Image by Valve on Flickr

Ahead of the qualifiers for this year's International, we caught up with Team NP support player Aui_2000 to talk about the new/old team and his thoughts on the scene as a whole, especially with his insight on organizations and their dynamics.

Hello Aui, you guys just came back from three tournaments, Manila Masters, Zotac Cup and The Summit, 3rd, 2nd and 4th place respectively. Did you expect to do this well going into these events and why did the results get worse towards the end?

I think going into the first two events we expected to do very well. At the time we were performing very well in scrims and that gave us a lot of confidence. It was a bit disappointing that we weren't able to win one of those tournaments. Coming into Summit I think we were a bit less confident--a bunch of people got sick after Manila/Zotac and the high amount of travel meant we weren't able to practice as much as we would have liked to.

Do you think knowing each other so well contributed to the early results? 4/5 of your team’s players have played together before after all. Or did the team chemistry just fit?

I think our confidence mostly came from scrims. It’s nice to have a history together, but it’s been a long time since we’ve played together. Even though you can have some idea how well you’re going to work together, you can’t know for sure until you actually play.

Image by ESL | Chris Romano

How have Fata, Envy and pie changed the last time you played with them?

To be honest, everyone’s sort of similar. We’ve all gone to different teams where we’ve had some success, so we’ve all learned different things that we can now bring back to the team. But I’d say all the strengths and weaknesses of the players are still the same things.

When did Team NP decide to change its roster?

For me it was after DAC. We had a poor showing at the event. I knew something had to change, because we weren’t going to find any success.

Did you moving back to the support role have anything to do with how the roster changes were made?

Personally, I didn’t think it was good for Envy to be mid and me to be carry on the same team.

Fata doesn’t get a lot of attention himself, but is often part of really successful teams. I’ve listened to him on LAN and it always sounds like he is making a lot of calls. If I said he seems like the captain behind the captain, would you agree?

He makes the second most in-game calls in the team. So you could say that.

TI qualifiers are upon you guys. Is there any concern of "overconfidence", considering the fairly strong performances and results recently and the fact that everybody looks towards NP as one of the favorites?

I don't think we will have an overconfidence problem. And it's not because we don't think we're a strong team that's able to win, but because we think our opponents for this qualifier are super strong. I don't think na has ever looked better, so we won't underestimate them.

Now that you’re back to the 4 position, how would you say has the role changed since all the way back when you first picked it up?

I never really played a traditional 4. All the way back to C9, I don’t think we ever played the 4 role similar to anybody else and I don’t think we’re doing that now either. So I think it’s difficult for me to answer.

How much did playing with world class supports such as PPD or Pie change the way you play/perceive the support position? Are there things you picked up from them that you would’ve never thought of before?

You learn a lot from every teammate you have, so it’s hard to specifically point out things. The best thing ppd taught me was about your presence of mind, i.e. staying calm and stuff like that. Pie is a really good laner. He has some really cool things he thinks about in a game. But it’s difficult to answer this, because you play in a team, so you learn from everyone at the same time.

In our last interview, you said something interesting. When asked about the lack of an invite for TI2 qualifiers, you said: “Despite TI being huge, it still is not the only tournament in the world.” - Would you still respond this way if you didn’t make it to TI or its qualifiers?

It has changed a lot since then. TI was like a 1.6 Million Dollar tournament and other tournaments were a lot bigger than they are now because they had crowdfunding. Right now though, only TI has crowdfunding, not even the Majors have crowdfunding. In the Dota ecosystem, TI has become even more important.

Do you like this change?

I think it’s pretty bad for the scene. Having Majors is good I suppose, but I’m not entirely sure either. It’s weird right now. We have huge tournaments like Epicenter or DAC with 500,000 USD prize pools, which show that the scene has this potential for really big tournaments. These 3rd party tournaments may be bigger now than they were before, they are still relatively smaller compared to TI. I preferred crowdfunding, it made events feel bigger and more important.

You’ve been part of many organizations, Dignitas, EG, but also “modern” ones with DC and NP. What do you think about this trend towards player owned organizations? Do you think this is healthy? Or are there aspects of traditional organizations that you think are also important?

I think it doesn’t really matter if you’re in a player owned organization or in a traditional one, as long as your contracts are tailored towards Dota. The reason why you have had a lot of player owned organizations pop up after TI4 is because a lot of contracts were not tailored towards Dota. Dota is a game where, at the time, prize pools were overwhelmingly responsible for your income. The traditional model of teams providing support in salary in return for cut of prize pool did not work out that well. I know there are a lot of teams where the organization would recover their investment just off of prize pool cuts, which didn’t make much sense for the players.

But in this day and age, where contracts are tailored towards Dota, I wouldn’t care if I played in a player run organization or in a traditional one.

I think you needed things like Secret or DC to happen for traditional orgs to want to tailor their contracts to the economy of Dota. At this point, I think enough change has been enacted that traditional orgs would work just as well in Dota.

How important is coaching right now?

I think it’s decently important. Dota is a very complex game, so if you have an impartial party that can look at the game and process it during the game, they’ll be able to give you a more valid answer on what went wrong or what you can improve/focus on. Sometimes people also have opposing viewpoints, and the most important thing in Dota is to be on the same page. Even if you do the wrong strategy all together, you have a higher chance to win than if you all try to do your own thing. Having a coach can help to get everyone on the same page and let players learn from their mistakes faster.

Are a lot of people suited for coaching?

I think it’s pretty hard to be a coach. I don’t think I made a particularly good coach for Secret. When you come in, I think everybody would be a good coach. I think when I came in to Secret, my initial coaching was helpful. After a while, it became pretty hard for me. I think it’ll be the same for a lot of people that will try to coach. I think you need a certain type of personality. You need a certain approach to the game.

For people who pull a lot from their team to learn, it’s hard to be a coach, because then you’re only learning the same thing your team is learning, so you teach them exactly what they already know. That’s not what being a coach is about. You should want to improve on their ideas or come up with new ideas.

What would you say makes Bulba a great coach then? Is it this trait or is there something else that lets him stand out?

I think Bulba is really good at learning from outside sources. He’s good at taking stuff from replays or talking to people and taking stuff from that. He’s also good at fighting for his idea. As a coach, you have to know when to defer to a player, or when to push for an idea you believe in. He’s good at knowing that.

At TI5, he was the one who fought for the “CDEC-Style”, to invade the Radiant jungle as Dire to take the safe lane and control of the enemy jungle. As a result, we were able to play around that idea and it helped a lot during the tournament.

You play support in pubs. What’s that about?

I know, it’s awful.

Why?

I haven’t played support in a long time, so I just need to play these heroes (laughs). Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play them that well.