Quinn "Srey" Fischer has been a constant presence in the Heroes scene since early 2015.

His name became synonymous with a dedicated high-MMR player that has shown his skill on lesser-known squads, as well as an attentive community contributor through his guides and coaching. Despite that, Srey has so far failed to take the big stage at a major Blizzard event.

But Tempo Storm has since announced that they are trying out Srey as their warrior player and shotcaller. Combined with the mention from manager Jared "Zoia" Eggleston that they were no longer trying out other candidates and that it was "90 percent" certain that they would eventually sign Srey, it appears that drought could soon end.

Srey took some time — on patch day, no less — to talk about his background in gaming, his tryout with Tempo Storm and what he thinks of the Chinese scene.

We'll have to wait for an official team photo of Srey, as he was reluctant to give a picture out before Tempo produced one. But thankfully he's given us a lot to work with on the interview side — anyone who has talked with him knows that he's not shy about sharing his opinion when asked, so we've broken the Q&A into a few pieces.

In this first installment, he talks about how he got into Heroes, his time with Stellar Lotus, and the one mistake he sees from aspiring competitive players.

How did you start playing Heroes of the Storm?

I've always been a big fan of video games. I played video games all my life basically, but I never played [them] seriously. I actually played consoles for most of it, but I played RTS as well — I was pretty big into RTS. I played the Age of Empires series, Age of Mythology. A lot that I can't even remember right now. There's Supreme Commander, Forged Alliances, etc. StarCraft, obviously.

I was big on consoles, most of the time I just played console. But I started playing League of Legends when it came out, just after beta. I played that for about five years and I had no MOBA experience prior to that. Just RTS. But once I started playing League of Legends, which was completely different, I just really enjoyed it, and that's basically all I played for quite a long time. During that time I was going to school — high school and then to university.

I switched programs quite a bit. I was in science, then I went into business, then I went into math. I was hopping around because I wasn't really enjoying it, so I just took a break. So I've been playing Heroes basically full-time since December. I basically tried the game as soon as I got a beta invite, and from that day I literally have not played League of Legends since.

Not even once?

Maybe some ARAM, but I've never played ranked or anything like that. Maybe one or two normals.

Just, "I wonder what League's like?" and I go to ARAM, play some of that, and I'm like, "Oh, there's items in this game."

You've been playing since December, and you were a part of some amateur squads — obviously Happy Faerie Dragons and more recently, before the Tempo thing came up, you were running your own team through the ETS qualifiers. Was the goal with those teams always to go pro and get signed?

In December, I basically only played for fun. I started playing with Happy Faerie Dragons in February, or just before. So I played through December, through January into February. And after that, basically my goal was to go pro.

But my goal is to be the best player that I can be, and be on the best team that I can be. Not so much the financial side or anything like that — that just came along as a bonus.

So I played with Happy Faerie with my intention of just beating other teams. Did that for a couple months.

After Happy Faerie disbanded, I was still looking for other teams, but there was probably two or three months where I wasn't scrimming at all.

I'm not sure when we disbanded, but I didn't scrim from when we disbanded until about June-ish. And then I started talking to Stellar Lotus and from the time with Stellar Lotus, I've scrimmed basically every day since, in one way or another.

So even though I haven't been signed to a notable team, I'm pretty experienced. I'd be surprised if, even at the time, people [knew] who I was. Not that I'm like a big figure now or anything, but I hadn't heard my name or anything.

I know you've done some guide writing and paid coaching. Is there one thing that you could point out that hurts the play of aspiring competitive players?

There's two main things.

The first thing is overcommitting to fights, and just overcommitting in general. You win a fight, get a kill or two and then, instead of chasing or continuing on, just take what you've claimed and move on and do something else instead of chasing.

There's a lot of times that you can just get a kill, disengage and take the objective. But a lot of times people will get the kill, keep on fighting because it's a 5v4, and maybe they'll die, or not kill anyone and waste time. So don't overcommit, just take what you've got.

Know the limits of your team, too. If you're running a Tyrande comp or a pick comp, that comp is based around getting a kill, and you use all of your abilities to kill that one person. So even though it's a 5v4, you still have no abilities up, you have no damage. The enemy team can definitely turn on you, so you have to be aware of the limits of your comp.

The second thing is, and this is really important, when you're fighting over objectives, or fighting over anything — any time you're teamfighting, you're risking losing the game. Especially late-game.

Early game, you're risking putting yourself behind significantly and late game you're risking just losing the game.

So any time you fight, you want to make sure you're fighting over something realistic, and you either have an advantage or are forced to fight to prevent the enemy team from having a larger advantage.

An example would be: even if you're ahead, you don't want to fight the enemy team — say we're talking about Sky Temple — in mid lane, over nothing. Even fighting over ogres might not be worth it, because you're forcing that objective and you might not gain anything from it. All you'd gain is ogres, but what you'd lose is a significant amount of experience when you're forced into those fights.

So you don't want to fight for no reason. You want to make sure if you fight, you can take something from it. Unless you have a significant advantage, and you can just control the whole map by forcing them away from stuff.

The other part is that obviously talent tiers are very important. Say you're Level 13 and the enemy is Level 15 and about to turn 16, you want to fight them before they turn 16. So you want to force that fight, you can't wait until they hit 16. And it's the same if you're 15 and they're level 14, and you're about to hit 16, you want to just wait until you hit 16 to avoid forcing the fight.

So basically, you can sum it up as saying: when you're fighting, you should have an advantage, and you should be fighting over something that's worth it; you should be able to take something from it. So it's basically fighting over stuff for no reason. There's teamfighting for no reason, fighting for no reason, overcommitting, not thinking about their play, not playing smartly.

A lot of times, when you guys eventually see us play, we'll win a big fight, and it looks like we can keep going, but we'll just step back, take the fort, take the objectives and keep pushing with that.

I wanted to talk about Stellar Lotus. It looks like you were on the roster for about a month.

I was playing with them quite a bit before that, it's probably at least two months. Usually with the team stuff, they don't announce it for quite a while. And I was never signed with them or anything like that, I was just playing with them.

So what happened there?

Stellar Lotus was playing with [Aaron "erho" Kappes] at the time, and I had some experience with erho. But pretty much, to sum it up, me and him butted heads a bit. And he was shotcalling, and I need to have a voice on the team. And basically, with him on the team, I wasn't allowed that opportunity.

I need to have that voice on the team. And I was being a detriment to the team just because we wouldn't coordinate properly, because we weren't on the same page.

erho obviously has a reputation to be difficult to work with. So basically what happened was that I just couldn't work with him, and it came down to him or me, and they chose to go with erho.

ESVDiamond [Patrick F. Soulliere II, Stellar Lotus's manager] regrets that decision obviously, because [erho] left like a week later, or they kicked him a week later. And he's been trying to get me back since. But that was the decision.

It was probably the right decision at the time, because there was obviously an issue, and that thing kinda came to a head ... But I don't blame him or anything, and I didn't really want to stay with the team if it was going to be like that.

It honestly worked out, because I'd be signed with them right now, and not on Tempo.

This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Josh Bury was there when the walls fell, the invaders flooded into Orgrimmar and one brave Tauren named Gamon looked down and whispered "no." You can find Josh on Twitter.