A veteran analyst and longtime content creator, Renato ‘Shakarez’ Perdigão joins us today to discuss the inner workings of his vast job experience. Whether he is helping Clutch gaming assemble their NA LCS roster or breaking down the latest metagame trend in an easily digestible Blitz Esports piece, Shakarez's game understanding has earned him the respect of organizations and fans alike.

It's not unusual for analysts to start as content creators and move into a team once their skills have been proven, but it's not as common for people to come back to the content creation side of things once they've earned respect for their knowledge. What is it that motivated you to split your time so much between both roles?

After coming back from Brazil, I spent most of the offseason leading up to spring 2016 looking for a position as an analyst or assistant coach. In the end, I passed a trial with an LCS team and they offered me a position but, a last minute offer came from LolKing. The offer was simply more attractive and it allowed me to work from home and I was frankly feeling a bit burnt out on working with teams, so I thought doing content for a split or two would be a welcome change and a good pause.

"What a player can do when behind or ahead is also important, but that can always be taught"

I ended up enjoying working in content much more and being able to educate players on trends in both solo queue and professional matches were much more rewarding to me than tons of hours per day watching and reviewing scrims. Even when working in helping build Clutch's LCS application during the second half of 2017, I never stopped doing content.

Conventional wisdom often dictates that if a team is missing a very good player in some position and a more individually skilled one is on the open market that teams should always try to go for the more skilled player if they want to win.

Do you think this makes for a good roster building philosophy?

Well first off, the common fans often forget that players have contracts. You can’t just get rid of them without having to pay a severance package and benching them means they’re still getting a salary, so teams can’t always make a move just because it looks good in theory.

Beyond that, individual skill is obviously an important factor but shouldn’t be the sole factor when looking to build a roster. Seemingly better individual skill might be covered by the fact that said player has a shallow champion pool, or looks especially good because he’s used to getting more resources and attention from teammates, or generally gets favorable matchups via counter picks in draft.

In my opinion and also drawing from my experiences working at teams, having access to players who can play multiple styles and can fit the team’s needs and also the ever changing meta is a more important factor. To give an example, let’s say that player X is usually up in CS in lane, maybe that’s a byproduct of his team setting up around him to allow that.

What a player can do when behind or ahead is also important, but that can always be taught.

One of the most underappreciated factors of roster building is setting up the coaching staff. As someone that has both been involved in roster building and has often worked as an analyst for teams, what are the main problems that can arise from a badly set up coaching staff?

I think the main problem that can arise is if the coach isn’t good enough. Not to say that coaches should know everything, but if he struggles to give players information that they can use and find useful, either because he doesn’t communicate it properly or just because he lacks the knowledge, then the players will quickly deem him as not useful and lose his respect and authority.

This when talking specifically about gameplay coaches. I’ve seen this happen a few times throughout my career. There have been examples in the past where teams just decided to keep going without a coach, possibly because the coaches influence in that situation didn’t add anything or even hindered the team’s progress.

It’s very hard to know if a coach is good, unless you’ve talked to them about the game a lot you won’t really know much at all from the info out in the public. You can’t really fall into the trap of only looking at past results. Talking to players that have worked under him or other staff members that have worked with him can help.

In my case I had every candidate give me a VOD review of a specific game and see what areas they covered and that helped a lot in being able to recognize who would be a good hire, at least in respects to their knowledge of the game.

"Find what works for you. Your style, your niche."

Certainly, fans must have contacted you in the past looking for advice and some of our readers might be looking to get into content creation as well but lack any sort of experience. Is there any advice you'd wish you had gotten when you yourself where a rookie looking to get into content creation?

All the time and I’m constantly messaged about it, to the point where I just forget to answer (sorry).

I kind of just jumped in and started talking about topics that I liked and interested me and it eventually got me somewhere, looking back my biggest issue was that I was scared. Scared of not being good enough, scared of being wrong. The community can be cutthroat so getting things wrong was something that terrified me, it still does sometimes, but before it was worse before.

I’ve had several pieces that I just left halfway through or almost completed because I doubted myself, so I would say the biggest thing is to just go through with it and if the content is bad, that’s that, you can learn from it and improve and perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to have someone on Reddit or Youtube giving you constructive criticism.

In general, I’d say that if you’re an aspiring content creator you should aim to learn more about writing, image editing and video editing. I’m mostly self-taught on photoshop and video editing and while I’m not amazing, I know enough to be able to make a piece look much better. Nowadays I have editors for that but when you’re starting off going the extra mile to make sure the piece is good quality can matter a lot.

Finally, find what works for you. Your style, your niche. Something that sets you apart from the rest of the competition. We are in a time where you have websites are looking for contributors and freelancers to provide content so get to writing and don’t be afraid to reach out, that’s how I got most of my gigs.

Shakarez and his latest content