In the third of our brand new “hype machine” interviews going into the biggest LAN of the year, the height of the Summer LAN season, insomnia58. This new series will explore the usual suspects who are gunning for glory in both the UK Masters Finals & at the main event insomnia58. We shall also be exploring some of the more “unknowns” in the scene with a few teams pinned for “interesting storylines” that are currently developing within the scene and online portion of league play for example. It won’t strictly be a “top player” affair, but we will try to shed the limelight on those outside the British Elite group to give our readers an insight into the growing depth of talent within our scene.
In a twist of events, we sat down with one of the community teams that consistently end up supporting Multiplay’s iSeries events. Team Penguin Overlords are always a welcome addition to any tournament they join, and we wanted to really shed some light on these guys (and girls) and talk about their ambitions going into the largest LAN of the year. We also wanted to get their thoughts on a wider variety of issues within the scene from pricing of LAN to PCWing other teams.
We’ve managed to capture Craig “cthreestar” Ewart who is a player who has had a wealth of experience in the Counter-Strike scene, stemming all the way back to the 1.6 days in 2004. When 1.6 died, Craig decided to hang up his mouse and take time away from the scene to try and focus on his real life commitments. In 2015 though, his life had radically changed, and found himself forced out of a job by his own personal circumstances in his life. This meant he had found time and focus to return to compete in the CS scene, although much of it had drastically changed with of course the merging of the 1.6 and Source scenes in the UK and everyone mostly getting behind Global Offensive as the main game.
With that he found himself back in Team Penguin Overlords, a team which has a shorter history than most of the communities and organisation within the CS scene in the UK. TPO.eSports became a community in March 2015 with it’s primary focus being on CS:GO. The majority of team and it’s external members managed to meet for the first time at insomnia55 in August 2015. From the line-up back then there is only two original members left, myself and MiKeZje, who will actually be stepping down after i58 although a lot of our old members are still actively involved in TPO & our development team.
Since then they’ve made very little changes to their team and only made changes when it’s been forced onto them. They have a great chemistry and bonding within the community and have a few outsider challengers to the fringe elements of the scene. This is why we wanted to have a chat with Craig, as his team is one of those teams that are around, but never get the coverage they deserve. They are an interesting bunch with some great stories behind the team.
How confident are you about your team’s chances at i58? Where are you realistically looking to finish?
I’m pretty confident we’ll do much better than we have previous events where we have struggled and failed to get through the group stages and all I ask of the players is that we progress every season to better placements/promotions, so realistically getting out of groups is an absolute must for us this time round, with the practice and results we’ve been putting in online I see no reason why we can’t achieve this.
Is there any team you’re not prepared for, a dark horse you think can reach top 8?
We have focused on other teams in previous events but we tend to find we can perform a lot better sticking to our own game plan than trying to anti-strat and change our style to suit the enemy teams. If I was to choose a dark horse out of the signed up teams so far would have to be IGI eSports, with their consistent improvements as a team and their solid online results I’m certain they will shock a few teams.
What are your thoughts on mix teams entering and winning LANs like we saw Rasta.Infused do at i57?
Personally I don’t think this should be allowed, don’t get me wrong some of the players in these mixes are insane, have barrels of experience and with the crazy performances individually they put in, they do deserve to win but super mixes aren’t going to be what brings the UK scene forward. It’s hard to avoid this but if we had some sort of body/structure within the UK that could implement systems to prevent this we could be better off. One suggestion I have is seasonal team-lists.
In your opinion, who’s the star player on your team, what do they bring to the table?
Well, recently I have seen every single player in the line-up step up and do their part at some point, although there is one player in our line-up who stands out for me mostly due to his consistency, clutching excellence and sheer fragging ability, not only does mezii[F]’ have it all in-game but for him only being 17, his attitude out of game, dedication and his general persona is what it takes to be one of the best players around our (UK) scene.
What’s the team chemistry like outside of the game, do you get along well?
We all get on well, some of us have been playing for nearly a year together now and having nearly all 5 players from completely different backgrounds (Poland, Scotland, N.Ireland and England) can be difficult to manage sometimes, one of the main reasons we do get along so well is the fact we respect each other and talk about everything or anything that could affect the team or the individual, whether it’s family issues, recent performances, improvements and even helping each other financially if necessary.
What is your perspective on LAN prices, with Multiplay jacking up the BYOC price to £99 this time around, can this potentially cause teams to skip insomnia and focus on other stuff?
I can understand moving to a bigger venue can cause inflation in other areas of Multiplay and although it is great to see Prize Pools being upped slightly. I still feel these tickets are far too expensive, it’s not too bad for the teams who are funded to go to these events but for the organisations that don’t have funding readily available it can be tough on the players, especially the younger ones who are still in education.
Does Craig look proper Evil here whilst in action at iSeries?
How has your online performance been so far? Do you think you can stay consistent on LAN?
We’ve had some great results online especially this season, our main focus was CEVO-IM as it was the highest skilled league we could compete in at our level, currently we are still in the PLAYOFFS although have qualified for CEVO-Main next season with some notable victories vs. teams like HWA-Gaming (Turkey) and RizeGaming (Czech). We also competed in the first ESEA UK Open, our first time competing in an ESEA league where we narrowly missed out vs. Royals.UK in the QF of the Playoffs. Do I think we can carry this over to LAN? We wouldn’t be going if we couldn’t :).
You’ve been around the scene for a while, how have things changed from when you first started playing to today? And is there anything you’d like to see happen within UK CS?
Being honest with you since I came back to CS at the start of last year, not much has changed except the team rosters. Like I said previously we need a body regulating the UK scenes tournaments, LANs, and UKCS in general, as well as more guidance for younger organisations to flourish so they can support the young budding teams.
Another point I’d like to bring up, which is often not mentioned is the cliché that exists in the top tier of the UK scene. Some of these players could massively help our scene and younger growing teams if they left their egos to the side and actually cared about the state of the scene instead of themselves. An example of this is the “invite only” Facebook groups where top tier UK teams will only play teams they consider equal or better without giving other teams a chance even if they are from the same nation which causes a massive skill gap in teams within our scene.
Have you ever thought about joining a European team? Do you think it’d lead to more success than you would get in a UK team?
Of course, I have thought about it and I respect players who make the decision to move out with the UK scene, or who have been scouted from professional, well-established organisations like happened with ‘dephh’ and ‘Surreal’ going to NA. In the long run these ‘transfers’ don’t really help the UK scene, it helps the NA/EU scene and although I wish any UK players do well out with our scene, I also hope players who do move can still help improve and become role-models to the UK scene.
As a team you’ve been around the scene for a long time now and taken part in a fair few tournaments, what is the main factor for keeping a team together as long as you have?
Respect, Counter-Strike can be a stressful game at times full of emotion, debates and rage. It’s one of the reasons we all love it but if you can’t respect each other in a team environment, then you simply won’t last as a team.
For reference this is Team Penguin Overlords lineup for insomnia58:
Craig “cthreestar” Ewart
Tomasz “vedi” Rusinek
Will “Mezii[F]” Merriman
Mike “MiKeZje” Smith
Steve “ArchEnemy” Duncan.
Previous Interviews:
Pre-insomnia58: An interview with…. Jakem
Pre-insomnia58: An interview with…. SpeedyG
We will be having plenty of interviews over the coming days with a variety of teams, so make sure you keep in touch with UKCSGO.com in the run up and during insomnia58 through our Facebook & Twitter pages.
