



Player Profile Michael "dooi" Dewey

QPL: WEEK 1 vs rapha, WEEK 2 vs GNiK, WEEK 3 vs psygib, WEEK 4 vs whaz

Hi Michael, can you please introduce yourself and tell us how did you get yourself to Quake?

My dad played Quake 2 and Quake 3 extensively. I was introduced to Quake 2 at age 4. I did not enjoy Quake as much as other games at the time. I mostly attribute this to social aspects ie. wanting to play games that my friends were playing. By the time I was 11 or 12 I knew my interest in Quake was growing from a competitive perspective. From age 11 to 14, I spent a significant amount of time dueling. Mainly one map, DM6, on Quake Live. When I got to high school I began to take baseball seriously. I trained and earned an opportunity to play in college. I was good enough to get there but not good enough to stay. I quit after my second season as I had lost the enjoyment I used to get from the game. I also performed poorly. At that time, I began playing various FPS games again including CSGO, UT4, Battlefield, and Quake Live. Generally, I was in the top 1% of every game I played despite having what I considered to be relatively poor mechanical skills. In April of 2017 Quake Champions Beta was released and I began to play. By May or June, they had announced Quakecon 2017 and I decided I wanted to try competing and I qualified for the tournament. That was my introduction to competitive Quake.

I heard you are a huge fan of baseball, what team is your favourite and are there any analogy you can throw in between Quake and baseball?

I am a big baseball fan. The San Francisco Giants are my favorite team and I would consider the Houston Astros a close second. I tend to identify with certain players and thus become fans of their team. I am not a loyal team fan if I am being completely honest. I think the greatest personal parallel between athletics and esports was the learning how to deal with the anxiety, fear, and embarrassment associated with failure. Failing sucks, especially when it is public. I carried some of what I learned from baseball to Quake and was able to expedite the process of learning how to deal with failure. I haven’t always dealt with it in an optimal way, but I do the best I can and try to deal with it a little better each time.

You made it to Quake Pro League and first weeks showed you have skills needed to thrive there. Did you set any goals for yourself, or if we continue on psychological note, does setting goals somehow bind you?

The goal is to win every match 3-0. There are goals that branch from that and improvement goals that I set each week. Focal points that I know are key to help me win my matchup. But the ultimate goal is to win the match at hand.

From what I understand, you played a lot with rapha back in a days. What was tough for you to learn about Quake and is there any advice you would give to newcomers?

I think most who are close to, or who have practiced with, rapha would say he is as good of a teacher as he is a player. Which is pretty incredible because often times the best players are the worst teachers. There are a lot of tough things to learn in Quake. I could identify individual pieces of my game that have been difficult challenges to overcome, but I think the ability to stay in the present moment is the most difficult skill to master in any game or sport. Being present allows you to make adjustments, react to changes, and solve problems. This type of mental discipline requires training outside of the game, and is very difficult to master. In terms of advice, obviously there are certain mechanical hurdles you have to overcome in order to be competitive at a high level. However, most players I see get stuck in the mechanical mindset. They are robots mechanically but mentally weak. Not strong enough to handle pressures associated with actual competition. Actual competition is fierce. Anxiety is high. If I had to take a shot-in-the-dark guess, I’d say around 50% of players have physical responses to their performance anxiety. Nausea (or worse actually vomiting), sleep loss, shakiness, etc. Failure is a very real consequence, and defeats more players than any one esports champion ever will. Many players focus entirely too much on the physical elements of their game and spend no time on their mental and psychological game. I differentiate the two because, in my opinion, they are very different. Your mental game is your approach to the game and your psychological game is your state of mind. Develop those elements of your game and you will be shocked how often you outperform your mechanics.

Was it somehow symbolic for you to play your first game in Stage 2 against rapha then?

Not particularly. We have played in the past in various online tournaments and on LAN once. I don’t really put emphasis on one match versus the next. This helps me be objective when analyzing my performance.

Iam actually glad, that you are mentioning mechanical skills and mental stability – what tools can player with lower mechanical skills use to overcome 80% Rail?

This has a two-part answer based one the scenario. Is your opponent hitting 80% because you are in bad positions or because he is hitting everything regardless of your position? If you are in bad positions and they are hitting a lot, you need to deny shots. This may mean you have to change the way you play the map. That is a major difference between playing for fun and playing to. If they are hitting everything, you need to understand that is part of being mechanically inferior. Sometimes mechanics just win, and there isn’t much you can do about it aside from continuing to improve your mechanics over time and making the best decisions that you can.

You are known for your patient, sometimes one would say the passive style of gameplay. What made you go this direction? I believe it must be nerve wracking from time to time.

I am a patient player. I would say I am not passive or aggressive. There are a number of factors that play into how I approach the game. A lot of times the champion matchup doesn’t warrant aggression, so I play passive. If I have a matchup that favors aggressive play, then I will play aggressively.

What approach do you have while picking champions? Do you have some favourites for each arena. We see more and more Scalebearers in the picks, is Scale new meta?

I can’t really comment on my champ picking approach. I think the meta is pretty diverse at the moment. Scale is an interesting pick because he and Keel are probably the most balanced tanks. There are two or three maps where Scale is pretty dominant and the rest, he is alright at best. I think that is reasonable for a tank. In my opinion, the goal should be to have vanilla mediums be viable on most every map, and all other fringe picks limited to 2-4 viable maps. What I have seen in my time playing QC is that people generally start complaining when fringe picks become viable on 5 or 6 maps.