steel: "the next step [is to] perform at these events coming up"

Many topics surrounding Torqued in the past months were brought up during the chat with Joshua "steel" Nissan.

steel is confident about making Pro League

Ahead of Torqued's initial match against compLexity in ESL Pro League Season 7 relegation, Michael "Duck" Moriarty sat down with Joshua "steel" Nissan to discuss the event and his team over the last few months.

So you've secured 3rd place in MDL, straight into the relegation tournament, and you're playing compLexity later today. What are your initial thoughts on the matchup?

We've played compLexity in other qualifiers throughout the tournaments, but the last - probably a month, month and a half - and we've had pretty good success with them with their old roster that had ptr and Slemmy. So we had decent results against that, and now they've actually made roster changes where they've changed their in-game leader and their AWPer to ShahZaM and stanislaw and I think that because they've been going through those changes and they've had stylistic changes and role changes and maybe players change positions on maps, I think that they're going to be a little bit more loose. But I think the players that they have don't fit that style as well. So you have players that require structure that haven't had time to create a structure, so I think it plays into our favor a bit.

You've had a pretty successful MDL season, third place overall. In the playoffs, you had a good result, but fell to freakazoid's team Swole Patrol. Did you see yourselves going all the way to the MDL winners game before that match or was it a surprise?

I thought we'd go all the way to the winners match for sure. I think that an issue that our team had and continues to have for whatever reason - I'm trying to find a solution for it - is that we sometimes lose focus in game and you can tell the difference. When we're playing and everyone's clicking, and everyone's brains turned on, and everyone's playing well, and everyone's in a good mood we can be really good and we can beat pretty much any North American team in a BO3 series. But, when that's not there, when one or two players aren't focused or aren't in a good mood and we're not cheering and stuff, I think things start to fall apart, especially against certain types of teams and their playstyles. I think Swole Patrol was one of those teams that were kind of our kryptonite for a little bit. Since then we've played them a couple of other times and beat them in BO3s, so I think that we're kind of over that hurdle, but that hurdle still exists for other teams. We're trying to work at it right now, we're trying to figure out what the actual cause is and trying to apply a solution because it happens to teams that we know we should be better than, and then we just end up losing to them.

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So, you're in the relegation tournament, it's double elimination. Is your team confident in securing promotion to the ESL Pro League?

...Yes, we are. I think with teams that are here we've beaten in best-of-threes online more times than they've beaten us. So that's compLexity. I don't think we've actually faced up against Splyce in any matches directly, I think we've just - I think they've been taken out of tournaments before we've actually faced off against them. But, our practice results against them - the more recent practice results against them - we've won, and then compLexity we beat regularly, and then Swole Patrol we've been beating in the latest results, and eUnited, when we did play them in matches we beat them, but we haven't played them in a match in quite some time.

Certain pundits and analysts of the CS:GO scene complained about certain invites you got in the past. Do you see your recent qualifications as showing the analysts and wider personalities that you're a team there to be competitive and can win?

I think that's the first step, I think that the next step would be to actually perform at these events coming up, so this weekend with MDL Global Finals and the relegation matches, and then next week at DreamHack. I think after these next two weeks it'll be a lot more clear and it'll be a lot easier for us to actually say "hey, this is why we were getting those invites" I think we do need to perform first though before just saying "hey, we qualified through online tournaments to get to a LAN" It's not enough yet.

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At the start of the season, you were at least rumored to be joining an organization that are now in the Pro League. Were these rumors grounded or are you trying to stick with Torqued as a brand?

So with regards to Torqued as a brand, I think that it's really just a placeholder until we figure out what the best long-term solution is, and we're keeping quite open-minded, so if that means that an organization comes along and gives us an offer that's really good for us, then I think we would take it, even though it's probably not the greatest long-term five years down the road plan. Aside from that, if we're able to have investors be happy to somehow fund Torqued and we're able to make that into an actual full time thing, thinking about after retiring as a player, I think that would be in all of our best interests. So right now, we're just keeping the options open and we're trying to get as close to a proper valuation as possible. So right now we have only MDL online and qualifiers - that's all, so after we see where we fall with regards to if we have an EPL spot, how are we faring at these events that we've already qualified for - I think that will show us and show others exactly how valuable we are in terms of how much can we perform, do we choke, or are we good with content. With regards to being approached by SoaR - we were approached by SoaR, and whatever happened between them and their previous team I'm not sure about the specifics. We were never intending to take an EPL spot from the now Dignitas team, but it seems like we were name dropped into a situation where we shouldn't have been name dropped because I'm sure we weren't the only team that they reached out to see if they wanted to pick up instead. The only thing that happened was like an initial conversation between me and one of the SoaR owners that were gauging whether or not we'd be interested in playing under their organization or not.

With regards to the ESL Pro League itself shrinking in size and organizations dropping out of the scene in North America, what are your thoughts? How negative of an impact does that afford North American Counter-Strike and CS as a whole?

I don't think it's the biggest impact right now, you still see new orgs either getting into Counter-Strike or trying to get in, so it's not the end of the world. I also think that if you look at the teams that those organizations sponsor, they weren't exactly dividing good ROI for those orgs. So you're looking at Splyce that was in CS for multiple years and their biggest accomplishment was fluking out a Major qualifier spot and then getting dead last in the Major. That was literally their biggest accomplishment in the two plus years they were in CS. When you look at CLG they had a lot of success in 2015 when they had the original roster with tarik and everyone else and as soon as that roster started losing players that's when they started having mixed results, inconsistent success, and after not being able to qualify for the Minor and EPL Finals and other events, it didn't make sense to keep that CS team. Misfits again, they had their team fall apart. So all the orgs that pulled out of CS didn't really see the ROI because they're probably paying the players a lot and not getting enough out of it, just because there's inconsistent results, they're not qualifying for enough tournaments, or they're not qualifying for any tournaments at all. So they just play a couple of online leagues and lose out in every qualifier.

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As a player who has streamed regularly in the past and semi-regularly does so now, what is the balance there - remaining competitive in a team and also creating content for your sizeable followers?

So for right now, my priority is to be the best player that I can be, be the best teammate, and try to have the team be as successful as possible. So that's where the brunt of my energy and focus is. Any left over time that I have that I can put into streaming when I'm not doing other responsibilities such as sponsor obligations or real life responsibilities, I'll try to stream. It's hard to want to stream CS. Like, CS isn't a game that you can just casually play and enjoy being mediocre at or just fucking around. If I wanted to do that I would play other games. If I'm trying to just casually play, I could play PUBG and I can decide, "do I just wanna go for as many kills as possible this game, just drive around and find people, or do I wanna go for first place and tryhard?" Or I can play another game, like say Ironsights, a game that a few of my teammates and I have been playing after practice recently, and that's just the run and gun type of thing and you don't have to have your brain on, you can just switch off your brain and run around. For CS though, you can play FPL or Rank S and you go there with the expectation that it's going to be higher quality gameplay, people are gonna be trying, people are gonna be communicating, people are gonna be adapting to the situations, and then you get the same situations that you're seeing from the same players of the last few years and that's rookie, amateur mistakes that should've been corrected years ago, fundamental mistakes, communication issues, especially with non-native speakers. You have people that probably don't have any league experience, so they have this sick movie clip pistol round, but for the rest of the game they just get picked off by an AWP and don't know how to counter it or how to avoid that. You're playing rounds - you look at the timer, you're smoked off at your spot until a minute thirty and already one or two teammates are dead, and it's just not an enjoyable experience at all for me. And whether or not people don't like playing with me because I'm too strict or too tryhard or whatever, it doesn't really matter because I probably don't enjoy playing with the people who say "it's just for fun" or "I just had a long day of practice, so I don't wanna get on and try hard again or be serious again." I mean, it's like I just had a long day of practice too and I come here, and the quality of games are so bad. I'm so used to having things run so well in my team and I come to this and it looks like a shitshow, and no one wants to work to improve it. I said I'm not gonna play FPL until after these events, so when I return home I'd play FPL again, but I took a month break just because it was not helping at all. It doesn't help me as a player, it doesn't make me better. If anything it makes me worse.

Cutting back the events you qualified for - are you confident in making an impact there or is it just a "see what happens"?

I think at DreamHack, I think it's definitely in our reach to do really well. I could see getting out of groups and making the semifinals at the very least. Hopefully we can make the finals of it though. With regards to the ESL One Belo Horizonte event, there's gonna be a lot of hard hitters there, so main focus - make it out of groups, then play it by ear, take it step by step. Obviously, it depends on the matchups, and we'll do better against some teams and worse against others just depending on playstyle. But I'm hoping that just having these events right now, this experience, is gonna definitely boost us. Although the teams that are gonna be at ESL One Belo Horizonte have either been teams for a long time or the players have been competing at a top tier level - like they haven't missed a day of CS in the last three years. So for us that are playing catchup still, some of us switched fulltime to other games and are getting back into the scene, using this experience just to have more high level matches, higher pressure matches, and being able to play at these events is gonna boost us as a team in terms of caliber and everything else just tremendously.