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| EA Sports Cup |
| Gent, Belgium |
| 2008/11/15 |
Teams attending
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Interview: vG^olander
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| posted by: jetset on 2007-11-23, 23:39 |
| viewed: 133 times |
| comments: 1 |
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page 1: Interview
For my next interview I caught up with none other than David Olander, a friendly Swedish Counter-Strike:Source player who has quite an interesting background in vCoD as well. David is one of the stars from Europe’s leading Cs:Source team Volt-Gaming and he was so kind to waste some of his little spare time to give this little interview :)
Hej David, let's start with a little introduction about who "olander" really is. My name is as you know David Olander, and I'm 21 years old. I currently live in a little boring town called Ronneby in southern Sweden. My current occupation is a student at Blekinge Institute of Technology where I am studying IT-Security and Computer Engineering. And on my spare time I get drunk and play Cs:S with Volt Gaming.
As you are cooking diner at the moment, I assume you live in a student home. Have you got any room mates or do you live just by yourself? I live by myself in a 22 m² apartment :)
So nobody their to disrupt your training with Volt. How many days, and especially how long do you train in a week to remain one of the leading teams in Europe? Nope, I can be alone whenever I want :) We train like 4 days a week or something. It depends if I have schoolwork or if someone else is going somewhere. Since I have a lot of stuff to do in school we have to adjust to how much I can play. But I have passed all my exams so far so I hope it will continue like that :)
Starting from Adastra in the early days you've decided to join the ranks of the American organisation zEx. After winning the Clanbase EC XIII '06 LAN FINALS you've decided to leave them and become Adastra again. What was you're biggest motivation behind that ? Well we really liked it in zEx because of all the attention we got in the US scene but there are a lot of laws involved in getting sponsored in the US. To send money to a European team and stuff like that didn’t work out quite as we wanted. Otherwise the organisation was great and everything about it. They are great people and we wished them good luck in the future when we left :)
A strange thing happened at Assembly on EC Finals.. How come the EC LAN final’s second half was played ONLINE? :D Yes vizzion ate a hamburger from the local hamburger-dealer and got very sick. He felt crap when we started to play the game on contra at the LAN but still managed to complete the first half. After that I went with him to the toilet and he puked several times. Logitech were real sports with this and saw vizzion and how sick he looked so they agreed to play it online. I will never say something bad about the boys in Logitech since I really respect them for what they did. Thanks once again guys.
Very nice from Logitech! Anyway, you didn’t stay Adastra for a long time and at this time you are playing for the Volt-gaming organisation, which are also very successful in the European cs1.6 scene. How did the chemistry between Adastra and Volt start? Well we basically got asked if we where interested and at that moment we had a couple of choices but we ended up with volt since they already had a Swedish 1.6 team and seemed like a bunch of really nice guys. A plus is that the organisation is Nordic-based and that helps a lot when you communicate with the management.
The team from the early stages of Adastra didn’t really change a lot looking at the team representing Volt now. Can you introduce your team to the public please? Jonas 'nordQvist' Nordqvist : He is our in-game leader and takes most of the AWP spots. He whines a lot when we don’t shut up on vent :D . Back home he’s my best friend and we have a lot of fun together. Martin 'tyron' Jeppsson : Martin is our youngest player, he’s only 16 years old but a really good aimer and he hardly never whines, only when we do. Mathias 'maths' Eneström-Jönsson : Mathias is also a dear friend of mine back home as we went to the same school together etc. He’s fairly unknown but a very good player and he also comes up with lots of ideas when we do our tactics. Fredrik 'vizzion' Nilsson : He’s my bitch, and kinda like my little brother. I can’t get more angry at anyone in the team then him, when he shows up late sometimes he just says 'mybad' (mybad is copyright volt-gaming.css 2006-2007). He’s a very good aimer and a very smart player.
You’re still new in Volt-gaming, are you eager to get some awards or are you guys taking things easy? We haven’t had the time to get anything yet since we are quite new there. But we hope to get far in Eurocup and at SHG-Open LAN. So those are our number 1 priorities right now.
You’re doing quite good in the current Clanbase EC with four wins in a row. Rushing over Europe’s leading team Insignia Cadre and sending teams like EverFrost and Copenhagen home you are well on your way to get the double! Yeah, so far it has been good. The match against EverFrost was very nice and both teams played very well. EverFrost plays in a way that is very easy to read what they will do next so I think that’s why we won. Copenhagen wasn’t really that hard either but they are pretty good players too though and are very nice people. And Cadre, well, we got our game together and everyone played really good. They beat us on inferno at IC Cup and we beat them in Eurocup, can’t be more fair then that. I like playing Cadre because I love the players very much, both as friends and as players.
What team did really surprise you, in a positive or negative way, in the current EC group stages? Well I don’t know what the rest of the team thinks but my opinion is that EverFrost played really good, and I think they are very good aimers. They were disappointing at Assembly but now they are getting there :) It’s fun for them and I wish them good luck!
With some top 1.6 teams switching over to Cs:S, do you think it’s good for the source community since they will get more recognition from sponsors and maybe get selected for a bigger tournament like WSVG etc ? Well to be honest I don’t really care since they will bring a lot of kids to the community. The 1.6 scene is all about whining and 13 year old kids, but the top teams can switch as long as they don’t bring the kids.
Do you think they will obtain the skill, walk over the scene and become the best in no time? No I don’t think that. They will get flashed and die :P . But give them a few months and they will get a lot better. But I think the US scene will dominate Source because the Americans aren’t as stupid as many of the European teams are. They are just whining about how bad Cs:S is while they haven’t even tried it for more then 15 minutes!
With some top 1.6 teams switching over to Cs:S, do you think it’s good for the source community since they will get more recognition from sponsors and maybe get selected for a bigger tournament like WSVG? It’s good that Cs:S is getting bigger and we see some bigger LANs coming our way yes. But I still hope players will switch to Source because it’s a better game, not because of the tournaments. I don’t want any kids playing and annoying the hell out of me. I still can’t understand why this haven’t happened before but I guess its contracts etc.
The Call of Duty 2 scene is also aiming to get selected for such a tournament, which game do you think deserves it the most? Well I think Source deserves it since it is a bigger game. But I wish my friends of Call of Duty the very best!
You’re not unknown to the Call of Duty scene as you played vCoD on a high level with teams like Epitaph and team Dignitas. Why did you decided to switch over to Cs:S ? Well I had a little break where I didn’t play anything and I started to play CS:S with my in real friends, nordQvist and vizzion. Since CoD2 was not released yet they whined so much to start playing Cs:S I did. Later when CoD was released I tried CoD2 with zEm and I didn’t like it, so I stuck with CS:S.
Playing for such teams, you must have had many awards and victories. What was the biggest award you've won in the vCoD series? We won Optihack LAN with Dignitas and got a 5th place in Italy with Epitaph at SmauILP. But other then that it’s like online wins in a various of leagues and cups. To be honest I don’t really remember all the online stuff we won. But I had a good time along the way :)
Are you still in contact with your old friends of vCoD? Do you sometimes play mixes with them for the old days? Yeah, I still talk to a lot of them from time to time but I don’t play any mixes. The only game I play is Cs:S :)
Let’s look into the future ;) Where do you see Source in let’s say 6 months from now? Hmm hard to say but I hope there will be more money involved and bigger tournaments and events. Hopefully we have more teams playing the game to have a bit more competition.
So you’re saying there’s a big gap between top clans and the common teams? Yes there is a big gap, but its going to even in some time I think. Everyone is evolving and people come up with new things all the time since it is such a new game. Skilled clans obviously don’t have the skill that is required to be a top clan. It can either be tactics, gameplay or just aim/reflexes.
To get a clear image about the real top clans in Cs:S, which clans according to you fall under that flag? Well, most likely Volt-gaming, Insignia Cadre, n!faculty, Alternate-aTTax, Team Logitech.fi , everFrost and I probably forgot some more but those clans are those that have skilled players that actually can kill you, have good tactics and can adapt in the middle of a game.
Well this is the time where I run out of questions and our ways will split. What was your biggest experience so far playing Cs:S ? Taking the first place in last Eurocup LAN finals and taking the second at the Assembly LAN ’06 were my biggest experiences so far.
So David, thank you for this interview and I wish you the very best in the future, both online as well as offline ;) Do you have any last shoutouts towards anyone? Yes, I want to thank Volt-Gaming and our sponsors SteelSeries, zkillz and Saitek. Also I want to thank Ninive for being so sweet to me all the time. I want to say puss puss to Juha 'aNgeldust' Kurppa and all the guys in Volt-Gaming. Don’t forget to visit www.volt-gaming.com .
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