TL: So tell us a bit about yourself.
qxc: Hey, I’m Kevin Riley. I’m 20 and am a Computer Science major. Currently, I work for Dreamhost as a computer programmer intern. During the school year I work security at different parties on campus, work the homework hotline, and do coaching for extra income. I go to Harvey Mudd College. Same school as Day[9].

TL: Have you met him?
qxc: Aye. We go to the arcade on Fridays.

TL: How’s coaching? Profitable?
qxc: It’s okay. I wasn’t super well known at the time, so it was hard finding people. I’m also really busy with school. I woke up early on a couple of Saturdays to fit in a session. But I like doing it and the people I coach always come away satisfied.

TL: That’s always good to hear. So how’d you come up with your ID?
qxc: Long story short (as I’ve told the story a lot at this point), there was a q3 player who used the nick czm. I liked the simplicity so I came up with 3 letters that I liked. Thus, qxc.

TL: How about a bit about your Brood War history?
qxc: I started playing Brood War seriously about a year and a half ago in February. I went from D+ to B over the course of about a year and then got to play beta because a friend who had a mac offered me his key. From then, I switched from Brood War to SC2 and became devoted to becoming a top tier SC2 player. I’ve participated in nearly every tournament/show match/event available to me since, and started performing pretty well towards the end.

TL: What would you say was your big break into the scene?
qxc: I won Triple Strike once? Maybe twice? And got invited to TLI, beat NoNy first round and lost to Louder. Losing TLI learned me real good. I’d say that’s the reason I was able to win the GosuCoaching tourney the following week.

TL: When you first started playing in the Triple Strike cups, you were in the team Assembly Redialing. Now, you’re a part of Root Gaming. What’s the story of your clan history?
qxc: Assembly Redialing is actually a reference to the TL April Fool’s joke. That wasn’t a clan of any sorts… Just a couple of guys playing in the Triple Strike Cup. Root was the first and only clan I’ve been in for SC2. In BW I hopped through a number of clans. Most recently, I’ve been playing for TAD while the beta has been down.

TL: Also, you used to get coaching from iNcontroL. Did that help you in any way?
qxc: Yeah. inc coached me a bunch in BW. If you’ve ever seen my TvZ mech in SC2, you can thank inc for making that so strong. In BW, I used to mech on Desti TvZ and it was by far my strongest build largely to the help I got from inc. When I switched over to SC2 and started meching after the roach nerf, a lot of that knowledge and practice carried over very naturally.

TL: On that note, how would you describe your play style?
qxc: Aggressive.

TL: Anything else?
qxc: I don’t know. It’s hard to classify myself. I find builds that work and I practice them to death. People ask me why I make certain decisions and sometimes the answer is “because it works,” whether the decision is aggressive or not.

TL: But you still seem to like to pressure and harass more than sit back and defend?
qxc: -ish. Mech in SC2 relies on defend more than attacking.

TL: Yeah, but opening up into that, you have a lot of options.
qxc: Sort of. It depends on what style of mech you’re playing. My style plays more for the endgame, so it limits my openings to ones that are fairly conservative and set me up for that.

TL: Speaking of mech, do you have any comments on balance and balance complaints?
qxc: Too early to tell. Most Z’s hadn’t really figured out a good response to mech when the beta was going down. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out in phase 2.

TL: What about thoughts on how the game’s turned out so far?
qxc: Some things die hard. TvP was my weakest matchup from Brood War, and that’s still true in SC2. I find it to be very frustrating. My biggest complaint though is that some units still feel useless. Reapers and BCs come to mind. Other than early proxy reaper play, I can rarely find a good reason or time to build them.

TL: What about things Blizzard needs to patch before the release? Anything B.Net or UI related?
qxc: It’s all been said. Chat channels, invisible mode, hiding one’s play history, add by ID, being able to hide from Facebook searches.

TL: You know what really bugs me, personally: those control group tabs at the bottom of my screen that I always accidentally misclick, which overrides my control groups.
qxc: Heh. And on the left side. Wish they would remove ‘em.

TL: So you’ve made a few maps. Any comments about the Galaxy Editor?
qxc: It’s extremely powerful. Much more powerful than the WC3 Editor. But… with great power comes great complexity (hah). It’s a real pain sometimes trying to figure out how to do fairly trivial things. For example. I couldn’t figure out how to make timers work initially. So I mimicked a timer in the first version of the build order tester by incrementing the number of kills on a roach I had placed on the map every second, and then I printed the value out when the player reset. In Brood War and Warcraft 3, those kinds of workarounds were common-ish and mostly had to do with limitations of the editor. In SC2’s editor, I do those things because I have trouble figuring out the proper way to accomplish what I want.

TL: Haha. That works, I guess. Do you have any preferred was of training? Like mass gaming on the ladder? Or finding a practice partner and grinding? Or watching reps?
qxc: Everything and anything. If you stop doing one of those, you’re losing out on learning about the game in a specific way. Ladder tends to have a lot of fairly refined cheese (at higher levels of play). And it’s also full of “me-too” kinds of players. I never thought I could play myself until I played a ladder game against some Terran (can’t remember his name) at the top tiers of Platinum (before Diamond).

TL: By that, you mean someone who plays like you do?
qxc: Yeah. Like. Exactly the same.

TL: Haha. Maybe he was watching you and copied you.
qxc: Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. It was right after a big tournament. (Continuing) Replays have a lot of information about upcoming shifts in the meta game as well as ideas. Particularly useful are replays from Europe/Asia as I don’t see their builds often. And practice partners are a good way to hone a specific build and matchup.

TL: Do you have any thoughts about the relative skills of other top players? Or no comment?
qxc: Yo Ima mess you all up. Don’t mess with q-x-c. Seriously though, not really. I just like playing with good people who give a good challenge. And if I lose, that’s even better because that person can teach me a lot.

TL: What about favorite progamers? Do you have any?
qxc: Boxer.

TL: Is that the reason you chose Terran?
qxc: Naw. The reason I chose Terran is that I couldn’t play PvT or ZvT in Brood War. Process of elimination. I couldn’t go into PvT knowing that my only hope of winning was to mass carriers every game.

TL: Just curious, how much do you read TL?
qxc: I skim the forums occasionally, but tend not to post as most of the stuff actually regarding the game has a lot of … garbage? Dunno. Just a lot of people theorycrafting. Not actually very useful.

TL: Well, what do you think we could do to encourage more high level discussion that you might consider participating in?
qxc: Have invite only topics. For example, create a TvZ discussion thread and only allow top tier Terrans and Zergs to post in it. Assuming people actually participated, it could be pretty interesting. It’s tough to defend a point when I’ve got bronze players telling me what I’m saying is wrong every other line.

TL: That’s an interesting idea (Note: it has been discussed before by the Mods. No comments). Any last words before you go?
qxc: I’ve got a new map that’s going to be released shortly. And my weekly stream on Wednesday. It’s a Q&A session at 6:10 PM PST. I take questions from my thread on TL called “qxc the quack” and more while live. I’m also going to be releasing a map called Blink Stalker Survival, which is a fun blink based survival game (pretty self-explanatory). I’ve also got a twitter where I post updates about tournaments I play in and new maps I’ve released and how badly I pwned Day[9] at Puzzle Fighter last Friday. And I have a Facebook page. Just search for qxc. I don’t know if I really have anything else to say about SC2. Looking forward to tournaments, playing and stuff. Ya know, the micro and the macro. Like the ying and the yang.

TL: Alright, great. Thanks for your time, and good luck in the future.