Ragnarork Profile Blog Joined June 2011 France 8972 Posts Last Edited: 2016-10-03 11:31:46 #1 I’m here at ESL One New York with Sadokist, who’s been casting games and will still be casting games here at the event. How are you doing?



Very good! It’s good to be somewhat closer to home, North America at least. My parents are here which is great, it was nice to have them around. So yeah, very good, very good!



How has the event been for you so far?



It’s been brief! It’s a two day event for us in the arena, the casting for the group stage in the swiss format was done from Cologne before that. I think this format lends itself well to getting a fast but fair event. There’s no arguing, no disputing that if you lost in the swiss format, you lost and you’re out, it’s not an upset thing. I think it’s very cool for getting teams this evenly matched. In terms of the event itself, in terms of atmosphere, in terms of venue… The venue is fantastic; you know North American sports arenas tend to lend themselves well to these, that’s what they’re built for.



In terms of atmosphere, it’s building. I think we’re going to get into it as the day goes on. We’re only four games in right now and we’re still seeing some of the heavy hitters kind of show up. We’ve seen Na’Vi - SK, and it was pretty loud for that, but it wasn’t in the playoffs yet, so I think tomorrow is going to be very loud. And in terms of game quality, I’m not gonna lie it hasn’t been amazing but it’s been surprising. Obviously we saw Astralis get knocked out by OpTic, we saw G2 fall completely flat. So the unpredictability continues to be present and I think that a lot of people… I personally enjoy it, it makes it interesting to watch. If I knew for sure what’s gonna happen I wouldn’t watch it.



Indeed, and it has been kind of a trend recently, especially after the off-season, the CS scene seems so volatile...



That’s kind of the surprising part. It’s not even an uprising in teams, that’s explainable, you get clicking, you get your communication on, they work harder, they figure out a map, they get better at it. But seeing teams fall flat. That’s almost like… you know, is that just a lack of effort put into it eventually? Did they just got broke down and they didn’t put in the work to recover? Is it personality conflicts? Is it injury, as we’ve seen this year? And it’s shocking and over the break, some teams that took a longer break are way behind!



Yes, and they’re not necessarily the best performing teams right now!



Yeah, it’s crazy! And like, I think Na’Vi - SK… Na’Vi just beat them. You know SK were world number one… And it’s just a toss up! I think Fnatic with the new lineup, and the way that they’re improving, could be there soon again. Obviously there’s other factors in that, it depends on other teams, but it’s very volatile and I don’t know if I’ve a clear explanation but the one thing that’s absolutely true is, this kind of inconsistency that happened in the tier one last year, you could kind of get away and still slip through, because you had six teams, maybe seven, that were the clear cut tier one. This year you may still consider that new tier one but the tier two is so much closer, because now they’re on salary, there’s more stability in the scene for them, they’re able to put in more hours. Everyone is trying to come at these top teams now, to the point where you got maybe 20 teams that are capable of beating anyone on a good day.



It seems indeed like before there was that clear cut elite tier, but now even the contenders can get away with a few games.



Yes, it’s pretty nuts, and like… look at Heroic right? Inconsistent still, I mean ProLeague online hasn’t been amazing for them. But at LAN, they had a fantastic run in Kiev. Dignitas as well, they didn’t play with RUBINO as he took a break. So when they first came back they lost 16-3 to GODSENT I think it was. And within a day or two of playing with them again, everything CounterStrike started clicking again and now they’re flying off. Astralis continues to struggle. I mean it’s fun but.. yeah.



And in all this mess there’s still Virtus.Pro that still has some kind of stability and still keep a form. Except in StarLadder, but still.



Yeah but.. I can’t even say that because.... I still agree with you, and you’re dead right, they still have the Virtus Plow, they still have Virtus Throw. They aren’t necessarily playing the same style now. We’ve seen more flair from Neo right now, which is kind of interesting. It’s nice to see. It’s kind of reeling back the years as HenryG would say.



They notably don’t rely on Snax. It’s been quite noticeable.



Yes and the changing of the AWP quite frequently is kind of interesting as well. There’s games even now like, ok Pasha has been awping for a while, but is he gonna pick it up? You still don’t know what they’re going to do. But I think some of their online performances in ProLeague have been… to a lot of people, showing some inconsistencies, so they’re capitalizing. The one thing, the reason I can’t give you the full credit, to say they’re the only ones... I think you’re right, they’re the most in form right now, but there’s still that big hiccup at StarLadder. That was a pretty big hiccup. Now I know they had obligations, admittedly they flew in late, but that’s on them. That’s their decision.



Yes and they even said it themselves, it was a hiccup, they had their reasons, tried to forget about it, and went to Bucharest and took the trophy.



Yeah, and all credit to them and they could do the same thing here. Obviously they didn’t go through flawlessly, Na’Vi is the first team through. But there’s still a chance in this system for them. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the semis at the very least tomorrow and putting up a good fight. You know, at the last two majors, when SK (and Luminosity before) won their title, the only people to get a map off them was Virtus Pro.



Exactly. Alright, moving on to other stuff, you’ve been launching Drop The Bomb recently. Has that project turned out to be as you planned it to be from the beginning?



Hmm, yeah, in some ways it turned out way better than we expected. The feature pieces have been phenomenal. But in some ways I think it hasn’t quite been where we wanted it to be. So we need to do better on our marketing, on our promotions. We’ve got a social media person but we only got it for the last show. Immediately we saw the results, we had way much better frontpage exposure on Twitch, doing timing things better. We got better tweets going, we had some promotion, it’s much better… We should have gotten that a little bit sooner. We had to learn with... you know, “are we selling out too much?”, in terms of product placement, with the format of the show. We’ve learned a lot.



There’s still a lot of tidying up I want to do in that sense for the actual show section itself, the podcast section. And just making sure we’re clear cut about what we want to talk about, our timings are a little better. But in terms of the features and in terms of community response, I think we’re thrilled with where we are, and I think it’s so much better. I mean picking up Tom Newman as a producer, he’s been fantastic and I think we’re all super shocked, and thrilled at how well he’s done for us this year.



The Asia piece was indeed absolutely insane and shed some light on a scene not many people know about, apart from the TyLoos, the Vicis, that sometimes go abroad, but other than that…



Yeah, they don’t get the exposure. And that was Tom literally going… Alright, we’re supposed to do a piece on Na’Vi. Still planning on it. But we haven’t had the opportunity to do so because they were knocked out in the groups in Kiev. So they were gone early, we had to kinda act on our feet. And Tom was like, “well the asians… let’s see what I can dig up!”.



Can Yang [E/N: currently Chief Business Officer for MVP] is there, he’s been in the scene forever. We wanted to do more translation stuff but it was just too hard to set up, and it kinda killed the way the interview flowed. But Can did an excellent job walking through how CS is played over there, it was just great, it was really good. And, even for me, I learned a lot watching that. Some of the Lekr0 piece stuff I already know from talking to him, which is why we wanted to put that out for the community, because it’s interesting stuff. But the asian one, I was like “wow, I didn’t even know that”. It’s been pretty cool.



Do you see yourself as some kind of counterpart to Room On Fire?



I would say no. I don’t want people to think that. Obviously it seems that way, they’re a branded duo or trio, they got seven person under the house. We’re a branded duo, it seems like that, it’s not. We’re simply a podcast, that’s all we wanted to be, it’s just Henry and I, doing a show that we wanted to put together for the community. We still work with Room On Fire, they’re still our colleagues, they’re still our friends. We just aren’t part of it because Henry and I, we’re doing our own thing. And for them, they wanted to bring in some other talent, and just something a little different. There’s no animosity, there’s no counterpart. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised in the next year - not saying we really talked about it - but we flew with the idea of potentially, maybe, now and then doing some content together and trying really to put some stuff out for the community. No, I think if people see it that way… they shouldn’t!



Talking about Room On Fire, they’ve brought a few more people in recently, especially a few lesser known casters like Metuz. How do you feel, as a caster, about how hard it is for upcoming talents to find their place, a place, in the scene? Do you feel the CS:GO scene lets you do that easily?



I was really fortunate because my timing was right. I was there when the growth started, I was North American and there was a need for a North American caster. I got X Games (E/N: the MLG Aspen Invitational in 2015), which was a last minute decision. And it blew up for me. Now it’s not that easy for most people. There’s a very tough road to get into it now. The tier one guys are locked down, we got three duos. You don’t often need more than that at the bigger events. So the thing is, there’s definitely room, because the scene has been growing so much there’s conflicting schedules. This year I’ve had four weekends that had events stacked on top of each other. Like, I had a commitment here I couldn’t be there. It’s unfortunate, I’d love to do everything but I can’t. And because of that, there is gonna be a void now and space for new casters.



Room On Fire is trying to bring in people that they see as talented, that they want to work with, that they want to help promote, that they can go to an event organiser and say “oh you need people? Okay, we got these guys, these are people you can trust, that we’re working with”. And I think that’s really good. I think there’s a need for that, and like I said, in the next year there’ll be three or four, I would say, more casters that we’ve never even heard of yet, because there’s going to be a need for it.



Moving on to the professionalisation of the scene, we’ve seen some entities emerge this year, PEA and WESA. What do you think of the scene as far as professionalisation goes?



I see a divide. I see North America being stuck with PEA, and Europe being stuck with WESA. And I see them both having their allegiances with various leagues. So PEA is obviously going to be their own thing, we don’t know all the details yet. We don’t know when it’s going to be, it’s going to be some time in the new year. I imagine North American teams will make that the priority. And then in Europe as opposed to that we’ll have the WESA guys probably align with ESL. Maybe guys like ECS, I’m not saying they’re guaranteed to be gone, but they’re going to struggle… If teams start to make priorities based on associations, they could be the odd man out.



I kinda see it going that way as well, and if this happens, I’m alright with this idea. We have the world finals at the major! That’s when North American players are here, but there’s a whole different storyline because “oh we don’t see them playing each others much”. But no I think the obvious truth is that there will be some phasing out of individual standalone tournaments. I think, right now we got four leagues if you include PEA that’s coming out. With ESL Pro League, ECS, and E-League… one of those got to go.



Also, there’s actually been the first impacting decision from the player council, about the format of the ESL Pro League Finals.



Yeah, the additional team slots.



Right. It looks like a good decision but at the same time there’s only a handful of players that decided for the whole league. What’s your take on that?



The thing is, there’s definitely only a handful of players at the table, but they all talk. All these players have spreadsheets together that they’re sharing information on, making sure everyone is being treated equally, making sure that orgs aren’t mistreating anyone. Obviously team orgs, tournament orgs, leagues, ESL, DreamHack, all those kinds of orgs. Also making sure player standards, and communication, is equal to everyone in terms of travel, hotel, playing space on the desks, booths, whatever it is they’re going to be using, peripherals, cellphones, configs.



They definitely talk. So the fact that, okay there’s only five on the board, [E/N: actually there’s seven people, among those four players, one coach and two managers], they’re getting input from a lot of other people, and the people that are on the board were appointed by a lot of the players. I think there’s some good personalities among them. But I think it’s good to start to see them band together. I think it’s been needed for a while. The hard part is, with so many leagues you can’t really have a union because the three different leagues will have different teams, so how do you decide who is involved and who is not. It becomes, you know, “who do you exclude and who do you include?” and basically you’re back to a shambles.



So there has to be some consistency to it, but it’s good to see the players putting themselves in positions where they can start to get some leverage, and I think it’s the right move. Six teams more at the Pro League finals is far more interesting, you know. It seems to me that twelve teams is probably around the sweet spot. Sixteen is kinda reserved for the majors, but eight is almost like… I don’t feel this way because sometimes eight can give you some very interesting, close matchups with ideally the best teams available or even the best teams in the world at the time. But as we know the scene is so volatile, like we already mentioned.I think the more teams there the more interesting the storyline become.



The tournament indeed becomes more competitive. And what if the swiss tournament sees more usage?



I’m interested in seeing how that goes. I think anything above eight teams and it would be a long drawn out affair. It would be a long deal, but eight teams, it works well.



Or with maybe more matches at a time, but then we see less of it, so maybe a trade off to find here?



Yeah, it’ll be interesting, I think it will be interesting how it works. I think with eight teams it could work. I think it could be a more normal thing.



Alright! Let’s wrap this up, who do you pick as winning? One heart pick, one head pick.



Heart pick: Na’Vi. If you asked me that, I don’t know, if you had to ask me that three days ago I wouldn’t have said that, but after seeing the first two days of their performance and how they’re playing, how S1mple seems invigorated and they’re finally getting their timings on, I’m gonna say Na’Vi.



Head pick: Fnatic. I think Lekr0 and the boys can step it up, I think there’s some potential there, I think they’re growing into it, and I think they’re going to continue to do so.



It’s been interesting, because there’s been the story of pronax who got his teammates back, while so far it looks like Fnatic got the better part of the deal somehow.



It’s shocking actually yeah. I thought that the Fnatic team would take a little longer. Obviously Godsent would take some time to build as well, but I thought that they would have some sort of a foundation by playing pronax’ old style. But it’s a shocking affair for them right now, it’s very discouraging and they’re gonna have to find something in their personalities and some will to persevere on that because that’s one of those things where you can get frustrated and it falls apart, so hopefully it doesn’t, but other than that, I think Fnatic is in the right direction.



Well, thanks for the interview, and good luck with the next casts!



Thank you!







Interviewer:

Editor:

CSS:

Graphics:

Photos:



Very good! It’s good to be somewhat closer to home, North America at least. My parents are here which is great, it was nice to have them around. So yeah, very good, very good!It’s been brief! It’s a two day event for us in the arena, the casting for the group stage in the swiss format was done from Cologne before that. I think this format lends itself well to getting a fast but fair event. There’s no arguing, no disputing that if you lost in the swiss format, you lost and you’re out, it’s not an upset thing. I think it’s very cool for getting teams this evenly matched. In terms of the event itself, in terms of atmosphere, in terms of venue… The venue is fantastic; you know North American sports arenas tend to lend themselves well to these, that’s what they’re built for.In terms of atmosphere, it’s building. I think we’re going to get into it as the day goes on. We’re only four games in right now and we’re still seeing some of the heavy hitters kind of show up. We’ve seen Na’Vi - SK, and it was pretty loud for that, but it wasn’t in the playoffs yet, so I think tomorrow is going to be very loud. And in terms of game quality, I’m not gonna lie it hasn’t been amazing but it’s been surprising. Obviously we saw Astralis get knocked out by OpTic, we saw G2 fall completely flat. So the unpredictability continues to be present and I think that a lot of people… I personally enjoy it, it makes it interesting to watch. If I knew for sure what’s gonna happen I wouldn’t watch it.That’s kind of the surprising part. It’s not even an uprising in teams, that’s explainable, you get clicking, you get your communication on, they work harder, they figure out a map, they get better at it. But seeing teams fall flat. That’s almost like… you know, is that just a lack of effort put into it eventually? Did they just got broke down and they didn’t put in the work to recover? Is it personality conflicts? Is it injury, as we’ve seen this year? And it’s shocking and over the break, some teams that took a longer break are way behind!Yeah, it’s crazy! And like, I think Na’Vi - SK… Na’Vi just beat them. You know SK were world number one… And it’s just a toss up! I think Fnatic with the new lineup, and the way that they’re improving, could be there soon again. Obviously there’s other factors in that, it depends on other teams, but it’s very volatile and I don’t know if I’ve a clear explanation but the one thing that’s absolutely true is, this kind of inconsistency that happened in the tier one last year, you could kind of get away and still slip through, because you had six teams, maybe seven, that were the clear cut tier one. This year you may still consider that new tier one but the tier two is so much closer, because now they’re on salary, there’s more stability in the scene for them, they’re able to put in more hours. Everyone is trying to come at these top teams now, to the point where you got maybe 20 teams that are capable of beating anyone on a good day.Yes, it’s pretty nuts, and like… look at Heroic right? Inconsistent still, I mean ProLeague online hasn’t been amazing for them. But at LAN, they had a fantastic run in Kiev. Dignitas as well, they didn’t play with RUBINO as he took a break. So when they first came back they lost 16-3 to GODSENT I think it was. And within a day or two of playing with them again, everything CounterStrike started clicking again and now they’re flying off. Astralis continues to struggle. I mean it’s fun but.. yeah.Yeah but.. I can’t even say that because.... I still agree with you, and you’re dead right, they still have the Virtus Plow, they still have Virtus Throw. They aren’t necessarily playing the same style now. We’ve seen more flair from Neo right now, which is kind of interesting. It’s nice to see. It’s kind of reeling back the years as HenryG would say.Yes and the changing of the AWP quite frequently is kind of interesting as well. There’s games even now like, ok Pasha has been awping for a while, but is he gonna pick it up? You still don’t know what they’re going to do. But I think some of their online performances in ProLeague have been… to a lot of people, showing some inconsistencies, so they’re capitalizing. The one thing, the reason I can’t give you the full credit, to say they’re the only ones... I think you’re right, they’re the most in form right now, but there’s still that big hiccup at StarLadder. That was a pretty big hiccup. Now I know they had obligations, admittedly they flew in late, but that’s on them. That’s their decision.Yeah, and all credit to them and they could do the same thing here. Obviously they didn’t go through flawlessly, Na’Vi is the first team through. But there’s still a chance in this system for them. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the semis at the very least tomorrow and putting up a good fight. You know, at the last two majors, when SK (and Luminosity before) won their title, the only people to get a map off them was Virtus Pro.Hmm, yeah, in some ways it turned out way better than we expected. The feature pieces have been phenomenal. But in some ways I think it hasn’t quite been where we wanted it to be. So we need to do better on our marketing, on our promotions. We’ve got a social media person but we only got it for the last show. Immediately we saw the results, we had way much better frontpage exposure on Twitch, doing timing things better. We got better tweets going, we had some promotion, it’s much better… We should have gotten that a little bit sooner. We had to learn with... you know, “are we selling out too much?”, in terms of product placement, with the format of the show. We’ve learned a lot.There’s still a lot of tidying up I want to do in that sense for the actual show section itself, the podcast section. And just making sure we’re clear cut about what we want to talk about, our timings are a little better. But in terms of the features and in terms of community response, I think we’re thrilled with where we are, and I think it’s so much better. I mean picking up Tom Newman as a producer, he’s been fantastic and I think we’re all super shocked, and thrilled at how well he’s done for us this year.Yeah, they don’t get the exposure. And that was Tom literally going… Alright, we’re supposed to do a piece on Na’Vi. Still planning on it. But we haven’t had the opportunity to do so because they were knocked out in the groups in Kiev. So they were gone early, we had to kinda act on our feet. And Tom was like, “well the asians… let’s see what I can dig up!”.Can Yang [E/N: currently Chief Business Officer for MVP] is there, he’s been in the scene forever. We wanted to do more translation stuff but it was just too hard to set up, and it kinda killed the way the interview flowed. But Can did an excellent job walking through how CS is played over there, it was just great, it was really good. And, even for me, I learned a lot watching that. Some of the Lekr0 piece stuff I already know from talking to him, which is why we wanted to put that out for the community, because it’s interesting stuff. But the asian one, I was like “wow, I didn’t even know that”. It’s been pretty cool.I would say no. I don’t want people to think that. Obviously it seems that way, they’re a branded duo or trio, they got seven person under the house. We’re a branded duo, it seems like that, it’s not. We’re simply a podcast, that’s all we wanted to be, it’s just Henry and I, doing a show that we wanted to put together for the community. We still work with Room On Fire, they’re still our colleagues, they’re still our friends. We just aren’t part of it because Henry and I, we’re doing our own thing. And for them, they wanted to bring in some other talent, and just something a little different. There’s no animosity, there’s no counterpart. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised in the next year - not saying we really talked about it - but we flew with the idea of potentially, maybe, now and then doing some content together and trying really to put some stuff out for the community. No, I think if people see it that way… they shouldn’t!I was really fortunate because my timing was right. I was there when the growth started, I was North American and there was a need for a North American caster. I got X Games (E/N: the MLG Aspen Invitational in 2015), which was a last minute decision. And it blew up for me. Now it’s not that easy for most people. There’s a very tough road to get into it now. The tier one guys are locked down, we got three duos. You don’t often need more than that at the bigger events. So the thing is, there’s definitely room, because the scene has been growing so much there’s conflicting schedules. This year I’ve had four weekends that had events stacked on top of each other. Like, I had a commitment here I couldn’t be there. It’s unfortunate, I’d love to do everything but I can’t. And because of that, there is gonna be a void now and space for new casters.Room On Fire is trying to bring in people that they see as talented, that they want to work with, that they want to help promote, that they can go to an event organiser and say “oh you need people? Okay, we got these guys, these are people you can trust, that we’re working with”. And I think that’s really good. I think there’s a need for that, and like I said, in the next year there’ll be three or four, I would say, more casters that we’ve never even heard of yet, because there’s going to be a need for it.I see a divide. I see North America being stuck with PEA, and Europe being stuck with WESA. And I see them both having their allegiances with various leagues. So PEA is obviously going to be their own thing, we don’t know all the details yet. We don’t know when it’s going to be, it’s going to be some time in the new year. I imagine North American teams will make that the priority. And then in Europe as opposed to that we’ll have the WESA guys probably align with ESL. Maybe guys like ECS, I’m not saying they’re guaranteed to be gone, but they’re going to struggle… If teams start to make priorities based on associations, they could be the odd man out.I kinda see it going that way as well, and if this happens, I’m alright with this idea. We have the world finals at the major! That’s when North American players are here, but there’s a whole different storyline because “oh we don’t see them playing each others much”. But no I think the obvious truth is that there will be some phasing out of individual standalone tournaments. I think, right now we got four leagues if you include PEA that’s coming out. With ESL Pro League, ECS, and E-League… one of those got to go.Yeah, the additional team slots.The thing is, there’s definitely only a handful of players at the table, but they all talk. All these players have spreadsheets together that they’re sharing information on, making sure everyone is being treated equally, making sure that orgs aren’t mistreating anyone. Obviously team orgs, tournament orgs, leagues, ESL, DreamHack, all those kinds of orgs. Also making sure player standards, and communication, is equal to everyone in terms of travel, hotel, playing space on the desks, booths, whatever it is they’re going to be using, peripherals, cellphones, configs.They definitely talk. So the fact that, okay there’s only five on the board, [E/N: actually there’s seven people, among those four players, one coach and two managers], they’re getting input from a lot of other people, and the people that are on the board were appointed by a lot of the players. I think there’s some good personalities among them. But I think it’s good to start to see them band together. I think it’s been needed for a while. The hard part is, with so many leagues you can’t really have a union because the three different leagues will have different teams, so how do you decide who is involved and who is not. It becomes, you know, “who do you exclude and who do you include?” and basically you’re back to a shambles.So there has to be some consistency to it, but it’s good to see the players putting themselves in positions where they can start to get some leverage, and I think it’s the right move. Six teams more at the Pro League finals is far more interesting, you know. It seems to me that twelve teams is probably around the sweet spot. Sixteen is kinda reserved for the majors, but eight is almost like… I don’t feel this way because sometimes eight can give you some very interesting, close matchups with ideally the best teams available or even the best teams in the world at the time. But as we know the scene is so volatile, like we already mentioned.I think the more teams there the more interesting the storyline become.I’m interested in seeing how that goes. I think anything above eight teams and it would be a long drawn out affair. It would be a long deal, but eight teams, it works well.Yeah, it’ll be interesting, I think it will be interesting how it works. I think with eight teams it could work. I think it could be a more normal thing.Heart pick: Na’Vi. If you asked me that, I don’t know, if you had to ask me that three days ago I wouldn’t have said that, but after seeing the first two days of their performance and how they’re playing, how S1mple seems invigorated and they’re finally getting their timings on, I’m gonna say Na’Vi.Head pick: Fnatic. I think Lekr0 and the boys can step it up, I think there’s some potential there, I think they’re growing into it, and I think they’re going to continue to do so.It’s shocking actually yeah. I thought that the Fnatic team would take a little longer. Obviously Godsent would take some time to build as well, but I thought that they would have some sort of a foundation by playing pronax’ old style. But it’s a shocking affair for them right now, it’s very discouraging and they’re gonna have to find something in their personalities and some will to persevere on that because that’s one of those things where you can get frustrated and it falls apart, so hopefully it doesn’t, but other than that, I think Fnatic is in the right direction.Thank you!Interviewer: Ragnarork Editor: Yamato CSS: FO-nTTaX Graphics: DearDave Photos: DreamHack

Liquipedia Wanderer.