After a fifth place finish in Stage 1, the ﻿Atlanta Reign﻿ announced the departure of fan favorite DPS player Daniel "﻿dafran﻿" Francesca. A difficult 0-3 start to the second stage and a close victory over the ﻿Washington Justice﻿ weighing on their shoulders, the Reign achieved the upset of the season in their 3-1 victory of the formerly undefeated ﻿New York Excelsior﻿.





Upcomer discussed the team’s roster changes, teamwork, and scheduling challenges with main support player Petja "﻿Masaa﻿" Kantanen. This Saturday, he will look to once more lead his team to victory against the ever-dominant NYXL.





You have a new Zarya player in Andrej " BABYBAY





Masaa: It’s really hard because GOATS revolves around communication. You need to know when you have bubble, when your enemy has bubble, do they have amp, who’s discorded…you’re always talking about those things. And we have babybay and FRD coming in too, so we had two players switched out, so it’s really bad for us. But I think we have the same situation going on as the Gladiators when they got Decay. When they put him in, the stage was really rough for them in the beginning, and I think we have the same situation. But we’re slower to recover because we switched two players.





A lot of communication is the biggest thing, and just generally, learning how to play with new people. Because everyone has their own role in the communication, so either they need to adapt, or someone else needs to adapt, or we need to find a balance for who needs to do what to make it work.









Your roster is multilingual, and a former multilingual roster, the Florida Mayhem, has moved to an all Korean roster. What are some strengths and weaknesses of having so many different languages on your team?

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Well, I wish everyone spoke the same language, but it doesn’t work like that! I’m not sure if there's many strengths of having so many languages, like I have a really thick accent, so I don’t think the Koreans on my team understand half of what I’m saying, maybe even 90 percent of the time, they just smile and nod, and say ok. Yeah but at the same time, I think it might weld the team together faster when you have people learning picking up the new languages and talking to each other, getting comfortable with it, so it’s a team bonding thing at the same time.





That teamwork will be tested when you play against the New York Excelsior twice in a single stage.





It’s going to be rough. It requires some kind of Hail Mary for us to win, because like, the game against Washington—they’re the worst team in the league, and we had such a close game. They pushed us to Rialto, so that made us feel like the second worst team in the league. It’s going to be really rough, but we’re going to keep practicing. There’s no point in stressing about it. We see how they play the first time, see how we play, learn from our mistakes, maybe even come up with some cheese strats. We’re going to have more plans and game strats revolving around them, so that’s good.





Lucio’s Amp it Up ability has been nerfed, has that impacted your gameplay?





It actually has been quite a big change, especially the Lucio Wall Ride is completely different with the nerfs. Like right now you have to be so much more careful if you want to go for aggro boops because you can’t get the same momentum. And you’ve been playing the same hero for about 3 years right now, so you have everything by muscle memory. When it changes, you have to start learning again. Even to this day, the new patch, I still get stuck sometimes with Lucio because all of the muscle memory.





What are your goals for Stage 2 and the season as a whole?





Well, Stage 2, the goal was playoffs, but I don’t think that’s going to happen at this point. But the for the whole season, we’d like to make it to season playoffs. I don’t like to put too high expectations out, but we’d like to make it and then work from there.