autimatic & n0thing: "Easier when Stewie calls"

Cloud9 has been looking better in recent times, notably winning the Subaru Invitational over SK Gaming. Could you talk a bit about this and what that meant for you guys?

This tournament meant a lot for us and for our confidence, because I was calling and… Yeah basically it just did a lot for our confidence and showed us that we can still compete and win, but at the same time it was online, so we don’t think to much about it. That’s it.

There’s been a lot of fuss going on about shroud and his talks of retirement recently. Could you comment on this? Has that affected the mindset of the team?

Not for me at least. Just because I know what he means. Basically I understand that playing competitively is really tiring, I mean I get tired myself. On top of that everyone has their own goals. For instance I would want to eventually go back to school. I don’t know when. So yeah, everyone has their own plan and as long as he wants to play I want to keep playing with him. If he retires well that sucks but we’ll just move on.

Would you have a comment also on how you think Cloud9 performed at this tournament?

Well I think we performed terribly at this tournament and hopefully we don’t do that at the next tournament.

Following on that, what do you think are the biggest issues or weaknesses that you need to address, as a team, and individually as well?

As a team I think we’re trying to play too structured while we didn’t have the time to prepare, and so I think a large part of our gameplay was not about playing off intuition it was just thinking about “what strat do we run now?” then “what strat do we run now?”. And just about what to do in each strat instead of playing the game. So for the next tournament, Stewie is going to be calling, and when he calls it’s really easy to play your own game.

Just for fun, but who do you think will be the next up and coming star for NA?

Honestly, everyone just sucks [laughs]. So I don’t think there will be one. Not that I know at least.

This iteration of Cloud9 has been the longest standing so far, with the last change welcoming autimatic in August 2016. You’ve had mixed results, but you made history by clinching a big title for NA which hadn’t been done in a very long time. Now you’re back to being outside of the top 10 teams. How do you reflect on the past few months and how you got here?

First of all thanks for the interview. After the brazilian victory [E/N: at ESL Pro League Season 4]... you know a lot of things combined for us there. autimatic as a player really coming into his own and finding confidence, Stewie calling well, me having a good lurk role, shroud having a good support role, with Tyler [E/N: Skadoodle]. Really everyone making things happen.

Towards the end of the year I think we got a little bit stale, and we didn’t qualify for the major. It was in a really rough fashion for us, losing to Hellraisers like that. It’s just been one of these periods where our team has so much potential and shows it in flashes. We’ve been willing to work and are still willing to work together on trying to find ways to keep making that a consistent result.

So even this weekend when we started versus SK, we were really confident. We lost bost pistols though, and we had an 8-7 half on T. We just needed a good start on CT, we didn’t get it. It just always so hard to find consistent metrics for why we lose, but we definitely know how to win and we’re confident now. We’re looking forward to bring it to the minor qualifier next week. We’re going to make some changes back again. Stewie is going to be back to calling, Tim [E/N: autimatic] has been calling for a few months just to try it. But we think that will free everyone up a bit more again with Stewie calling because Tim was playing really well in that environment.



What do you think are the biggest weaknesses or issues that the team needs to address?

Well, Sean Gares used to call strats for us and I think that made myself, shroud and Tyler very conditioned to having a strat caller who has a complete plan for the round and really wants to micromanage. Ever since Stewie and Tim started calling, obviously they don’t have that same experience as strat callers and they also just don’t want to play like that.

So one of the things we have to do is just to keep making sure that, whether it’s me, shroud or Tyler, we’re not staying too static in our gameplay on CT. We’re changing up our spots on the T side, we’re abusing gaps and I think you’ve seen flashes of us getting better at that. I’ve been working really hard trying to improve my T side game and CT side game as well in terms of working on these sides, playing more for information and getting kills at the right time. So things like that.

Mentioning your win at ESL Pro League Season 4, that was at a time when NA looked to be competing at the highest level. There was Liquid earlier in the year, OpTic a short while after, when they won ELEAGUE Season 2. But that didn’t carry on for very long. What happened there, why did it fail and what would be necessary for NA to emerge on top in the long run?

I think if you just look at it and take it case by case... you look at Liquid for instance. Right now they’re kind of on an upward trend and if you look at their issues it’s because they just got stanislaw, they got rid of Pimp, they brought in Twistzz instead. So I think they just need some time. I feel we’re more stronger than them but they’re one of those teams, when EliGE is on fire, Twistzz is on fire, jdm is getting pick, it’s too strong.

So I think for NA to get back on top, it’s just about all the NA teams to just embrace their identity and really push to be a top tier team. And just everyday having everyone working hard. OpTic has this identity crisis where they are not sure kind of what to do. I think they have jasonR playing but I’m not sure that’s a long term solution for them. So they just got to figure out stuff out there without their fifth player.



Then our team, we know our issues, we just talked about it. NRG is a team where again, they have some newer players and that’s kind of right on the fringe of that next year in NA and so that’s where we just got to keep pushing those teams to stay on top and keep the new talent coming in. I think with the brazilians and those three or four NA teams, all of those teams could be in the top ten potentially so gotta keep working.

You’ve been absent of the Majors since MLG Columbus in 2016. For the PGL Major in Krakow the road looks even tougher with multiple qualifiers, with a lot of hungry teams. How do you prepare for such a marathon of a qualification process and how do you feel when you consider the long road ahead?

It can be overwhelming if you think about all the travel but obviously you try to do one event at a time. Even coming today to the ESL Pro League finals and seeing the crowd is enough motivation to say “we want to be here”. As long as you have that passion I think it kind of carries you from event to event. And then the real task there is just in the day to day and keeping some of your shots fresh.

Knowing what you’re good at and what other teams are going to abuse individually is really big. So I think all of us as individual need to stay in tune with our game and make sure that we’re not getting caught and anti-strated, stuff like that.

The format for this group stage has been criticized, we’ve seen the situation with Liquid and North where one was guaranteed to advance. Overall what do you think about this format and do you have a preferred format for 12 teams?

I think they should change the tiebreaker format. I think seeing $16k for five rounds would be better than $10k for three rounds. Maybe five rounds $16k, if that goes to OT then three rounds $16k, and maybe one round sudden death, something like that, a five-three-one format.

Then the round robin group play, some people aren’t fond of it, but it doesn’t bother me. Obviously everyone wants best-of-three matches. It’s pretty hard though with broadcasting so I think the only thing they could do better with this current format is maybe the scheduling. So the team that plays two matches maybe play on the same day, and then three matches on the same day. Because they were kind of going back and forth with that and I know it was messing up some of the teams. Maybe make some of the breaks better.

In terms of the actual format I don’t have a problem with this one. Maybe expanding and doing like a 16 team GSL format in the future but I don’t think anyone wants more team. If anything some people want less NA teams. So I’m fine with the format for now.

What are you team’s biggest goal for the rest of this year?

The team’s biggest goals for the rest of this year are to obviously win more than just one event and we’re going to start with qualifying for the major, and then getting top three at ECS and ESL Cologne are basically in our minds.



Interviewer: XXTN
Editor: Ragnarork
Photo credits: HLTV
CSS: FO-nTTaX