Pre-Cph Games: disruptor, hooch

With us having interviewed members of over team teams already, it's time for n!faculty's leader Christoph "disruptor" Dölger and Dimitri "hooch" Bogdanov from Nostalgie.

Christoph "disruptor" Dölger's n!faculty haven't been able to live up to their expectations since their ground breaking fourth place finish at ESWC 2012 in November.

They weren't able to win EPS Germany or advance from the group stage at DreamHack Winter, but have achieved strong results online, including a win over NiP in RaidCall EMS One Cup #1.

Find out what Dölger & co have been working on since their group stage exit in Vienna last month to make sure they will get much further this week in Copenhagen.

How has your preparation for Copenhagen Games been? Have you bootcamped or simply practiced online? Have you faced any issues? How prepared do you feel as a team?

n!faculty disruptor: We just made a boodcamp for one week before the event. Only smn had to stay at home which made us a bit sad :*(, but we will meet again in Copenhagen <3, nohomo! Our preparation during the bootcamp was very good. Our last weeks after Mad Catz had been very bad for us and it continued online. But now we are strong again, by winning our latest three eps matches, for example against Team-Alternate. We feel well prepared right now!

How important is Copenhagen Games to your team as an event? It has the most prize money since DreamHack Winter and just about every top team attending, including the North Americans. Does it being BYOC take any of the prestige away in your opinion?

n!faculty disruptor: The event is very important for us! After the good performance on ESWC 2012 we had two bad LAN results at Dreamhack Winter and Mad Catz. It’s time to give our fans and organization good results, they deserve it for their hard work and dedication!

It would be cooler and easier to have a non-byoc tournament but with this many teams competing it’s not possible for the organizers to build up that many computers. However, the tournament will be the toughest with the best teams of the world and we are really looking forward to it.

With almost all top teams present, who do you think will finish in the top four besides NiP? Is there any team in particular who isn't getting enough attention or who has been impressing you in practice?

n!faculty disruptor: That question is hard to answer, because almost every team has the opportunity to be in the top four. I can’t tell you who it will be.

Do you like the format of Copenhagen Games (best-of-three groups, best-of-three upper- and best-of-one lower bracket)? What would you change? Do you think it forces teams to play too much?

n!faculty disruptor: I love the format of Copenhagen Games! Playing almost every game in best-of-three is perfect, because you can always have a bad game on one side and the map is quickly lost. With best-of-three the better team is going to win, because it’s not depending on just one map.

If I could change one thing, it would be the best-of-one format in the lower bracket. As I said above, best-of-three is positive for the better team. But here again I guess that it’s not possible to do it, because of the caused delay.

disruptor during Mad Catz Invitational 

Which one thing do you think can make the biggest difference in how your team performs this week? Does your team e.g. rely on someone to have good matches a lot? Are you very reliant on pistol round wins? Anything similar besides "hitting your shots" or "being lucky"?

n!faculty disruptor: Every player has to have a good form on the play days. But we still can manage to win games if one player is failing, but only if the other four are hitting their shots. It’s important to be warmed up for every match.

We are used to loose almost every pistol round, so it doesn’t panic us, but it’s still harder to win the matches.

n!faculty has been better online than on LAN for months based on results, what do you think it is that allows you to perform better from home? Is it lack of experience or something else that is hindering your play at tournaments?

n!faculty disruptor: Normally we are way better offline! We love to play on LAN, it’s like our second home. The last good offline performance had been on ESWC 2012 in Paris, after that we struggled at Dreamhack Winter and especially at Mad Catz Vienna. At Dreamhack we needed one round to get to the playoffs, what was really bitter. At Mad Catz Vienna we were extremely disappointed because the fans, our organization and for sure we had a way higher expectation of our performance. We just had a too long journey by car and way to less sleep. We were absolutely unable to perform well. After that disappointment we decided to pay all the travel costs back to our organization n!faculty. We know how hard they work to send us to events, so as a team we decided to pay everything back. In addition we apologized to all our fans, sponsors and our organization n!faculty.

We earned new experience and learned our lesson. We now know how to handle it better and will transfer that knowledge for the Copenhagen Games. I don’t want to have a disappointment like this again!

You looked like a shoe-in to advance to playoffs in Vienna until the TeamCRG match knocked you out of the tournament. What went wrong in that game? The match even took place on de_inferno_se, which most consider to be a strong map for you. Would you agree with that? What have you done to make sure it doesn't happen again?

n!faculty disruptor: First of all TeamCRG played well. But we still had lots of problems there. We had a long journey and just about two to four hours of sleep. My tournament PC had lots of problems and the admins tried to fix it for three or four hours and that really through us out. That absolutely killed the rest of our performance. My Computer had low fps and the admins tried to fix it in several ways. As they finally changed the computer, they changed it with a broken one, GeT_Right from NiP had with the same problem. Hours went by and finally they build up a completely new computer, just like they did for NiP and then it worked. I wanted to have it from the beginning, but well the admins wanted to fix it on their way :|.

We practiced hard and learned from the experience we gained at the event, to be sure, that something like that won’t happen again.

Since Mad Catz Invitational it seems like your level of online play has also decreased as you've dropped multiple matches in EPS Germany and lost to Absolute Legends in RaidCall EMS One Cup. What do you think has led to this development? Have you changed your playing style or preparation somehow to be more effective on LAN? Is it just a slump?

n!faculty disruptor: After Mad Catz we struggled and had a big loss of power for weeks. At the bootcamp we adapted our game style and strategies and finally got better. As I said before we won the last official matches and the practice results are very good as well. We are out of the slump and definitely back! We now just need to show this positive trend on Copenhagen Games and surely want to show everybody that we learned from the last two events and are back even stronger than before.

We are looking forward to Copenhagen Games!

We also managed to catch up with Russian mixteam Nostalgie's Dimitri "hooch" Bogdanov, an old school Russian player who has represented teams such as UNiTED, Virtus.pro and more in 1.6.

More recently Bogdanov attended Mat Catz Invitational in Vienna last month, managing to knock out Richard "shoxie" Papillous' Imaginary Gaming in the first group stage en route to a 5-8th finish after a second NiP loss.

Nostalgie are now headed to Copenhagen without two of their star players from Vienna. Continue reading to find out how Bogdanov thinks his team will fair starting tomorrow.

How has your preparation for Copenhagen Games been? Have you bootcamped or simply practiced online? Have you faced any issues? How prepared do you feel as a team?

Nostalgie hooch: Well our preparation was this tournament was not so good to be honest. We had a few practices all together, but mostly we were preparing individually. I don't feel that we are prepared to do some great damage, but still we can make disappointments for some teams :)

How important is Copenhagen Games to your team as an event? It has the most prize money since DreamHack Winter and just about every top team attending, including the North Americans. Does it being BYOC take any of the prestige away in your opinion?

Nostalgie hooch: Well we are just going to have fun, we don't think we will make it to the top, so money prize doesn't matter :). It's nice that NA teams attend, making this tournament some kind of a world championship. BYOC is even better, no one can say it was bad PCs or monitors, so it even makes it more interesting to watch.

With almost all top teams present, who do you think will finish in the top four besides NiP? Is there any team in particular who isn't getting enough attention or who has been impressing you in practice?

Nostalgie hooch: Quantic, ESC, Virtus.pro, fnatic and VeryGames in a random order.

Do you like the format of Copenhagen Games (best-of-three groups, best-of-three upper- and best-of-one lower bracket)? What would you change? Do you think it forces teams to play too much?

Nostalgie hooch: I think it's really nice because some people need to travel really a lot. Usually teams play three maps and leave the tournament, but now they are able to play more for the money they have paid to participate. And especially for spectators this is really nice, more matches - more positive emotions :).

hooch travels to Copenhagen hoping to upset some teams

Which one thing do you think can make the biggest difference in how your team performs this week? Does your team e.g. rely on someone to have good matches a lot? Are you very reliant on pistol round wins? Anything similar besides "hitting your shots" or "being lucky"?

Nostalgie hooch: We are just going to spray and pray, nothing else to rely on :).

You are currently playing with dAT team along side Eduard "ED1K" Ivanov. How come you aren't attending with your real team? You already missed out on Mad Catz Invitational as you wound up going with Nostalgie mixteam instead.

Nostalgie hooch: It's not a team, we tried to practice and play together but after a couple of maps we decided to just play officials and then go different ways when the event is over :).

Are you at all worried about how you will be able to perform at Copenhagen Games with arguably your two strongest players from Vienna, Kirill "ANGE1" Karasiow and Mihail "Dosia" Stolyarov missing from your current team? What can you tell us about their replacements?

Nostalgie hooch: We aren't worried at all, in Vienna we made the maximum result with our mix , at this point we just want to have a good time and disappoint some mid-high teams :). We hae evil from zNation, who played with me in Virtus.pro in 2012 and young talent flame, who isn't so known to the scene, but I hope he will try to show his best, it's going to be his first international event and it's the same like I had in CPL 2004 and I did really well too. I hope the story continues and he will perform even better than I did.

Stay tuned to HLTV.org for even more pre-Copenhagen Games coverage as we still have, among other stuff, an interview with ESC Gaming's Filip "NEO" Kubski coming up today.