Season 14 powered by Twitch: Premiership Playoff Interviews #1 Kaidus from BFF

To build up some excitement for the upcoming Premiership playoffs,  freshmeatt (what a beast!) has set up a hub page with all important information, that will be updated frequently. It will always contain the latest information about the upcoming match. You can reach it by clicking the banner on top of the site’s home directory or by clicking here. Also, official ETF2L Premiership Ambassador  Admirable sat down with  kaidus from the 4th seed in the Premiership Playoffs  BFF and talked about his expectations for the upcoming match against  broder.

Premiership Playoff Interviews #1 Kaidus from BFF

Admirable: Hello citizens of ETF2L. This is your Premiership Ambassador speaking. Welcome to the first of a four part ETF2L Season 14 powered by Twitch Premiership Playoff Interview Series, where we will be delving in to the minds of the rockstars of European 6v6 in the lead up to the brutal crescendo to the season that is the playoffs. Today I am joined by Jason Allen, Season 13’s Demoman of the Season and team captain for the number four seed, BFF. You may know him better as kaidus… what’s up brother man?

Kaidus: Uhm yeah. Hey! What’s up!

A: Well, in seasons gone by I might have broken the ice with some insightful questions about Team Fortress 2 fashion, but no more! I’m on the hunt for drama and I ask you to hold no punches here. I want you to speak your mind, Jason. Are you game?

K: Am I game? Yeah I’m game! I had actually looked up the name of my hat in preparation for the questions, but I guess we’re keeping it serious. What do you want to know, man? We’re practising for the first game… hopefully not the last game!

A: Alright, I’m gonna get down to business, man. Just allow me to build you up before I knock you down. I’m gonna start off by saying that you’re an incredibly talented demoman; equally adept with pipes and stickies to produce sickening damage figures, the fastest rollouts in Europe, and an explosive agility and creativity in battle that often leaves your opponents often shooting at your dust trails. You are the player on BFF I look to for those elusive “big plays” and yet, as I often point out in casts, I see you as the mercurial character, almost impulsive in the decisions and plays you make, often biting off more than you can chew and leaving your team without a demoman in key situations. How does my analysis compare to your own insights on your play style?

K: Yeah, I guess you summed it up pretty well! I don’t really know what to say about it. I play TF2 the only way I know. I guess I see something, like you said this before in a cast… I remember a specific cast, I see something and I just think “Yeah I gotta go for it!”… like I don’t really think about the consequences a lot of the time. I dunno, I think sometimes people are a bit harsh. I guess you, ’cause I guess I listen to a lot of your casts back when you cast us. Sometimes it’s a bit harsh and there’s a bit more going on beneath the surface, like sometimes they aren’t random plays, sometimes I’m going for something in sync with the team, but then something gets lost in translation and the team isn’t thinking the same thing as me when I think they might be. So some of the time it’s that kind of thing and there’s a bit more to it, but mostly I just like go for it, you know?

A: Yeah I see that a lot in casts as well where I’m often saying something like “kaidus seems to be out of position, but maybe it’s just that his team haven’t reacted fast enough”. It’s this like ah… there’s so many ways to play TF2, that’s what I love about the game. I can’t slate anyone’s attempts to play it, especially since I’m banned from playing demoman in Pickup2…

K: Haha!

A: … but eh… moving on! You’ll be facing off against Broder on Wednesday; the first fixture of the playoffs. It’s a rematch of the best game of the main season, in my opinion. You managed to draw blood, but not land the fatal blow. What have you learned since? What weaknesses might you attempt to exploit in the Broder roster and play style?

K: Uhm! I guess… I dunno… I guess they’re really aggressive team. I dunno I guess on our regular season game, the map we took by golden cap, Badlands, I kind of identified the fact that they like to play on mid really aggressive on the point. Like they bring their demo house, he comes straight out on the point, with scouts coming on the point as well, but I kind of realised my rollout was faster than ryb’s, so if we just countered that play for play, we should be able to do it better than them. I think we took the bulk of the mids on that map, so that kind of played in to our favour, but I dunno – on the other maps it doesn’t work so good. So we’ll have to figure something out.

A: Are you playing your cards close to your chest here? You don’t want to give too much away? Or you really haven’t put too much thought in to it?

K: Well, the thing is like, it’s a really open question because I don’t know the maps yet. I mean I can assume that they’re gonna pick Snakewater for the first map. They get the pick because they’re the higher seed, but it’s like the loser picks. I spoke to Zebbosai, actually, asked him if he wanted to be gentlemen and just kind of say what our picks would be in advance, but he was like “no way” so I’m not gonna say what our pick is. So I can’t really go in to much detail on that, but I guess they’re gonna pick Snakewater, but for us on Snakewater our main focus is just to get our own game sorted out on it, because we’re pretty weak on that map, like, that’s why I expect them to pick it. It’s a pretty weak map for us so I’m not really be looking at what they’re doing, I’m more just looking at stepping our own game up at the moment.

A: Well yeah, let me sorta flip that back on you and ask what are the shortcomings of BFF that you’ve been able to identify? What are the leaks that need to be plugged before you go back to do battle with Broder again?

K: I dunno, I guess this is not so much to do with Broder, but against all teams. Something we seem to lack compared to say Epsilon and cc// at least is… uhm… kind of breadth of comms? Like, say our flank is Daleth, Beavern and Quad. Mainly Daleth and Beavern. Both of them are pretty kinda dependent, they try and work off of what other people are doing. So a lot of the times the comms get very one dimensional, like they’re all coming from the combo. Whereas with Epsilon you get the scouts telling someone what they are doing and what they should do to help them. In our team we often don’t have that, I mean credit to Beavern, he’s stepped it up in that department a lot, like he’s making a lot more calls “I’m going behind, jump now” that kind of thing. That’s the main issue for me, that’s what I’ve really been trying to drill in to them all season long. The comms, the calls can’t only come from me and Hat, like other people gotta contribute. We are getting there, bit by bit, but it’s gonna take some time still.

A: You mentioned a few of the names on your roster there. Season 14 saw a couple of familiar faces added to the BFF; you got Hat, Quad and Beavern. They’re all old hands, but the acquisition of Daleth maybe raised a few eyebrows? Was this a case of no one better being available, or did you feel you’d sort of unearthed a raw talent, like a diamond in the rough?

K: It was a bit of both. I mean had there been a superstar available I probably would have gone for him. There was some tried and tested people available that would have done a decent enough job, but I dunno… like it’s kind of all or nothing. I wasn’t really gonna be content with just finding someone who would be OK and stayed OK. Like, Daleth might not be up there with your Mike’s and your Tek’s or whoever you wanna compare him to, but it’s his first season playing this role, definitely playing at this level. So he’s one that I think will get there in time, but mostly I just wanted someone that was kind of a clean slate. With the gunboats being implemented this season I didn’t want someone who would have these really dry, static routines of what they do as a roaming soldier. I wanted someone that would kind of look to do it a bit differently, or like listen to what I’ve got to say and what I want from them rather than just having their own stuff sorted out. Like uhm… I played with Zebbosai on roamer a lot over the last couple of seasons, and whilst he’s a sick player and I would rate him as undisputed top two soldier in Europe, we always had some issues in the way we played together because he had his way of doing things and I had mine, and neither of us were really ever gonna agree to completely change the way we played… like we made small adjustments here and there, but overall there wasn’t that much natural synergy in it. Whereas with Daleth I just kind of felt that he was a clean slate that could learn to play with us. Do you know what I mean?

A: Yeah, I can really feel what you are saying there, it’s something that I have personally tried to achieve in Crack Clan. Getting players that maybe don’t have a fully formed idea of what they want to do, that you can maybe mould a little bit, but they’ve probably ended up moulding me more than anything. But, you’re talking about the pre-season drama there or hinting at it and I want to sort of look back here and lay it out for the people that maybe don’t know. You decided to cut Darn and Mirelin, whilst at the same time kukkye, bybben and Zebbo abandoned ship. There was some sort of clandestine dealings going on there and we saw four of those players resurface in the very Broder roster that stands between you and Crack Clan. This fixture is much more than just a game of Team Fortress 2; it is the ultimate vindication for the decisions that were made then, and perhaps the backs that were stabbed. Can you handle that sort of pressure, Jason?

K: Yeah for sure we can handle the pressure. I mean from the outside I guess it looks that way and I don’t want to destroy what you’re doing here, kinda trying to build a story behind this game, but there isn’t like… for me at least there’s not that much animosity here. To my knowledge, everyone that left towards the tail end of last season, they did so for their own reasons and then Broder, the team, the idea came later and was mainly down to circumstance, like to do with Ryb coming back and that sort of thing… otherwise it might not have happened. I mean none of the players that I… I mean I cut two players, I cut Darn and Evilmoon and none of them are really involved here. I mean, for me, if there was ever gonna be a grudge match here, it would have been MyDGB [Pokeman], but even then it wasn’t so much that. I dunno, I guess I was a bit put out to begin with because it basically looked like they’d reformed the team save for me and Darn, and as far as I was aware Darn was all of their problems, not me. So I felt a bit like “Woah! What did I do here to upset them?”, but at the end of the day I think it was just down to Ryb coming back and it was too tempting an offer to pass up for some of them.

A: That’s fair enough. You read my cunning ruse well. I’m just trying to start some drama here; hack journalism!

K: Oh no! I flipping hate Zebbosai… I’m gonna… I’m gonna wreck the kid! You know?

A: Thank you! Thank you, but you’ve already scuppered my last question here, man. I’m gonna read it out anyway, cause you know I’m just a cardboard cut-out of an interviewer. This match will be played under the new “Loser’s Pick” system which sees the higher seeded team get the first map pick and the loser of each subsequent map pick the map that follows. The big difference from last season being that the maps will be unknown until game time on Wednesday, meaning you have to prepare for all five maps in the pool. How will the new system effect your training schedule?

K: I guess we’ll take a gamble. I’m just assuming they’re gonna pick Snakewater. As far as I can see, for our team, in three days… well in the two days that we have playing to prepare we’re not really going to take any significant strides on any other map. Like Badlands is fine, Gully is fine, Process and Granary are OK, but it two days were are not going to make any significant strides on those maps. Whereas I think on Snakewater it can be like a complete turnaround over two days, because it’s like… we basically need to revaluate everything about the map, how we play it as a team, and I think that I two days we can make a lot of improvements. So I’m just gonna take a gamble on it and assume they’ll pick Snakewater, and if they don’t then personally I think that’s a bad decision from their end. I don’t think I’d have lost out by not play other maps, because we will play other maps as well. Like I won’t say what our picks gonna be, but all the other maps are just kind of OK. I wouldn’t expect to make much changes to them over the two days, we’ll just kind of refine it a bit more, which we will do anyway, because obviously when you are PCWing you always play two maps, so… like two maps against the same team, so we’re not just going to play Snakewater. I think the system is kind of bad for us, because I made the changes to the roster so late we didn’t get any pre-season in and all season long we’ve been kinda chasing the game a bit, if you know what I mean. By Week 3 we were already behind and we had to learn two maps at once and this kind of thing. We’re still chasing, still playing catchup on that front. So the fact that we don’t know the maps makes it a little bit harder for us, but this season for me was always just about setting up a basis to build on for next season; I said at the start of the season “as long as we got fourth I was completely fine with it”. Because we’ve got people moving house and stuff the playoffs for us are a bit… ah… a bit difficult. So it’s kind of like our goal has already been reached for the season and anything else is a just a bonus, so I’m not too worried about that, but mainly just looking a bit further forward I guess.

A: How certain are you of that Broder in the map selection? Are you just guessing that they will pick Snakewater or…

K: I’d be absolutely amazed if they didn’t, because lost to MyDGB on it and they’re not a bad team, but I think on any other map we would have taken it relatively comfortably.

A: Well, if I’m Zebbosai and I’m sitting listening to this interview am I going to take this as mind games, “Is Kaidus trying to double bluff me here? Telling me to pick Snakewater when really he wants me to pick Snakewater?”

K: Well at the end of the day, like they know for a fact that we haven’t practised it lately and they know that we only have two days to improve it and whenever we’ve played Broder on Snakewater it was disgusting, man. PCWs against Broder on Snakewater, they just like… it’s probably the reason we’re so bad at it, because we got so demoralised. It was just mids like, you couldn’t even frickin’ like breath on the mids, it was just like scouts in your face, we’re dead, Hat’s dead, we’re on last, the points capped, new mid, repeat. That’s kind of how it was, so if he remembers any of that he’s probably thinking “Yeah, Snakewater. Easy bet!” I don’t think it’ll go the same way, but I think there’s no point for them to pick another map. I mean we showed we could beat them on Badlands, I don’t think they enjoy Granary enough to wanna play that, Gullywash we’ve had good results, Process is neither here nor there. So I think just for them it makes sense to pick Snakewater.

A: Yeah I can see your logic here, but folks the only way to find out for sure which maps are played will be to tune in this Wednesday 13^th March 2013 at 21:15CET for Round 1 of ETF2L’s Season 14 powered by Twitch and Club3D Premiership Playoffs. Thank you for your time Jason, and good luck to BFF.

K: Thanks buddy!