and so I know that on my stream and on Reddit and a lot of places it got kind of taken out of context and people thought that like I wasn't aware that these guys were being picked up."

He continued:

"Like I was definitely aware of it but it was definitely kind of a risk that 100Thieves decide to jump on and I don't blame them for doing it. If I was in 100Thieves’ shoes I would want a team too. Have it you know a team in these tournaments right away too, if it worked out, it would have been great...They played the game since the beta, everything was… everyone was meshing well. It looked like there was chemistry, and in reality we tried to make it work and things just weren't as good as anyone expected or as everyone expected. We worked really hard, we all tried to practice a lot, we tried different agent lineups we...we tried so many things in different tournaments and it just didn't work out.”

100Thieves in the debut episode of the Curveball (image credits: Dexerto)

Hiko concludes by saying:

“So, uh you know I have no ill will, or I have no bad blood with any of them. I like all of them, personally we all got along, there's never any fights or never any like real true arguments, just at the end of the day just didn't work out... For at least especially for 100Thieves it was just unacceptable that we were just consistently not even able to make it out of groups at most of the events. So again it's unfortunate it didn't work… it just didn't.”

Hiko indeed talked about a lot of the issues that the 100Thieves roster was facing at the time. However, there might still be more to the situation than what meets the eye, and Valorant Hub delves deep into the matter in their discord server.