Crescent Esports is made up of
many people from all walks of life, similar to the esports community itself. As
gamers in a competitive sport, sometimes things don’t go according to plan
despite the grueling hours of practice. Here, we’re not afraid to discuss those
moments. Just like you, everyone has a bad day. We’re human!
As part of a running series, we
will be sharing stories highlighting each of the unique individuals who have
decided to make a home here at Crescent Esports. Through the good times, bad
times, fun times, and family time, tune in for a glimpse into our world.
This week Crescent’s own Venisia
had the chance to sit down with our Apex team for a relaxed discussion about
their latest online tournament, battle royale games, esports, and more.
Disclaimer: The conversation
has been edited for readability.
Venisia: Let’s start with
introductions.
PartyPetah: So, my name is
Peter. My IGN is PartyPetah. I’m 21 years old from Chicago and currently an
undergraduate student. I’ve been playing video games since I was in the womb. I
probably came out with a controller in my hand. I’ve been playing competitively
for maybe like eight years of my life. I have been following the pro-competitive
scene for CS:GO and other games for the last five or six years, but I’ve
only engaged it recently with Apex Legends.
Irock: My name is Isaiah.
I am 16-years-old. I was born in California and now currently in Louisiana. I
started playing video games when I was three and I started getting competitive
five years ago. Apex is my first game that I started playing
professionally tournament wise.
CE_StoneR: My name is
Devon. I’ve been playing competitively for about 4-5 years now and my in-game
name is CE_StoneR.
Venisia: As gamers, our profile
names may come with interesting stories. What influenced your gamertags?
PartyPetah: So, I started
out playing Halo a lot on the Xbox. Actually, the PC was probably when I was
maybe like in the third or fourth grade. My classmates and friends first
introduced me to this game you may know called Runescape. There’s an
indie game character, the biggest baller ever who’d wear the most expensive
items in the game and his name was “Party Pete.” Originally, when I was deep
into that game, I had two really good friends named Brian and Dan, both English.
They’re both lads who will refuse to call you by your actual name. As I refuse to
call StoneR or Irock by Irock or StoneR, I always call them Stone or Rock. I condense
people’s names into nicknames like they [Brian and Dan] did. So, I adopted that
into the name like PartyPetah. I first put it on my Runescape account
and then afterwards, the rest was history.
Irock: The story of how
the name Irock came to be was that I started to break dance when I was four-years-old.
When I was nine, I was doing performances for high schools with my family and we
would have our own nickname or breakdancing names. Since my name is Isaiah and
it stared with an “I,” they had a friend named JROCK. They suggested I become
Irock and I started using it for very long time. So, when I started gaming, I
though Irock sounded pretty cool.
CE_StoneR: *laughter
Venisia: Now for some
serious questions in regard to the tournament this past weekend. How do you think
you performed overall?
PartyPetah: Not well, as
compared to how we did previously in our first tournament. I feel like we just
weren’t as focused. I mean, granted, there were similar competitors that we
went up against last time from other orgs and others we weren’t used to. We did
beat our previous competitors in overall placement and such this time around. However,
we definitely could have done better. We’ve been focusing a lot more on scrims,
pro league placements, and open division more so than a kill race tournament. We
haven’t had a lot of relevant practice and it’s been like two weeks since we
played a tournament.
Venisia: Do you think your
performance was attributed to mental distractions and such?
PartyPetah: Definitely. It
was 100% nothing to do with our skill, just mentally in terms of communication.
We just are very like lackluster.
Venisia: Would you guys
agree?
Irock: Yeah, we weren’t there.
PartyPetah: We weren’t there. We’re better than how we played out this weekend. But we just weren’t there.
Irock: Our first tournament proved something. Like the last team, I was a part of for Crescent, they got second place and we got third. But they treated us like we didn’t have a chance against them. We get right behind them by a couple points which I’m sure was unnerving.
Venisia: What did you
think of your opponent’s performance?
PartyPetah: Well, there’s
a couple things that happened. I’m aware now that I think just a day before the
tournament was set to go live, there may have been have influence from
different orgs and different representations of teams to allow for config
changes that were previously not allowed. I think it was pretty clear that it
came across like one of the players is an epileptic who couldn’t play the game
without having the muzzle flash reduced on certain guns. Which I’m not going to
say is not true, but I don’t think that’s like the entire reason either. Altered
configs give a very hefty advantage to certain players. Since it was a global
event, people from Russia, UK and NA were participating. A lot of people were
playing in bot countries like Brazil, or bot servers where due to various
factors, the level of competition is, almost ridiculously easy. So, they were
able to string on maybe a 30-kill or nearly 40-kill game without much issue while
doing it with enough time as well. I don’t think that every team did that. And
even the teams that did wasn’t necessarily their fault. There was nothing stated
in the rules, you know, it’s a new scene. They still need to work out all the
rules and everything. Everything’s a learning experience.
Irock: And what I felt like is, everyone should have played on a specific server for the tournament.
PartyPetah: I agree, but
then again, the scene is super young. And they’re not really taking into
account location and all these other like variables that they didn’t think would
have to dealt with. Without private servers for Pro League or open league, it’s
going to just get harder and harder.
Venisia: How have you
found the impact Apex Legends has had on the esports community as compared
to other battle royales?
PartyPetah: The impact I’d
say is relatively minor. It’s blown up very quickly at the start. I think even a
record to even do so amongst other competitive scenes for battle royales, but it
suffers from the fact that there’s no private lobbies, there’s no private
servers, there’s no official adding update. It blew up initially with PUBG
and then Fortnite came in, but currently from the esports side, people
are extremely underwhelmed by it at the moment. I think that Respawn should
just focus more on the casual side of the game to begin with. Because as long
as the casual side lives the esports scene will always be there regardless of
how, like good or bad it is. But if they can’t, there will be no esports scene
if there’s no casual player basis that’s just how it works.
Venisia: What would be your reaction to someone saying they think battle royales in general are getting old?
PartyPetah: I know a lot
of people think that way. And I can understand why. Battle royales encompass a
lot of people of different skill levels into one game, right. So, guys like us and
the rest of tier one and tier two pro players, step into a game to walk away
with sometimes nearly half of the server as a kill under the squad. So, coming
from the stance of just an average player who only gets to play video games on
the weekends, they get sick of games where pretty much one person is King, and
you can’t compete against them. At least in traditional 5v5 competitive games
like CS:GO, Rainbow Six, and even Overwatch, there are brackets
of skill groups and levels. Battle royales are different regardless of how much
they try to implement the ranking system into different BR games. It’s still at
the end of the day comes across as ineffective and people don’t respect them. People
don’t care and there are times where 100 people are in a single game cue. It’s
kind of hard to match up every single person in the game when hundreds or thousands
of people are queuing to be around the same skill level. I can totally
understand why they’re sick of it. They’re sick of landing, grabbing good loot,
booting up, and then dying instantly losing it all in arena shooters. They just
want to respawn and play again. Like there’s nothing lost.
Venisia: What’s next on
your horizon?
Irock: Our big goal is to
do a LAN tournament together.
Fun random facts about our Apex boys:
It was a lot of fun getting to
know each of our players and we look forward to sharing more stories so stay
tuned for more each week. Be sure to follow us on social media for more!
#FlytheFleur
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