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- Xyp9x says prolonged fatigue and burnout are the reason behind his temporary departure.
- The rifler has taken an indefinite break from Counter-Strike stating that he does not know when he will be competing again.
- He has been replaced by Snappi on the roster.
After Astralis officially announced the temporary departure of Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth from their roster, the player himself came forward to provide a reason as to why he was taking a break from Counter-Strike.
The clutch minister via a TwitLonger post revealed that he has been feeling burned out since many months now, even showing stress-related symptoms, further stating that “It's time to take the necessary break to rest and find the motivation to get back to competing for Astralis.”
Xyp9x who has been having a great year so far currently holds an overall rating of 1.09 in online events since the start of 2020. But fatigue seems to have caught up to the 24-year-old rifler who said that despite everyone trying everything in their power to help him out, and him wanting to play for the team without taking a break, he feels that “The time has come to take care of my health and therefore I have given in a sick note to Astralis.”
He goes on to thank his teammates and the organization for being supportive of his decision, concluding by stating that “I don’t know when I will be back competing but I hope that my fans understand, as this was a very hard decision for me to make.”
Fatigue and burnout seem to be taking a toll on quite a lot of players recently, with Lukas ”gla1ve” Rossander taking a three-month break due to similar reasons earlier this month. The part which seems to worry quite a lot of fans seems to be the uncertainty in Xyp9x’s concluding statement, where he fails to specify the duration of his leave.
Which is quite similar to Olof "olofmeister" Gustafsson’s departing statement, where he specifies everything except the duration of his absence. Such an open-ended conclusion always leaves that small ‘maybe’ in the minds of the community members, related to whether the player will even come back to play CS:GO competitively or not.
While this does not seem likely to be the case with Xyp9x, it is surely a possibility when it comes to Olofmeister.
Astralis has now suffered two roster changes, and while they had braced themselves for the first one with Jakob "JUGi" Hansen replacing gla1ve, this time around the Danish organization had to run around in a bid to find a temporary replacement, finally getting their hands on Marco "Snappi" Pfeiffer.
With a new lineup at their disposal and back-to-back top tier tournaments in front of them, a big task seems to be looming in front of Astralis, and it will be interesting to see how the team performs in this situation.
