Visa issues plagued OpTic Gaming in the first few weeks of the Spring Split, forcing them to play a number of their Academy members in LCS matches. That came back to bite them at the end of the split, when they finished tied for seventh, one game out of playoffs.





Despite the team missing playoffs for all three splits since its inception, OpTic starting jungler William “Meteos” Hartman is confident in his team’s ability to end the drought this split. We caught up with him to discuss the team’s mood, his relationship with the Academy team, and how the culture on this OpTic roster compares with his former teams.





Interview performed by Aaron Mickunas; article written by Brian Chang.





What’s going through the roster’s heads going into summer?





Meteos: Well, going into summer I’m feeling a lot better than going into spring, because like you were saying, there were visa issues. It just made practice hard. I feel like on any new team you’re going to have some kind of unknown problems. There’s no way you can predict what’s going to happen. It’s just, things are going to happen, and you got to work through it. So when you have the average number of issues coming into a team and then you add the visa stuff where it’s like we’re practicing with different players all the time, it was really hard for us because our sub AD Carry was [Toàn "Asta" Trần].





So we’re playing with [Asta] and he’s an incredibly good player mechanically, but he’s really inexperienced with competitive, so we were trying to get him caught up to speed as far as what to be doing in a competitive scenario. Also English isn’t his first language, so there was the language barrier with him and Crown.





I think it’s definitely a lot easier now because Crown has improved his English at an insanely fast rate. His English was very, very low level when he first got here. I remember one of the first times I was talking to him, we were having a meeting, and he kind of just disappeared. He came back 10 minutes later, and I was like, “Oh, where did you go?” He didn’t understand what I was asking. Now I can have a pretty normal conversation with him and he understands what’s going on.





I feel like there’s a lot less stuff stacked against us this time around, and I think the team’s mood has been really, really good actually. We had some turbulence in spring, like players not getting along. It’s not so much anyone hating each other, but it’ll just be normal team disagreements, that kind of stuff, the way you want to play the game, the way you see the game, decisions you make. So far, it’s felt a lot smoother. We’re all used to playing with each other more, there’s a lot more familiarity there, so I feel like we trust each more just because we’ve had that time to play with each other. I think we’ll have a good Summer Split for sure.





Photo via Riot Games





Aside from the language barrier being eased, is there anything else that you guys have attacked to address specific problems from spring, or is it mostly just that there aren’t as many timing issues?





I think having more time to work together has been a big thing. I’ve done quite a bit of work on my own communication skills and stuff like that because I definitely don’t always communicate things as well as I could. Say we throw a game from like a 10,000 gold lead, I might be kind of pissed about that because we should have won that game. Then in review it’s really easy to be like, “Why would you possibly do this kind of thing?” It’s not helpful to do that so I’ve just been taking a lot of steps toward trying to reduce friction within the team.





Obviously there’s always going to be some, but I’m always doing my best to make it not stem from myself as much as possible, while still getting through the issues. It’s not the case where you want to ignore a problem for the sake of not hurting someone’s feelings because then the problem is still going to be there, so basically just a lot of communication skills. I feel like we’re all a bit better at talking to each other and respecting each other’s opinions and just trying to come up with the best we can collaboratively.





You and [Academy jungler Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett] have sort of a unique situation where Dardoch, unlike most Academy players, has spent most of his career on starting rosters. How does that dynamic work?





I think that he’s obviously a very good player, probably one of the best Academy junglers for sure. He could definitely be on an LCS team. He’s got the experience, the talent for that, so he’s a really good player. I think that our playstyles are somewhat different from each other. There are similarities that any LCS jungler will have with one another, but as far as the way we see the game, or the champions we pick, or what we’re prioritizing in the game is not always the same, so I think we can learn from each other in that regard.





It’s not necessarily that one way is always going to be better than the other way, and I think it helps to help divergent views on things because maybe he’ll see something I don’t or I’ll see something he doesn’t. We don’t work hand-in-hand or anything. It’s not like we’re watching every action the other person takes, but we’ll talk about our thoughts on things, like certain champion picks.

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Sometimes he’ll be like, “This thing seems broken.” I’ll be like, “I don’t know dude, seems pretty bad to me.” Then we’ll try it out more, sometimes we’ll be like, “Yeah, I think you’re right about this,” or even just a question. “Hey man, when this happens, what do you think the best thing to do is?” It’s been nice having another experienced player to go off of. It feels like we can learn from each other rather than working with some player fresh out of solo queue where it’s going to be a lot more of a one-sided relationship. They’d be learning a lot from me, but I wouldn’t really gain much from them. It’s been pretty good.





That reminds me of the 2017 relationship between [former Cloud9 top laners Jeon "Ray" Ji-won and Jung "Impact" Eon-yeong]. Do you think that OpTic could ever go forward with something like that, where you guys are being played for different playstyles or different metas?





I think we did that a little bit last split, where we were sort of spitting time in scrims. He would go in for LCS games if they wanted to play some champion that I didn’t really play. Last split it was the Jayce jungle, where for me, Jayce just doesn’t seem like a jungle champ so I didn’t really put much time into it, but Dardoch plays more of those off-meta flex picks, like the top lane or the mid lane champs that you take into the jungle. There’s some merit to that.





I think that for me personally, I prefer when I’m able to work with the same people the whole day, because it was a little weird when we would split time. It would be like morning I’m scrimming with the LCS team, evening I’m scrimming with the Academy team and he’s scrimming with the LCS team. The takeaways we have from review, it won’t really carry over in the same sense. I’ll be expected to do one thing in Academy, like play around people in a certain way, and then in LCS it’ll be totally different, and it’s the same for [Dardoch]. I think it’s a little easier when I’m working with the same people. That way, the stuff we talk about in review, it sticks. It’s not like I have to remember like, “When I’m playing with this dude, he wants me to do this. When I’m playing with this guy, he wants me to do this.” I think there can be merit in switching off, but I prefer the stable roster.





Speaking of working together with teams, back when you were on 100 Thieves, at least from an outsider’s perspective, they seemed to care a lot about showing their players together in their videos, content, all that stuff. Could you describe the difference between that culture and OpTic’s?





That’s interesting. On 100 Thieves, maybe it’s just a perception thing, but that was the most work-like team setting I’ve ever been in. It didn’t feel like we were friends. We were like coworkers, but on Cloud9 it was basically we were family at that point. On OpTic I definitely feel like we’re more along the lines of friends. I really enjoy spending time with almost everybody on OpTic. I guess we haven’t made a lot of content as a team, but I think we all just really love hanging out with each other. Some people are so funny. If you put everyone together, it’s like, some stupid things can happen and everyone’s going to be laughing. I really like the dynamic of OpTic. The Academy and LCS teams are close since we scrim right next to each other, and we’re switching off players sometimes, we’re talking about the game. It doesn’t feel too much like a coworker thing.

So I guess that perception of 100 Thieves I had is just from the content, and it’s not what’s really going on, at least when you were playing with them?





I think 100 Thieves does a great job branding themselves, and they have a really cool brand. Maybe it’s changed too, since it’s been about a year since I was there. It definitely was the team I had the lowest amount of fun with. Not to say I didn’t like my time there, but it was very serious. It felt like everyone there was serious. People associate me and [Cloud9 DC Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi] as memeing together, and that’s sort of more of my style, like light-hearted, goofy stuff, and on 100 Thieves when I would do that people would look at me like, “What’s wrong with this guy?” On OpTic I think it’s a lot more of that vibe.





Photo via Riot Games





Do you see OpTic ever becoming more family-oriented, or do you think that’s just a unique thing for Cloud9?





I think that the whole scene has changed a lot and moved away from that with franchising and stuff like that. I think Cloud9 was a really interesting case, where back in season two and season three it was the case where players would play with each other because you’d meet someone in solo queue and be like, “Hey man, I like playing with you, I think you’re really good, let’s make a team.” Nowadays, you say that, and you get poaching fines and stuff like that. It’s very by-the-books, talk to my agent, talk to my general manager.





When I was traded off 100 Thieves, I had no say in that whatsoever. It was just, “Congrats on going 2-0 this week in LCS. By the way, you’re going to FlyQuest Academy.” I was like, “Okay. What?” I think the whole space of the scene has changed quite a bit and moved away from that. It’s not to say it can’t happen. I do enjoy OpTic and working there, but I feel like with just the way contracts work, the fact that a lot more money is involved nowadays, it won’t happen. When we first started on Cloud9, it was like we were Quantic before that and our salaries were $300 a month per player. Nowadays people are making way more than that. Way, way more than that. It’s really hard to say what’s going to happen, because it’s all changing so fast, and pretty much everything is unprecedented, so it’s hard to say what’s going to happen, but I’m enjoying my time on a day-to-day basis.





I feel like League is one of those games where if you want to be the best, you really have to commit everything to it. There have been times in my career where I didn’t feel like I wanted to commit that much time to it, like in 2017 when I was on Phoenix1. I was kind of going through some personal stuff that year. I was like, “That’s going to mess with me. I don’t think I’m going to be a good teammate at this point. I don’t think I can fully commit to playing.” I didn’t even want to play at all that year, but P1 wanted me to anyway. Now it’s like, I love the grind. I like just being able to play, so it’s nice when I’m able to enjoy my time that I’m putting in. If it feels like a chore 24/7, I feel like you’ll just lose your sanity, fast. You shouldn’t feel forced to play solo queue. When I see the players who are like, “Man, I really don’t want to play League but my management is going to yell at me if I’m not spamming solo queue,” I’m just like, “Then are you really here for the right reason?” I think it’s way better when it comes from within.





One more big question. What is the team’s general worry, concern, or do they just not care about the possible Immortals buyout?





I don’t actually know much about it, personally. I don’t know any secrets that aren’t available to the public, so I’m not sure I can give my thoughts on it, but I think that nothing would happen before the end of the year. It’s probably something that would happen in the offseason. Basically, the mood on our team is that we don’t really know what’s happening with that. That’s above our paygrade. That’s stuff that the owners are working on. For us, we’re like, “Let’s have a good split. We don’t know what’s going to happen next year. Maybe we’ll still play together, maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll just be rebranded, maybe they’ll make a whole new roster and we’ll go to different teams. Let’s just do our best with what we have, try to have a good run in the summer. Let’s try to make playoffs, because OpTic hasn’t gotten there yet.” I’m feeling pretty good about it, and hopefully this split will be a good one for us.