Kink: I’ll go first. My in-game name is Kink. I’m the support player for Mirrmaid. I’ve been playing HotS since alpha and I dare to say I’ve the most games played in SEA.

Ceddya: Woah, no big deal. Yeah, I’m Ceddya, I’m also on Mirrmaid, and I’m the flex player for the team. I’ve been here since beta.

Ceddya: Yeah, I send him regards.

(Both laugh)

Kink: Good question. Favorite hero for me is Malf. I would say he’s my comfort hero, and in every tournament I like to play Malf. Hated hero...I’d say Probius, Azmodan…any specialist really. They’re quite annoying.

Ceddya: I’m the opposite of him. I actually love the specialists. I love Probius, I love Azmodan, I love Kel’Thuzad. But I hate Chromie. I haaaaaaaaaaate Chromie. I think everybody does though.

Ceddya: Mirrmaid was a very difficult name to come across. We had a lot of iterations. We wanted to have Mirr on the name. We had names like Mirrderer and finally we just settled Mirrmaid.

Kink: Yeah, it was the most friendly name.

Ceddya: Mirr is our boss, and you know…we’re his maids. So….

Kink: Mirrmaids

Kink: We only have two tournaments per year for us in the minor regions. And scrims are impossible to come by. We only scrim with people in our friend list because we’ve known them, and with each tournament that list gets smaller and smaller...along with all the other problems in minor regions, like long queue times. Our quick matches are a 10 minute queue every single time. Hero League is sometimes easily 15 minutes. Zero team league games, zero unranked games. That’s the state of our matchmaking.

Ceddya: Yes, it’s hard to get practice.

Ceddya: I think the tournaments are fun, and I’ll speak for myself, but it’d be great if we could actually have more tournaments in minor regions, because if you look at our past tournaments, we’ve achieved quite some things. This Phase fourteen teams have joined our tournament, so interest is there, but I just wish there’d be more tournaments. Those are fun, the competitive games that you don’t really find in ranked queue because of the poor matchmaking. So if we could get more tournaments, that’d be great.

[Ceddya: I wouldn’t mind a weekly league, but the thing is, there also has to be the necessary monitoring center for people to be coming back every week to commit to it. But I think a weekly league would be great to increase the competitiveness of the region.

Kink: I agree. I think right now many players…there’s no draw for them to come back because the time to wait between tournaments is so long. If we could have something to encourage them to come and play on a regular basis, it would definitely help the region.

Kink: It’s already merged actually. The organizers for the Southeast Asian tournaments are the organizers from Taiwan; they’re the Taiwanese site. I will say it’s more impersonal. We don’t actually have someone to look after us who is from our region as well. So it always looks like we are in the background instead of being the main people that they care for.

Ceddya: It’s like Kink said. Blizzard Taiwan manages both Southeast Asia and Taiwan. From the Southeast Asian perspective, well, I appreciate the effort they put into organizing this. At the same time, it also feels like there’s a lot less focus on our region. We’ve a smaller prize pool, and our tournament format is actually quite poor. It’s a single elimination for the qualifiers. So that means if you are a second place team or a third place team, your bad RNG seeding can cause you to be eliminated, and it’s not really a great competitive format. Those are our thoughts on that.

Kink: Some teams join the tournament, play one or two games, and then they’re out of it already.

Ceddya: That’s also disappointing, they commit their full effort into it. If bad luck just ruins their entire tournament…. But more importantly, tournaments do attract viewers. And I really used to enjoy it when they broadcasted our tournaments because there you got to see players that you know on screen. It becomes a good community; that’s fun. But right now, since this year, for our two tournaments there has been zero broadcast at all. Our tournaments are not streamed at all. So, from that end, I feel like Blizzard is missing [an opportunity] to capitalize on this tournament and promote the game.

Kink: They didn’t allow us to make a fan broadcast. We tried asking Blizzard Taiwan if we could have our own stream with the delay, so we could at least broadcast to our friends, but they didn’t allow us. So, zero broadcast, fan or official.

Ceddya: The Discord channel we’re in is actually a channel for one of the informal tournaments we had this year, and you can see the organization is here. They can check the chat and see it’s all done. This was actually a weekly thing, and see how many teams took part. But this kind of organization was somehow lacking in the two Blizzard tournaments we had this year, which is why I think from our end we’ve actually [been] the region they neglected. For scores and stuff, we uploaded everything, and basically that’s how we handled it all.

Kink: Well, I would say losing them is a blow, of course. I was actually the support player for PSISTORM when they were still playing in Southeast Asia. At that point in time, in the last tournament, there were two top teams that could fight for first place: PSISTORM and Resurgence. But at this point, since PSISTORM has left, the competitiveness has been really beaten. We didn’t feel it was a challenge taking the first place this time, in this tournament.

Ceddya: Their members—or a couple of their members—actually had real life [issues], like university in America. But also a couple of them tried at this tournament.

Ceddya: Oh, Mirr has told us he has been researching and consulting with his friends in Europe. He has high hopes, but big ones say we can’t beat Taiwan. Anyway, we have a hope.

Kink: In terms of game time, Taiwan has been playing for at least two or three weeks in their official tournament because they have a group stage, a qualifier, and top four. We didn’t have such a format; we had our entire tournament finished in less than two days. So, in terms of game time they’re way ahead of us, and right now, since in Southeast Asia there are no more tournaments, we have no one left to scrim. So all we have is actually quick match. It’s not something we want. It would be our biggest accomplishment if we can take Taiwan down.

Kink: I think it affects the diversity of the international tournaments. It’s definitely a blow for us because they were something we could at least…it was easier to hope for, to dream about attending an international, major international tournament, and now it’s quite unlikely for some minor regions to ever make it there. I think Brazil, the South American region, they are the ones who would suffer—and Southeast Asia as well.

Ceddya: I actually like the idea of the four minor regions competing together. My concern is that the different investment for each region would also affect the competitiveness of each region. I like it, but I just also would like to see an increasing parity in how much each region receives from Blizzard.

Kink: I think he means higher prizes.

Ceddya: To begin with.

Kink: In Southeast Asia you’d have better players come back and play if there was maybe an increased prize pool the same as the other minor regions. We like this idea of tournament format, but at the same time, to have better players in minor regions, they should have equal amount of funding, if that makes sense.

Kink: Actually announce the tournaments in the many Facebook groups that we have. For the last one, we didn’t know there was a tournament until someone accidentally found a Blizzard website. There was nothing about this on the Facebook groups nor the Discord groups. There were no news at all, no admins, nothing.

Ceddya: I think what makes SEA unique is that we are comprised of many different countries, and some countries speak different languages. If Blizzard wants to penetrate the market, I feel that they need to actually approach the different countries. For Thailand and for Indonesia, I think for even Vietnam, they all have their own Facebook groups that are very public. It’d be great if someone could advertise the games on those channels. I think advertising on the official channels is not very effective for the Southeast Asian region. I think a different strategy has to be adopted considering our geography, our demography.

Kink: Same as there’s a French stream, a Russian stream…they should do that here.

Ceddya: There won’t be. There probably won’t be, because no casters were hired this time. Riku wasn’t hired I think.

Kink: Yes, the casters from last time, they weren’t called back. There’s probably only a Taiwanese stream.

Ceddya: We’ll do [as much as] possible to maybe broadcast our games to get the community as involved as possible because I think at the end of the day, we all want the same thing—for this community, for this region—to grow, for our community to expand. And I think by not broadcasting our games, by not investing more in our tournaments, they’re losing a very good opportunity to expand the game in this region.

You can look at games like League of Legends or Dota 2 where the developers spent so much time investing in those regions, and now, for League of Legends for example, Vietnam is a very successful region, and that’s because Riot took us into account. So, from our end it’d be nice if Southeast Asia just weren’t so neglected, if a little more focus and affect were placed into improving the competitiveness of this region. That would be great. Bid either higher prize pools or more detailed tournament formats, like what Taiwan has. Broadcasting our games, that would be fun. That’d be fun even for the community, I think.

Kink: Well, we’re definitely the underdogs. (they laugh) I don’t think anybody really knows us individually. The odds are definitely not in our favor but we’re gonna give our best with what we have, so that’s reason enough to support us.