if the shoe fits: an interview with Albert Yeh, General Manager of the Florida Mayhem SHU Follow Nov 9, 2019 · 22 min read

Courtesy of Florida Mayhem

It’s no secret that the Florida Mayhem have had a tumultuous two seasons in the Overwatch League, finishing second to last in the inaugural season and placing last in the season to follow. Mayhem was founded in 2017 as part of Misfits Gaming’s venture into the Overwatch League and are one of the 12 founding members of the league. The Mayhem we see today is vastly different to the Misfits roster that first entered the league in 2018. Of that original roster, the only player currently competing in the league is Logix who has been with the Toronto Defiant since early 2019.

While Mayhem has been plagued with poor performances, rumors of mismanagement and a seemingly revolving door of coaching staff, there have been a few bright spots from the organization representing the Sunshine State. Mayhem’s venture into the Path to Pro quickly developed a young, talented core into several league-ready players with notable names such as Shax, Apply and Mangachu finding homes for the upcoming 2020 season. And while the 2019 season posed the biggest challenge yet for the Mayhem — shrewd scouting, key roster additions and the implementation of role lock helped the team find some stability in Stage 4, laying the groundwork for a competent core moving into the next season. I had a chance to sit down with Mayhem’s former analyst, Head of Scouting and current General Manager Albert Yeh to discuss his journey through esports, the state of the team and Mayhem’s vision for the future.

1. For those unaware, can you tell us a bit more about yourself — what was your life like before Overwatch and what other titles have you played and/or competed in?

I’ve been a gamer from a very young age but I didn’t start playing competitively until I was in college — that was when I really started dedicating more time to video games since I finally had a decent setup and a little more freedom.

I’ve played a lot of smaller titles such as Insurgency and Planetside 2. Immediately before Overwatch, I played Dirty Bomb competitively. There wasn’t necessarily a strong professional scene for Dirty Bomb but I think it’s fair to say that I competed at or close to the highest level — I remember scrimming Surefour’s team while they were the top team in NA (maybe even the world at that time). I also played a little bit of CS:GO and competed in a few open leagues but never pursued it further. I ended up winning the North American championship for Insurgency and was also a Planetside 2 World Champion which doesn’t mean much but it sounds cool!

2. You mentioned you were working prior to transitioning to Overwatch full time, can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Prior to esports full time I was competing in a bunch of Overwatch teams and held down full time jobs simultaneously. I worked as a consultant and later worked as a business analyst. Right before starting my position with the Mayhem, I was working for Comcast in New York in their AdTech division while also working with NRG as a coach.

3. You’ve had a long history competing in Overwatch, ranging back almost 3 years as a player in a multitude of teams such as Elevate, Street Hoops, Team of Snow and Prestige Worldwide/Rockets Esports. You first moved into a coaching/management position when you worked with NRG in Contenders S1 before signing with the Mayhem as an analyst in S1 of the Overwatch League. What was the transition like moving from playing to coaching/management positions?

I decided to call it quits as a player right around the time the new season of Contenders was announced in late 2017. This was also when Academy teams were announced — at the time, I was still playing on Prestige Worldwide/Rockets Esports with Stratus, Tehpwnzorr, NLaeeR, Progi and Dummy. Half our team had Academy trials while the other half didn’t so it didn’t make sense for me or the team to hold Stratus, Tehpwnzorr or NLaeeR back — I’d always said when we formed the team that we would never hold anyone from an opportunity to compete at the next level. Ultimately, Stratus went to NRG, Tehpwnzzorr went to GGEA and NlaeeR went to LNL so it was good to see members of the team find some success.

However, as a result — the team broke up. I ended up trialing for a few different projects but didn’t find anything promising and my options as a player didn’t look great. I ended up taking a step back and thinking to myself — Okay, I’m 25. Why would an Academy team want an older off-tank player at a time when the off-tank player pool was incredibly stacked with talent. The chances of me getting into the league as a player were incredibly slim and the meta at the time was double flanker dive — teams were only really looking for a single starting off-tank player. So I made the decision to stop competing as a player — I knew Jaime Cohenca on NRG and I put together a spreadsheet of prospects for their Academy team and brought it to his attention and said, “Hey man, I’d like to build your Academy team on a volunteer basis, if you’d let me”. That’s basically how I got that opportunity and as you know, ended up bringing you along as an assistant coach and we both made the transition from players to staff around the same time. After working with NRG and NineK for a few months, I received an offer to join the Mayhem as an analyst during the inaugural season. At the time, it was the only offer I had and I was sick of working two full-time jobs so I jumped at the opportunity to do what I love and moved to LA.

Courtesy of Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment

4. What was the transition like for the people in your life when you committed to an OWL position full time? How did your parents react?

Initially, my dad thought that I wasn’t going to be able to find a career in esports. I think he was under the assumption that I would quit gaming over quitting my professional career. We had a talk a month or two before I made the decision to join the Mayhem where he essentially said ‘You’ve been doing this since before college. You’re eventually going to have to choose one since it’s harming your development across both fronts’. I think that was a pretty fair statement, I constantly found that I didn’t have time to fully invest myself into work so I ended up doing a ton of horizontal moves that enabled me to play games on the side. He was initially pretty shocked when I made my decision to go full-time but both my parents are very supportive of me now. It’s been almost 2 years full-time and it’s something I really enjoy doing and I think both my parents can see that. My dad’s even recently told me about some esports degrees to look into!

I’m sure the ESPN article helped!

I actually haven’t shown them that yet but they’re boomers so maybe they won’t even realize the significance.

5. The role of an analyst is relatively poorly defined within the context of the league and the Path to Pro. Being the GM of the team now (and having being an analyst in the past), what expectations do you have for an analyst or your analyst team?

There’s basically two types of analysts within the context of professional Overwatch — the data focused analyst and the game analyst. The distinction I would make is that the data analysts usually don’t need to understand the game at a high level. Their focus tends to be on making computer vision tools, machine learning tools or wrangling large data sets to provide the coaching staff with analytics. You don’t need much game knowledge but you do need a lot of technical knowledge.

But you would need a sanity check, ideally to ensure that the data analyst is on the right path.

Right, you need a head coach or really, any coach to sit down with the analyst and say hey — this metric doesn’t really make sense within the context of Overwatch or this analysis (or the approach to it) doesn’t really line up with the meta or with how the game is being played right now. Essentially, you need to make sure that your coaching staff is able to lead your analyst team.

The other type of analyst is the game analyst — this is usually someone who is a former player or even a former coach. They might not have competed at the highest level but they understand the meta and the flow of the game well. These are the analysts that you trust to make your scouting reports and additionally assist in giving feedback to your coaches and players, depending on your coaching structure. I don’t think that the pure data analysts should be writing your scouting reports because if they don’t understand the game at a fundamental level, they can’t really cater the reports to the needs of your team. You really need to be able to put yourself in a player or coach’s shoes and say — Hey, this is what’s important for winning fights, maps and matches. Usually, those are the two types of analysts that I’ve encountered in Overwatch. Very rarely are there guys that can do both — someone that comes to mind is Gunba from the Los Angeles Valiant who would probably fit into both categories with ease.

6. While Blizzard provides packaged data sets from matches to teams, only a few teams in the league seem to utilize this to any sort of meaningful extent. While previous metas have made normalizing data sets extremely difficult, role lock might help alleviate some of these issues. What are your thoughts on data driven approaches to coaching at the OWL level? In general, what are your thoughts on analytics in the league?

The role of analytics really depends on what your coaching and analyst staff looks like. Issues can arise if a team is too data focused but conversely, issues can also arise if a team is too data blind. You need to be able to find a healthy balance and there’s really no set answer. What works best usually only works best for your team and your circumstances.

In general, I find that relying on analytics heavily is largely useless if your team doesn’t understand the meta at a fundamental level. For example, looking back at our team in S2 — we never had a strong understanding of GOATs and I doubt that adding data to the mix or applying a data driven approach would have helped us improve drastically. I think analytics helps you optimize the things you’re doing well. They can really help you improve if you’re a middle of the pack team because you’re able to look at what the top teams are doing and apply that to your strategies. But if your team doesn’t have a grasp of the meta, heavy reliance on analytics will not help you bridge that gap.

Data without context is also very detrimental. A good example that comes to mind is a tweet that Avalla (an assistant coach with the Washington Justice last season) made asking people to vote on what the best way to utilize Lucio beat was during a match. The answer, based on their scrim data, was presented as ‘Beating first wins you the most fights’. I think the question is fine but without any relevant context as to how the data is collected or other factors such as the enemy team’s ultimate economy, how the team fight is breaking down or what the game state is (Is it overtime? Are people staggering onto point? Is it 6v6 with equal ultimates?) makes the answer less meaningful.

All of the above matters when considering when you should be using a defensive ultimate as a team. Just looking at win rates without context can be extremely harmful — if data is collected where your team is using beat first every time but there are data points where it’s overtime and you always have the numbers advantage, this will obviously skew win rates and and can skew your final conclusion if you’re only relying on win rates to reach those conclusions. Or if your team only beats when the other team doesn’t have beat — your win rate will probably be much higher for those fights but this doesn’t mean that the usage of beat in that situation was correct without looking at factors such as game state or overall ultimate economy.

I also think that bad teams generally have bad stats — so if you’re losing consistently, you need to be careful at how much value you place on the data you’re collecting.

Right, especially during GOATs where full team wipes could be pretty common, it’s easy for bad teams to look much worse at an individual level.

Yeah, exactly. It’s easy to say — hey, we’re not getting as many Zarya ultimates as our counterparts if we’re getting destroyed every fight. That’s an obvious conclusion if we’ve lost a large amount of team fights early and our Zarya is unable to find value. That doesn’t necessarily mean that our Zarya is bad — it could also point to the rest of the team making mistakes and putting our Zarya on the back foot in every team fight. I just think there’s a lot of responsibility when it comes to presenting data and statistics with respect to the game because it has the potential to present some incredibly polarizing but false narratives.

I also believe there’s a lot of noise with Overwatch analytics right now. There’s nothing defined as it is in other sports. For example, in basketball you have a variety of useful metrics such as the standard points, rebounds and assists but there’s a whole slew of advanced metrics that can be looked at over a large sample size to understand the impact a player is having on a team such as Player Efficiency Rating, Win Shares and Offensive/Defensive Efficiency. I’m not sure we’re there yet for Overwatch — everyone looks at kills but we definitely need to be looking deeper than that and trying to identify what’s really important. It’s not easy to accomplish since with frequent meta changes, what might be an acceptable metric in one meta may vary significantly moving into the next. Right now, I’d probably take the eye test over a pure statistical analysis any day of the week — I think I trust that more.

Courtesy of Florida Mayhem

7. Over the course of the season, we’ve seen teams make frequent alterations to their coaching staff. Mayhem has gone through 7 or 8 staffing changes this year alone — what is your vision moving into the off-season in terms of creating a coaching staff to bolster your 2020 campaign?

For me, the most important thing in a coaching staff is that they get along in terms of their approach to the game. They should see the game in a similar light or at least see the game in a way that’s beneficial to each other. For example, if we look at Pavane, a coach famously known to favor passive and reactive play and pair him with a super aggressive coach — someone like Pajion with the Titans, they would probably not jive well together since they see the game from completely different perspectives.

Personalities, to a point, should also mesh but it’s a professional league — you should be comfortable and adaptable enough to work with anyone. While it is important to get along well outside the game as well, I think people (at the top level) should be professional enough to make it work with a variety of different personalities on the roster.

With respect to our coaching staff changes — we moved to a full Korean roster halfway through the season. Our original head coach Mineral had never coached a full Korean roster before and at the time raised some valid concerns about being able to effectively coach a roster in a completely different language. Ultimately, we reached a mutual decision to part ways.

We let go of a few other coaches over the course of the season because they didn’t gel with the team or the players. I think the main issue was that we kept trying to patch things up during the season which is really difficult to do well. People usually aren’t willing to leave their teams mid-season and you’re forced to work with what’s available. I think it was pretty obvious it was a patchwork job. I don’t plan on that happening next year, we’re working on developing a stable coaching staff that I, the team and the organization believe in.

In terms of head coaches, the best head coaches have a clear vision and are able to delegate effectively. To me, those are the most important traits I’m looking for in a head coach. Coaches that can’t effectively delegate are going to struggle . At the OWL level, you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your coaching staff and be able to manage your staff (as well as your roster) effectively. It really does require an intimate understanding of your staff and knowing what will suit people well.

8. Something we’ve seen teams try (with varying levels of success) is having positional coaches where coaches are designated to work with players by their roles, not unlike the NFL or the NBA. The two examples that come to mind are Seoul Dynasty in S1 and Dallas Fuel in S2. Having played the game, coached the game and worked as an analyst — how does this line up with your view on coaching?

I believe it really depends on the coach’s personality. Coaches are naturally going to be ambitious and will potentially not enjoy being relegated or pigeonholed into one specific role. I think most coaches probably believe they can provide more value than by just being a positional coach. I relate positional coaching to private coaching but at a professional level — private coaches essentially help lower level players work on specific weaknesses or aspects of their game. I’m sure there’s some coaches that don’t mind taking on that role but I think it’s important for them to have the option to choose otherwise. In general, most coaches in the league have ambitions and they need to have room to grow. That’s what I like for my coaches — I don’t want to tell someone ‘Hey, you’re only doing this and I don’t want to hear your thoughts anywhere else’.

9. Mayhem has had two turbulent seasons thus far in the league. However, with the off-season ramping up and the core roster showing promise in Stage 4 with the addition of role lock, the future certainly seems promising. You had originally moved into management as a scout at the end of S1 — what was Mayhem’s vision for the future back then? And how/what about that has changed with the completion of S2?

Moving into Season 2, we had originally planned to create a mixed roster. I think one of our biggest pitfalls was putting too much emphasis into trials instead of looking into acquiring players from other teams in OWL or acquiring pairs or trios from teams with pre-existing synergy together. It was a difficult time since I wasn’t a GM or an assistant GM back then. While I did have a lot of input over the trials process, I felt like I wasn’t able to effectively push the vision of the roster that I would have liked to build.

Looking forward to Season 3, we’re focused on building on the core that showed a lot of promise towards the tail end of Season 2. The addition of role lock has definitely made the process of roster building a little easier since we don’t need to look for a DPS that can cover some off-tanks or an off-tank that can cover some DPS heroes. In terms of the roster makeup, for the foreseeable future, we’re invested into a full Korean roster since we have a strong base to build from. We don’t have any western coaches or a western Academy team so in terms of performance, it doesn’t make much sense to revert back. It’s not something I’m opposed to doing if we see some good options open up in the long term but we’re fully committed to building up the current roster for the next season.

10. Heading into this season, what are expectations like once you achieve your final roster?

Once we have a roster that we’re happy with, I think it’s really important for us to have a strong start to the season. Starting strong has ripple effects throughout the rest of the season and can help set the tone early — if you’re good in the first quarter of the season, it helps set you up for success later on and gives you some wiggle room to work through issues and still make the playoffs. I’d really like for us to have a honeymoon period rather than feeling like we’re in crisis mode immediately where everything is going wrong. Once the roster is finalized, our main focus is going to be making sure everyone gets reps and gets acclimated with playing with each other so we can build on the synergy we had finishing off Stage 4 last season.

Courtesy of Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment

11. You guys had a rough start to last season but managed to make some shrewd pickups to help finish off Stage 4 strong. When everything feels like it’s going wrong and the team is in crisis mode, how much impact does a guy like Fate have on the team?

We’re incredibly lucky to have a guy like Fate on the roster. He’s essentially a veteran presence on the team and is a very capable leader. In order to succeed as a main tank in the league now, you need to be exceptionally vocal. Prior to OWL, everyone expected your main supports to do all the macro and micro calling but when you get to the top level, every player in the lobby has an immense skill ceiling and knowledge of the game so everyone needs to be able to make the correct decisions at the right time — this can’t necessarily happen if your main support is forced to call everything and this is really where Fate excels.

Fate is a very vocal leader and pairs really well with Kris. They’re both essentially the collective brain of the team. Kris does a lot of the ultimate tracking and pre-fight planning which Fate also helps with. Additionally, Fate makes a lot of his own plans and is able to lead the team by calling mid-fight adjustments as needed. Outside the game, both Fate and Kris are super vocal and very involved in review and strategy sessions. It’s amazing to have a veteran like him on the team to show everyone what it means to be a professional player and to truly lead by example.

Courtesy of Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment

12. There are a lot of different opinions on who the deserved MVP should have been this year. While in S1, the answer was a little more clear cut in terms of JJonak and his play (which arguably revolutionized the flex support position across the league) — what is your take on this year’s MVP race with guys like Fury, JJanu, Haksal and the eventual winner — Sinatraa?

The MVP race was definitely a lot more stacked this season compared to the inaugural season. There were a number of players that I believe performed really well in GOATs but I personally voted for Sinatraa and I think his win was well deserved. I think there was a lot of criticism revolving around him not playing as a starter for the full season but that really doesn’t take away from the fact that he was the best at his position for 3/4 of the season. He was completely dominant in his Zarya play and the only other players that could hold a candle to his performances were Seominsoo or Nenne. In my opinion, Shock’s continued success was off the back of his play — not to take anything away from the other incredibly talented players on the team but Sinatraa definitely had a lot of expectations (like most Zarya players during GOATs) to perform and he consistently exceeded those expectations. He’s also shown the ability to play whatever role the team needs him to play, we saw him on a wide range of heroes and he particularly impressed on Doomfist. That’s a big part of being the MVP candidate for me, being able to do whatever your team needs of you, no matter the situation.

I think people in the community might be upset because of how they perceive Sinatraa but it’s important to remember that players are vastly different in ranked than they are in a team environment. I think because he streams so much and grinds so much, the public perception is that he’s really toxic or has a terrible attitude but from my experiences listening to him in comms in the early NRG/Shock days, he’s an exceptional leader and a core part of the team. He’s definitely shown the world that he’s matured from his time on Selfless and that he can be an asset to any team.

13. In your eyes, who was a player that was almost criminally underrated this season?

The player that stood out to me the most was Slime. The Titans had fantastic performances during the season but I don’t think Slime received enough credit for their consistency. While the Titans roster is certainly stacked, I would definitely consider Slime a top 5 main support based on his performance. During GOATs, his cooldown usage was consistently exceptional. He was always at the right place at the right time, enabling players like JJanu and Bumper. He’s definitely the most underrated in my eyes and I’m excited to see more from him.

14. Once Mayhem committed to a full Korean roster, it didn’t make much sense for you guys to continue to field a western Academy team. We’ve since seen a lot of the Mayhem Academy players move on and find success within the league. What were some of the key takeaways you guys took from fielding such a strong roster? How important is the path to pro as part of Mayhem’s vision moving forward?

Tier 2 Overwatch is incredibly important to the Overwatch ecosystem. You constantly need a pipeline of talent since OWL ready players don’t just pop out of anywhere. They need a place to grow, a place where they can compete with and against other like minded and talented players. Iron sharpens iron so you definitely need a strong, sustainable Tier 2 scene in order for the league to find continued success. It’s also generally very beneficial for OWL teams to be able to call players up from their Academy squad if they show strong development. It’s something we’re certainly looking to get back into, I’m personally pushing pretty hard for it since I built Mayhem Academy and would like to see more players develop under our banner. Whether or not that happens remains to be seen but I hope to share more information as it develops.

Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment

15. Who are some of the guys that you (and everyone) should be excited about moving on from Gauntlet and into the 2020 season?

I’m fairly certain everyone in the league was involved in some capacity in the SP9RK1E sweepstakes. He’s an insane player and someone I’ve been following since back when I was actively competing. He’s one of the guys that basically grew up with Overwatch. Everyone was always referring to him as this insanely talented young player that was going to dominate when he turned 18 and now we’re finally here. I personally think of him as the Zion Williamson of Overwatch — he’s very talented, very flexible and has shown that he can compete with the best.

Some of the other talent that has been impressive over the past two years and especially at Gauntlet were Yaki and Doha (who has shown a fair amount of flexibility as of late). Some of the western talent on Atlanta Academy such as Hawk and Sugarfree also performed exceptionally well and I hope to see both of them in the league someday. Another standout during Gauntlet (as well as the regular season) was Patiphan — he really rose to prominence during last year’s World Cup but I believe we got to see him step it up a notch during Gauntlet and show the world what he’s really capable of. The Gauntlet this year also showed that Korea is not the sole dominant region anymore and the rest of the world is slowly but surely developing talent that can compete, which is incredibly encouraging for the future of Overwatch and the league.

Courtesy of Florida Mayhem

16. The league recently released viewership numbers and announced that the 2019 Grand Finals viewership (based on the average minute audience metric) was up 16% from last year while viewership in the regular season had shown strong growth of about 11% in the 18–34 demographic. With these first two seasons supposedly surpassing the initial expectations — what are your expectations moving into next season where we see the league moving into the homestand/localization format?

If I’m being honest, I have no idea. I think that’s the big question mark and the big unknown for everyone moving into next season. It’s essentially something the league has committed fully to and it almost feels like the make or break season in many respects. I hope it goes great, I hope every team kills it at the homestands but realistically there are going to be a lot of pain points next year. I hope there’s more success than pain points but I honestly don’t know what to expect. I would almost compare this to the inaugural season where everyone has to fill out arenas, hire more marketing staff, hire event staff and so on. Organizations are having to staff up and spend big on infrastructure to make it the best season possible. I think everyone knows this is what we’ve been working towards — I hope it all works out. I’m definitely looking forward to living in Florida, I don’t have to pay any state taxes!

17. With you having spent close to 2 seasons in the league, what has been the most valuable experience you’ve gained and what is a piece of advice you would give to those grinding in the path to pro?

It might sound cheesy but the most valuable experience I’ve learned over these 2 seasons is failure. I strongly believe that you learn the most through failure. It hurts — a lot — but there’s a reason why I think I’ve grown so much these past two years. Prior to joining Mayhem, I don’t think I ever experienced failure to this extent. When everything goes right, you think you’re doing everything correctly just based on the results. It’s hard to see what areas you need to improve on and there’s nothing really prompting change. It has definitely been a really brutal learning process these last 2 seasons but I think with all the knowledge I’ve gained I’ve been able to formulate a very clear idea and vision for how I want the team to function and have also developed a clear understanding of what pitfalls to avoid.

18. Final question, when is SMC making a comeback?

Since we’re a money crew, we don’t play in seasons that have no meaning. We will not be competing for a cute spray!

You can find Albert on Twitter here!