AlpacaAttacka did a great interview for BreachingSiege.com over voice with Remorce of team Milspec (NA PC). Check out the audio here (mp3) and the transcript below!
AlpacaAttacka: Some basic questions to start off, what is your name, age, and what teams have you played on?
Remorce: My name is Brad Hickey, I am 23, and the teams I have played on, most unfortunately of all, my first team was Empire eSports back in December for two weeks, at the start of the game before I knew Flufvy was, well, Flufvy. He actually came off as a really nice guy the first time I met him, and then he just became a massive d*ck. So, that was somewhat unfortunate, but afterwards, I bounced around between a couple teams that weren't really notable. Then I went to ACN (Abnormally Cool Noobs), which was the team Serenity was starting up.I merged the team that I was running for the GO4 cup qualifiers to get into pro league for the first time, and after that kind of fizzled out, I started try out for AOX (Art of Xecution), which eventually became known as Kingdom eSports for season one of Pro League. I played with them for season one, then transferred over to Recorded Reported for season two, which then got picked up by VexX, and I have been on that team ever since. The only thing that has happened since is that we've changed sponsors slightly.
AlpacaAttacka: You recently did an AMA on Reddit with the rest of the MiLSPEC team. How do you feel that went, and what were the motivations behind doing it?
Remorce: We were actually just contacted by one of the moderators for that (Rainbow Six) subreddit, and they asked if we would be down for it, and we thought it was a brilliant idea, and we really always try to reach out to our fans on MiLSPEC. We always try to be the fan-oriented team. We like to kind of make everyone feel included; we want to build up a fan base around ourselves, we want to build up a following, and we want people to get involved in the pro league, so that was one of our biggest motivations, trying to get everybody involved, and hopefully bring some more interest into the pro league.
AlpacaAttacka: Siege, like all other games, has it's fair share of bugs and other issues. Which of these issues do you feel should be brought to the highest attention of the developers that need to be fixed?
Remorce: Time and time again, I think the answer you will always receive is hitreg. This game prides itself on being a competitive, eSport, and no competitive eSport should ever be decided by a coin flip type mechanic. And when I say coin flip type mechanics, I really mean the headshot interaction. It almost seems like you're flipping a coin whenever you shoot someone in the head, that whether or not the bullet will register; whether or not you will kill the guy, or if you're going to shoot him maybe three times in the head, and then he'll hit you once and you end up dying. So hitreg, I think, kind of encompasses a couple of things, being lag compensation and general networking things. I think it should be the biggest priority, more so I think Ubisoft has already recognized this as their biggest priority, and they have made some hints that it's being remedied in this next patch; the new operator drop patch.
AlpacaAttacka: What made you want to play Siege competitively? Did you think the game would get as big as it has?
Remorce: When I first started Siege, I was actually coming from Counter Strike. Initially, I played a lot of competitive Counter Strike, well I guess not a lot, relatively speaking. Some people have been playing that sh*t for like ten years, but myself, I've played for a year and a half or so playing at a competitive level. I primarily played for my school's eSports team. We participated in a couple of collegiate series, which was really fun, I really enjoyed that. We also did some EVO and ESEA stuff. We participated in season eighteen and nineteen. I mean, we really didn't get far, but we were just in the open division, but it was a lot of fun. I was a Global in Counter Strike all the way up until the R8 patch came out, and that is actually about the same time that the beta was running for Siege. When I started playing Siege, I realized that every single time I played Siege, even though the core of the game stays the same, every single time I play a round it's different, it's unique. It changes always and it always keeps me on my toes, where as Counter Strike, at the highest levels, every single game comes down to aim battles. Everything. Everything is an aim battle in Counter Strike. And this game has an element to where, to a certain extent, rely on strategy alone to win matches, and I thank that that is a unique characteristic that not many games have, and I think that's absolutely invaluable. It was something completely new to me at the time, and I was kind of just taken by it. I thought the game had a limitless potential because of it.
Do you feel that Siege has a chance to become a big-name eSports game? What will it take for it to get to that point?
I absolutely do. I definitely think it has the potential to do so. It's purely, in my opinion, going to rely on how much support Ubisoft throws at it. I think that they should take a League of Legends type approach and handle it themselves, and force it into that kind of scenario and give it funding for the initial start-up, that it absolutely has the potential to kick off the game and bring it to a new level. It definitely has the material there for it. I additionally Would request that the game is not going to reach it's highest echelon of play until we get a sandbox mode or a demo system. It's probably both. It's really hard to improve your play to the highest level without having either of those.
AlpacaAttacka: Currently ESL is handling most of the professional scene for this game. Would you like there to be more organizations that have tournaments for Siege, or would you rather it just be ESL?
Remorce: I would actually just rather have Ubisoft do it, honestly. And I draw to how Riot has run League of Legends, and that's counter to the whole Counter Strike thing. Counter Strike has a bunch of Majors and things of that nature, but the things that we see that have the most popularity lately have been things like E-League, where it's the primary event that teams play. We just need one big thing, kind of like a one-stop-shop deal. You'll have your big teams there, kind of like the NFL, kind of like the NBA, something where all of the teams play at the same place, all of the time, and teams don't constantly have to requalify for events. When teams don't constantly have to requalify for events, when teams can consistently remain the same, you can start to build up your fan base. You're not going to be in a situation where you're a fan of one team, you but their sixty dollar jersey, and they get relegated out of the pro league three months later. And now you're sitting here with this jersey, and yeah you want to be a fan of this team, you want to rep your team, but you can really just wear it if a player that you are a fan of specifically, let's say you got their specific jersey and maybe they're on a different team now. Things like that, being able to get apparel, being able to have brand recognition, and things of that nature is currently what is keeping our the big-name organizations from hopping into Rainbow Six, because when they see these pro league seasons, and they see every single season, four to five teams are dropping out of pro league, or the fact that the bottom four teams are thrown into a relegation bracket. As for comparison, with League of Legends, only the bottom three teams go into relegation, and even then, it's a best-of-five double elimination bracket, where as in this game, for the past three seasons it's been single elimination, best-of-three, bottom four teams go. Because of that, there has been massive turnovers, season after season after season, with teams constantly fragmenting and falling apart during the off-season, and no organization wants to stick their finger in that kind of pie. No one wants to step into something that is so volatile, and until they can remedy that with a more consistent pro league setting, it will never, never change. We will never see TSMs or Cloud9s. We will never see organizations of that caliber step into this game until that, specifically, is addressed. I hope that is what they plan and what they will be doing in the future. I think that's absolutely what they need to do. They need a consistent place for everyone, and they need to make it so that once you get into pro league, it is both hard to get in, and hard to get out of, because without that, no large organizations will be joining. This is because it's just too risky. It's just too risky to make long-term contracts. Everyone is going to be signing two to three-month contracts with minimal rewards for both sides, and they will just not be able to make the leap into that. It's a shame. It really is a shame, because I just remember that being one of the reasons they alluded to, they didn't say it specifically, but they eluded that there wasn't any real consistency, and always an element of fear lingering, that if we sign this team, are they just going to fall out after the season? Will we have to sign a new team? Of we had a Cloud9 with five different members every single season, there is not going to be a fan base following them. The fans get attached to the players, the fans get attached to more than just the name. I mean the name obviously brings some fans over, I know some people that sit there and are fans of every TSM anything, but to a certain extent, you need the core game fans, the people who come for the players, and with the players constantly switching teams, you can't do that kind of stuff, there's no money in it. There is no return in it for the sponsors.
AlpacaAttacka: If I am correct, you have played in every pro league season so far. Which of the seasons was you favorite to play in?
Remorce: Honestly? I kind of lean towards season one. I mean, when I was in Kingdom, we were second or third I think. I wish that I had more of an opportunity to play than I did, because I played very briefly for them. I believe I only played two or three games for them, towards the end of the season. I mean, obviously it's nice being at the top of the scoreboard. It really irritated me seeing myself finish in that fourth or fifth place spot. Constantly feeling like we're almost there. It's a very frustrating experience. I definitely like my team mates more now, but you know, winning is nice too.
AlpacaAttacka: For season 3, most of the Vexx Gaming roster moved to MiLSPEC, with the addition of Serenity17. What made the team decide to choose him, and who else was considered for that fifth slot?
Remorce: We were bouncing between a couple of players for that spot. Serenity came out, and I knew him from when I played with him on ACN, and I knew he had the potential, or at least he had the aim, required to be a pro league player, required to take those aim battles and be relatively competent about it. I just know that his only issue is that he had to get reaccustomed to the current meta, and that was a big concern, along with getting him out of the streamer mentality, if you know what I mean. The streamer mentality, in case you don't know, is kind of playing for glory. It's playing for yourself, playing for the frag, for the cool clip type deal, and making mistakes in the process, because obviously, if your only goal is to get the cool kills and try and run outside and get a 3k on someone, you're going to constantly make mistakes. You simply can't have that playstyle when you are facing players of the highest caliber; they won't fall to that, they really won't. That was a bit of a concern, and it did take a bit of time to get him out of that. In regards to the other players that we really touched on and were trying to pick up, I don't really want to go into that, just for them being currently on teams, and I didn't know at the time if they necessarily made it aware that they were looking for a team.
AlpacaAttacka: In season three, you placed fifth, one round behind Ferocity eSports. How do you feel about your team's performance this season? Is there anything you feel your team or you specifically could have done better?
Remorce: I wanted to scream. I feel that we handed that to them on a silver platter. I think the game that strikes me as the biggest issue, without a doubt, the match that made me say "Why the hell did we do that?", Would be the cTm match. The fact that we ended with three donuts (when a player gets zero kills), and you have someone in the other team going 14-0, having both matches going either 5-0 or 5-1 is very indicative of poor performance, not just by the team, but by everyone in an individual basis. That kind of stuff is simply unacceptable on every level. There is really no excuses for that kind of performance. That was just kind of disgusting performance in my opinion. There was very poor communication, we faltered in many different aspects. We definitely have the potential for it. We have the aim to take on these other teams, it's just that our communication and our strategies at the time were very flawed, and very, very chaotic. We even had rounds where someone was AFK, or where people sprinted in, and the after the fact were like "Oh, I should have said that they were in". It's these simplistic things that I think are a symptom of us not having played enough with one another, having practiced enough as we should have. That was our biggest flaw as VexX in season too as well. We just didn't have enough practice time and weren't familiar enough with one another's playstyles enough. We weren't comfortable with each other, at least not to the extent that we need to be, provided that we are in a pro league team, we need to really know each other in and out. We need to know how each and every one of us are going to react, and what our callouts mean. I mean, hell, we need to know callouts on positions, and right now, we were still working on situations where we were still defining what certain callouts were, and I think that's one of our biggest goals this season. Communication, communication, communication. Because that is what ruined this season for us. That's what caused us to lose games, that's what caused us to lose rounds, and I can think of countless rounds that we lost Because of communication. Purely because someone didn't clarify something, didn't say something at the right time, or, was just saying something for no reason, not giving quality callouts. By far, in my opinion, this is what caused us to fail this season.
AlpacaAttacka:As some people may know, TOPKEK will be stepping down from the main line-up in season four in order to care for his new child. We now know that he will be replaced by Peter, who was formerly a member of Lunatik. How do you feel about having him added to the team, and how do you feel his playstyle will affect the way MiLSPEC plays as a whole?
Remorce: I believe that Peter is a extremely strong fragger. I think that the next season might be very roam heavy, and I think that his abilities will be very well-appreciated in those scenarios, where we are going to need to take aim battles, and need people that are competent in taking aim battles. I don't think that people will be as passive as they were in previous seasons, so I do think that he will be a very strong member of the team. My only concern is how much he likes to talk, and his name is Peter. He wasn't creative at all. He literally made his actual username, which by the way is his actual name. Don't let him lie to you, it's not Paul, it's Peter.
AlpacaAttacka: How do you feel you have improved as a player throughout your time playing Siege?
Remorce: I would say I had a couple of distinct moments where my skill improved. For the most part, from December all they way to January-February when I joined Kingdom, I kind of got to a plateau of skill. They way that it was remedied was after Season 1 and we went into the off season, we began to scrimmage heavily against Orbit, before they went to LAN. We spent approximately six hours a day scrimmaging continuously against Orbit, where we would load up every single map, and just hit the right arrow after every single match ended, and we would just continuously scrimmage them over and over and over and over, until from there, I went from an average player, to an exceptionally good player, to where I was constantly dropping double digits against Orbit, where I would constantly be getting 10-15 kills per match in our scrimmages, and I was extremely confident in my play at the time, and I attribute that to it being a trial-by-fire of sorts, playing against the highest caliber players in our continent six hours a day continuously playing a lurking role forced me to rapidly adapt to their playstyle, and to force myself to practice to the highest degree until I could finally take battles against them and begin to slowly out-gun them. I think that was the biggest contributor to my skill increases in this game, and I would actually say that now I'm slowly working myself back up to that level. I look at it as constantly trying to get myself up to that level where I could go double digits against Orbit every single day. That was definitely my peak, and I am constantly trying to get back to it. That is by far my biggest challenge right now, to make sure to do whatever I can to get back to that level of play.
AlpacaAttacka: You usually play Blackbeard on offense and Bandit on defense. What makes you want to play these operators, and have you ever considered switching roles?
Remorce: The only reason that I play Blackbeard is because on my team at the time when Blackbeard came out, no one really like the slow, steady operator play, and it was just that I played Blackbeard better than anyone else on my team at the time, just by a fair margin. I ended up practicing more with him, and Just got to a very high level of play with Blackbeard, and at that point everyone else on my team stuck with their current roles, and I adapted to playing Blackbeard, and I've been playing him ever since. He is inherently a broken character, just by his very nature. As for Bandit, I love. Bandit and Jäger are definitely my two favorite characters to main. I was an Ash/Jäger main, just like everyone else in NA, for the longest time before Blackbeard came out, and that's just how it's been ever since. Bandit and Jäger play very similarly, once you get used to their guns. I would love to go back to a three-speed operator, as I have a lot of fun with them. I really just want Blackbeard pushed out of the meta, honestly. I want to get back on to a three-speed operator. It really is frustrating, but at the same time, I'm just good at Blackbeard because I have good aim and can typically get one-taps on to people before they can react or until the heavy recoil on his gun comes into effect. For a while, it was actually a meme in my (Twitch) chat, people would just be typing "one-tap", so that's how I got started on Blackbeard, by increasing my first-shot accuracy. I would love to switch to another operator, and while I have on defense, on attack, I would love to see Ash and IQ come into play. I really want to see three-speeds, I really do. I think it's more to the heart of the game. I realize that not everyone likes the fast run and gun operators, but my god they are so fun to play. They are, in my opinion, the most fun operators to play, and are the least clunky. Most importantly, though, playing them comes completely down to gun skill. You can't tank things as a three-speed. Unless your Ash. With Ash, you can tank a lot of things. I would much prefer to switch to a faster operator.
AlpacaAttacka: A large point of contention among the community is that you main Blackbeard for your team. Why is it that you are given much more negative feedback for playing him than other Blackbeard players, such as Pengu?
Remorce: I don't really know, honestly. I think a lot of it is because I stream, and when I stream, I, for the longest time, only played the operators that I mained in pro league, and the reason for that is because I didn't' want to practice something I wouldn't be using in pro league. In essence, that's what playing the game is. Even if you're just playing Ranked, you are practicing that operator. You are getting used to their mechanics and getting used to the intricacies of their gun, and because of that, playing the game and not playing the role that I use in pro league is a waste of time. I guess it's because every single time someone would tune into my stream they would see me playing Blackbeard and Bandit, every single time. It was like that for the longest time, so I guess it's a blend of me streaming and people constantly seeing me play as Blackbeard, and people were starting to say that it was because it was because I was one of the better Blackbeards in NA. Then the other pro league players started making memes about it, and I think it just continued from there. It is mildly annoying, because the reason why I play Blackbeard so d*mn much is because it's my assigned role, and if it's my assigned role, I will do whatever I can to be as effective as I can, and to be the best best in my region on what I am assigned to do. That's why I played him non-stop. A lot of the players that tune in to my streams don't seem to understand that type of thing, they just see Blackbeard and try to make jokes about it or say that I'm "Just a Blackbeard player", which started up about a month or two ago, where Even other pro league players were saying that kind of thing, and to think that pro league players can only play their assigned role is just absurd, which wildly annoyed me for the longest time. Getting made fun of for playing the operator I was assigned to play by my team made that kind of a sore spot.
AlpacaAttacka: In season three, Clubhouse was the single most-played map in the rotation. What do you think made it so popular this season?
Remorce: It's a map that saw a lot of new strategies. Many of the teams had been practicing it in the off-season, and it kind of just became on of the go-to maps, especially with the exclusion of other maps this season, we saw a constant focus on Chalet, Kanal, and Clubhouse, and if a team was weak on Kanal, they would pick Clubhouse, so we would very frequently Chalet and Clubhouse being picked, or if not that, we would see Chalet and Kanal. Although some teams began to always ban Chalet, notably Continuum, began to ban Chalet every single match after their back-to-back attempts to replicate the EU strats, which was met with continued failure, if I remember correctly. This caused them to lose matches on Chalet a multitude of times, that they definitely could have won if they used a more "meta" strategy.
AlpacaAttacka: With that being said, do you have any predictions as to what the popular map will be for season four?
Remorce: That's actually a very tough question, because there are so many different options for that map for this next season. I actually think that the new map will become very popular from the testing that we've done. Honestly, I think that, in my opinion, this map is going to be the new Chalet. A perfectly well-balanced map where you can play almost every single site on it. I think that the new map is going to come in swinging hard. Other than that, I would say Border. I would say that Border is going to be making a resurgence as well.
AlpacaAttacka: Most of the new DLC maps are usually not fully adopted by the professional teams until the start of the next season. Do you feel the same thing will happen with the new Skyscraper map, or will it be adopted sooner?
Remorce: I don't know. For us, at least, we played Favelas on the very first day of Pro League. I would say that is not necessarily true for all maps. I feel that Favelas was adopted very rapidly by the North American scene, in fact, it think I saw it in every single Play Day, with the exception of number two. I think that the new map is just so good that teams are going to want to learn it and want to play on it. That's my view of it at least. I absolutely don't think that there will be that weird, awkward period where we don't see it played until the next season. We'll be seeing it immediately. I think it's an exceptional map, plus I believe that we'll have enough time to practice on it, too.
AlpacaAttacka: Do you feel that the new operators will be picked frequently enough to change the game's meta? If so, what current operators might they be replacing?
Remorce: Without going into too much detail, just because of the NDA, I am going to say that they will always be picked, always. There will never be a situation where they will not be picked. Well, actually that's going a bit too far. I think that they will be picked as much as Blackbeard is picked now. The ninety-plus percent area. I won't say who they will replace, because that will give some implications as to what their abilities are, but they are going to be picked almost every single round in my opinion. They are very, very well designed. Their gunplay is exceptional, their character design is again, exceptional, and they are an absolute joy to play. I'm really excited to see everyone else's reaction to them, and I think the community, for the most part, will absolutely love playing these new operators. I think that Ubisoft has truly outdone themselves on these, and they are without a doubt the best-designed operators that ever introduced into this game to date.
AlpacaAttacka: What are your goals and expectations for MiLSPEC in season four?
Remorce: Honestly, it's my hopes that we can place among the top three. I realize that it's a big dream, but we weren't really that far off against all of these other teams with the exception of cTm.
AlpacaAttacka: Right. Most of your matches, even it they were 2-0's, the maps were always very close, usually being a 5-6, or a 4-6. Even if you were losing the maps, it was always a very close match.
Remorce: This was probably one of the most frustrating part of last season, always being able to take it into overtime, but we're never able to secure the win. We had massive issues with being able to seal the deal. We would get so close, but never take the win in the end. The Orgless game being most representative of that issue. That's the one that struck me the most with not being able to close out games, multiple times where we got up multiple rounds and let it get into overtime, and eventually from there, lost the game. I think that is definitely going to be one of our bigger focuses, making sure that we can finish those things out.
AlpacaAttacka: What advice would you give to somebody who was looking to enter the competitive scene for siege?
Remorce: I would definitely say they need to start participating in the GO4 cups. That's one of the biggest aspects of the game, and if you have any intentions at all of trying to get into the scene, then you absolutely need to start participating in the ESL cups, in the qualifiers, in the ladder cups, to a lesser extent, and although they're not as serious, they are still a great place for new teams to begin practicing and honing their skills.
AlpacaAttacka: If I remember correctly, a lot of the professional teams will participate in the weekly GO4 cups.
Remorce: Right. Because they are for money, and that is a revenue source for most of the teams, so they do currently participate in the GO4 cups. EU, for example, has mini community cups, which are just mid-week cups that that are, for the most part, only played by up-and-coming amateur teams. The pro league teams typically don't even touch those. The only reason the pro league teams play GO4 cups is for the money, and I doubt that will end up changing unless they are explicitly banned, which I don't really see happening.
AlpacaAttacka: Before we go, is there anything else you would like to add?
Remorce: Thank you for the opportunity, and thank you Mzo for creating this website, and thank you Alpaca for the interview. I had fun with it!
AlpacaAttacka: I would like to add that you do stream on Twitch and do make YouTube videos, correct?
Remorce: Yeah, I do! I stream on Twitch at a somewhat sporadic rate. I do try to stream as much as I can, but with school I can't quite stream as much as I would like. I do make some YouTube videos, but they are mostly from my stream, since I have to double-dip to a certain extent, to make sure that I can do as much as I can given the time that I have.
AlpacaAttacka: Thank you for joining me here, and I hope we can do it again at the end of season four.
Remorce: Hopefully it will be a victory interview. That would be nice.
Remorce's Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter links can be found here:
Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/Remorce
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/Remorce
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MiLSPEC_Remorce
