Halvor "vENdetta" Gulestøl: "You would've liked to have seen more teams making the trip over."





GosuGamers caught up with Halvor "vENdetta" Gulestøl, member of the analyst desk at the WESG 2016 Global Grand Finals, where we discussed various aspects of the tournament, his career and RoomOnFire.

GosuGamers presents an interview with RoomOnFire member, Halvor "vENdetta" Gulestøl, who was analysing matches during the recently concluded WESG 2016 Global Grand Finals, where we saw Team EnVyUs take away the whopping $800,000 prize purse. During our interview we discussed the formatting of the event, prize money, Halvor's enjoyment of his job, RoomOnFire, amongst various other topics pertaining to both eSports and CS:GO.

Below you will find a transcript of the recorded interview, alternatively you may listen to a recording below:

*Please be aware that the recording has a few distortions, due to the open nature of the environment the interview was recorded in.

Hi guys Aleksei from GosuGamers with vENdetta, an analyst here at the WESG 2016 Global Grand Finals. Halvor, how are you?

I’m doing good, really good actually. Finally getting over the worst part of the part of the jet lag, at least it feels like it. Feeling pretty good going into the finals day.

The adaptation, how are you finding it overall?

The adaptation coming in from Europe?

Yeah.



Normally I'm terrible with jet lag when I'm flying to Asia, the last time I came here was for Taipei last year and I was just a complete mess of a human being. This time it's a slight bit better, rough first day but getting into it now.

Sound. And how are you finding the food? Some people are saying that the Chinese have a certain diet.

Yeah, an acquired taste. For me it's been pretty good so far, I haven't actually ventured in to try authentic Chinese food. I've been sticking to the event catering, which has been pretty nice actually for an event. We went out yesterday, had some Korean barbecue, so no disasters so far, no food poisoning or anything of that sort. I've been pretty happy about it.

Talking about the event as a whole, from your perspective, you're "in the in", you get to experience stuff behind the stage. Is there anything that you would improve on, maybe do a bit differently purely from a talent point of view?

From a talent point of view, I mean we've been treated pretty well so far while we've been here. We've got a nice green room for ourselves that's kind of secluded, where we can chill out and relax, got all the games going on. All the games, actually. We're never going to miss out on anything, which is nice. The schedule has actually been way better than it has for normal events, so we don't feel overworked, even though we might have long days, you don't really feel too exhausted at the end of it. In that sense it's been pretty good. I guess the only issue really is the great firewall that's been a bit of an issue. Not for everybody else, because everybody else seems to find working VPNs, I don't, so I've been struggling a little bit with that, but that's pretty much it. Other than that it's been a fairly straightforward and relaxing event to do behind the scenes.

If we look at the matches, the format of the tournament is Olympic style. I took an interview recently from Jordan "Next" Savelli, Manager of Team EnVyUs, he evaluated it as being positive overall, but at the same time there's nooks and crannies that mean that teams coming with a roster from the same country get an advantage over teams that come as mixes. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head with that, it's definitely going to be an issue. A team like EnVyUs, for instance, or Space Soldiers for that matter are going to be able to compete with their full line-ups, which is always going to be beneficial for them compared to, let's say, Team Ukraine or Team Kazakhstan, that has to actually spread things out and also have players on that team since they're not a full roster, some of them have commitments with their teams back home, so you're seeing quite a few teams having to change their roster leading up to the event, because somebody has to practice for the major. For the full rosters, they can actually use this as a bit of a testing ground before the majors as well. I think that's always going to be an issue.

I've always been a big fan of having national tournaments, I think that's a really cool thing, but it also does weaken the level of play overall, just by the simple fact that more and more line-ups are having mixed nationalities and I don't see a good way of escaping it, unless you find some sort of an off-season for these kind of national tournaments and then have a similar rule where you have one captain pick out ten players etc. going that way about it, picking out an Olympic squad, if you like.

In terms of the matches that we saw in CS:GO, it's been a pretty spectacular event in the sense that we've seen teams that probably should've been up top, fall. In specific I'm talking about Team Kinguin and Space Soldiers nearly getting through to the Grand Finals. Would you have thought that this would be a possibility prior to the event?

We actually had this discussion with "natu" on the plane over here because we had the same flight from Helsinki, and we talked about who we actually regarded as favourites. We ended up in a really weird situation, where we looked at Kinguin as one of the strongest, maybe even the strongest team coming into this, simply because Virtus.pro has tendencies whenever they come off of breaks to be very up-and-down, we've even seen that on certain maps in this tournament, especially in their quarter-finals versus Dark Passage, they were really having a rough time. Kinguin have been playing constantly, non-stop in online tournaments and smaller LAN events and whatnot, so you kind of know what to expect. Envy obviously with the rumours going on with G2 and them merging line-ups, last time we saw that kind of a French shuffle happened, I think that was ESWC, where EnVyUs was playing and they just took a complete dive in terms of how they would perform. I was looking pretty positively on the chances that Kinguin and Space Soldiers had going into this. I'm not sure if they can actually still beat Virtus.pro in the semi-finals, it's a weird situation to be in, but it's pretty cool to see nonetheless, because even though you might have an idea of how things might progress on paper before the line-up, it's something completely different to see if the teams actually do excel. They still have their chances, it's a domestic match-up and that's always kind of a weird affair.

I suppose the teams (V.P and Kinguin) also know each other quite well, I imagine they practice quite frequently against each other, considering they're two very close teams and the players know each other very well.

In terms of the event, the prize pool is $1,500,000, which surpasses everything, basically. The only real contenders, and that's for two seasons would be ECS and ELEAGUE, and that's aggregate.

It's pretty nuts, actually. I think more and more tournaments in China, obviously not of this scale, but the more domestic tournaments they've had have also had a pretty significant rise in terms of prize money. I think that's obviously more and more sponsors picking up on the game here in China, becoming more popular, because it did have a pretty staggered start in Asia. CS:GO wasn't too popular to begin with, but it's picking up gradually. Still, a prize pool of this range is absolutely insane. Like you said, it surpasses everything we've seen, it surpasses majors. It's pretty crazy.

You would've liked to have seen more teams making the trip over, when its that kind of a crazy prize pool, especially with how top-heavy it is, if you make top 3, you're guaranteed $200,000. You're not going to find that kind of a prize purse anywhere else. It's nuts, but it's cool to see. I think it's not necessarily one-off either, as more and more sponsors outside (of eSports), or mainstream companies and whatnot take up interest within eSports, there's bound to be an influx of money in prize pools. I think it's just a start, not necessarily that we're going to see a TI (The International) level of money for a lot of tournaments, but yeah, I can definitely see there being a couple of million dollar plus tournaments over the year.

You mentioned TI. A concept that I really like in Dota 2 in particular is crowd sourcing. So you have in-game items that contribute towards the prize pool.

Yeah, like the eSport cases we had initially in CS:GO. I think there were only two instances of these cases in CS:GO. Not really sure why they've opted to go away from that, I think it would be a welcomed thing.



What they do with Dota, you have compendiums for TI that people buy. You get multiple skins and what have you for the various heroes and other fun things. I think people are more than happy to spend that money on it, not only because it's something they'd do otherwise, just like we buy gun skins or weapon skins in CS:GO, but you also feel like you're contributing to the grandest spectacle that your game has to offer throughout the year. I would like to see that come back in CS:GO, I think it's a great idea and it's not like you're forcing anyone to actually pay a fee to continue playing the game or anything like that, it's completely voluntary.

Purely aesthetic, nothing affecting the game.



Yeah, exactly, it doesn't affect the game in any sort of way. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be there. It's where Valve has two different stances on their own games, I guess they might be testing things out with Dota, or testing things out with CS, who knows what they're thinking, but that might be the reason why we don't have it in CS:GO. I would be a bit wary about ending up in a situation where TI would be the only tournament in Dota that mattered. I was never a big fan of that, you'd see constant team changes, you'd see line-ups being created two weeks ahead of the qualifiers to make the grand leap, that would destroy stable line-ups and whatnot, all for the chance of just making TI. I think it's bad for stability of the scene, I think it's bad for getting new talent on there as well, because if you're banking everything on one tournament of the year, you're going to go with what you know is tried and true, and that's going to be experienced veterans, for the better part of it. I think we have a pretty healthy scene in that sense in CS:GO.

Put crowdsourcing in, with an operation that is dedicated to a major and maybe you'd put a cap on it, like on how much of it would actually go towards the prize pool, or whether it's going to fund further events in the future. Maybe you'd notch the prize pool up by half a million and whatever is excess from the first operation that you have, that is then trickled down to the next major, something like that. I think that would be the best way to go about it. It's an interesting concept, I'm definitely a fan of crowdsourcing, for sure.

Drifting away from general questions, I'd like to find out more about yourself. I believe Copenhagen Games 2015 that was your first event?

My very first one was actually the Katowice major in 2015, but the initial intention of it was for me to not do anything apart from observing. I started out observing, the first one I did was Gamescom in 2014, and for Katowice I was initially hired to be and observer and ended up pretty much doing both analysis and observing together with Janko, who was brought on as the second observer for the event.

That's where it all started, Copenhagen was like the first commentary event I did, I kind of shied away from that, so not really doing much casting, unless it's something that the organisers ask me about when I'm here. That was the start of it all, kind of out of the blue. It was never something I planned on doing, or something I expected to do, to work with CS. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

If you look at the list of events you've participated in, it's an equal mix of commentating and analysing.

Maybe at a time, for now it’s definitely more analysis and desk work than commentary, barring a couple of games here and there because the schedule works out a certain way and somebody needs a break, or somebody is feeling sick that day etc. You can hop in, but I've never worked on commentary in that sense, because it was never my intention to do that. I would never sign myself up voluntarily to do it, because I know there's way better people for the job than me.

Would you say you enjoy commentating to the same degree as analytics, or is it very much that you significantly prefer analysing?



I think it goes in ebbs and flows really. Initially, when I was doing a lot of colour commentary, when I started doing online matches with Anders and Semm, when we were still streaming games, I got very tired of doing in-game stuff, or commentary, because you see so much going on within a game and then you have a very limited amount of time to actually elaborate on what you see and why that is of significance.

That kind of wore on me in that sense, because you want to explain the game as well as possible as many people and make it as understandable as you humanely can, but if you're given a very significant time constraint, then that's going to be extremely difficult to do. That's what I really liked about doing analysis and desk segments instead, because you have more time, at least you used to, now it's getting more and more shortened down and everything is getting kind of narrowed in, so it's still very limited as to how deep you can go into analysis, often times it'll be very shallow, which is a shame, but it's understandable as well. I can definitely see that it requires a special interest for people watching to be really caught up with the analysis part of it. Often times you're there to watch the spectacle of it, not the nitty-gritty. That's just how it is. For me, I would definitely enjoy desk work more, because you do have a bigger arena in that sense, to elaborate on what you've seen and what you feel is of importance, a lot of the time. It changes a tiny bit between online games and offline games, because the pace of the game is very different. Online games have a much higher tempo than what they do at LAN events, and that does play into it as well. If you're doing commentary at an offline event like this, you see teams slow things down, which does give you quite a bit of time to actually expand upon your thoughts.



You mentioned Anders and Semmler, you guys are obviously part of OnFire. Could you talk a little bit about it, give us an idea of what exactly RoomOnFire is? What are the future plans for the organisation?



RoomOnFire just started out as a bit of a trio team, as a brand for me, Anders and Semm, when we were still doing online games. Eventually as leagues started doing broadcast rights and whatnot, we couldn't stream as many games, so we kind of fell on the way side for that, for a significant amount of time, but eventually we started thinking of it as more of something that we could create into a casting group that would allow us to stand stronger when it came to negotiations and having a good idea of what's going on, instead of working against each-other, because everyone that works at events - we all like each other. We all have the same common goal - presenting the best show possible. It wouldn't make sense for us to not share information that we feel is important. It was more of a way of just grouping a lot of the talent that works within CS to the same place, where we can have an open discussion and conversation about what we want to do and what we'd like to see out of events from a talent standpoint. That's pretty much how it started out.

As for the future of RoomOnFire, I'm not really sure how much I can dwell into what the future plans are, but it's something that Semmler and moses are constantly working on and trying to improve. A lot of us there are. I guess for the near future the plan is to create as much content as possible, so in-between tournaments and whatnot, we'll have a constant stream of stuff that people can watch and tune in to, whether it be live streams or YouTube content with map breakdowns and whatnot, or Anders' theory craft and so on. That's pretty much the main focus for the foreseeable future.

Won't be holding you much longer man, thank you very much for the interview, it was very insightful and interesting. And yeah, looking forward to the grand final, that's going to be a good one.

Yeah it should definitely be a good one. I'm even excited to see the semi-finals and even the third place deciders, because even that's a pretty significant jump in prize money. It definitely should be a good ending to the tournament.

Image courtesy of ESL Flickr / Helen Kristiansson