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Congratulations to gBs (Get Burnt Son) for winning the 6v6 UGC Platinum league!

I had the pleasure of interviewing them about their run in the Season 7 of the UGC 6v6 league. Atomsk and Marxist are the co-leaders and offered me their Mumble for the interview.

Roster:

Atomsk – Pocket Soldier
Robot – Roaming Soldier
Marxist – Medic
Goomba – Scout/offclass
Hugh Laurie – Scout/offclass
Collide – Demoman

Hagabao: What was your team thinking as you went through the season? Biggest moments? Worst?

Atomsk: Well a huge problem was finding a roamer to stick around, right?

Marxist: Well yeah, I’ll give you a rundown of the history of the team, since I’ve been here for a while. We all (except for Atomsk) started out on the SourceOP community that Drunken F00l owned and operated, and after Free-to-play came out we were like “Ehh, we really don’t care for this anymore, we should look into 6v6.” Since then it’s been a revolving door of people who come and go either because they don’t have the time or they simply don’t care. Then we picked Atomsk up and we said “Hey, why don’t we join an official league?” UGC was free; CEVO was too, so we said “Well before we pay twenty dollars to ESEA why don’t we see how this goes?” The roster for our UGC team changed a lot throughout the season. We went through like 6 roaming soldiers, and changed demomen after the third week, but mainly we were just trying to test it out, how much we could learn in a short period of time, season’s only nine weeks long. So… I would say we’ve vastly improved.

A: Agreed. Personally I’ve been on a couple 6v6 teams, and I was instantly drawn to the energy that these guys have, they have a really chillaxed but committed sort of feel and I could tell that they weren’t going to disband like my other teams, so I kind of just stuck around and worked with them… and I’d say that we’re pretty good friends now, and I look forward to seasons to come.

H: What were you guys thinking about going into the finals? Biggest problems on team lil (My Little Ponies)?

A: Oh my god, we played them once earlier in the season and they were undefeated at that point, and we had no roaming soldier so we put our demo on roaming soldier and brought our backup demo in! So going into that final, they were still undefeated and we assumed it would be an uphill struggle, and I don’t know if you watched the video I posted, but as we were rolling them we were like “What happened!?” We assumed something must have happened, maybe their lineup had changed, but apparently we’d just improved a lot. It was a pleasant surprise.

M: The funniest thing was our Mumble comms, especially in that first Granary mid point, assuming this undefeated team would destroy us. You can see on that first Granary mid, I think only Goomba died at that mid and they wiped, and none of us knew it because we were all expecting to die, we all kind of had our eyes half closed…

A: Yeah! I remember Goomba was like “Uh, you guys should push up… they’re all dead.” Yeah, it became clear when our roamer disconnected and we still put up a fight at mid 5v6.

M: Yeah he lagged out midway through, that’s another thing, and we’ve had a lot of connection fun this season.

H: What positions do you guys play?

A: Marxist is our medic, I play pocket soldier, robot, who isn’t here, is our roaming soldier, Goomba and Hugh play scouts and off class, and collide is our demoman.

H: Is this the solid roster for next season?

A: Yeah I think so, it’s been working out.

M: Unless Goomba ragequits! That could happen.

A: Hah, yeah Goomba’s been telling us to replace him all season.

M: He’s the self-depreciating humor on our team, the glue that holds us together.

A: I don’t know why he’s being so shy now, maybe afraid of the cameras?

H: Anything to say Goomba?

Goomba: I plead the fifth.

*laughter*

A: But yeah, what I’m really excited about going into next seasons is that this team is basically the core of our Highlander team, and it’s going to be a really strong showing I think, we have pretty decent DM (deathmatch) skills and work well together as a team, and all we need to do is make a few additions to those fringe classes like pyro, heavy, and spy.

H: We’ll be seeing you guys in Highlander next season then!

A: Probably!

M: We’ll be the Honey Badgers for that. Atom actually has an entire system of binds worked out.

A: Mhm! I have an entire numpad that’s just quotes from the Randall video. Except for one that’s an Extine quote, that’s just like “YAAAOOOO!” for when I get a medic drop.

M: Occasionally when Goomba gets a medic pick, I’ll say, “highlight video?” because in his self-depreciating humor he claims that he’ll be completely edited out of the video, so I guess we’ll have to give him a courtesy one med frag.

A: I think my favorite quote from those videos was “Aw yeah, first med pick of the season!” and it’s the final match, hahaha.

A: Before this I wanted to switch the name to Honey Badgers so the two teams (Highlander and 6v6) would be distinguishable, but now that Gbs has a fancy reputation, hurr…

M: We have a brand now! That was another funny story, when the team started we were all like “well, we need a team name.” A lot of us came from the same community, and there was one guy on the server that would say “Get burnt son!” when he would do something he thought was good, so we decided to take that as our team name and despite numerous attempts to change it, we’ve never come up with anything better! Hugh, who’s our more aggressive scout, did some competitive Counterstrike so he’s got an eye for a good tag. So if we end up going to a sniper, it’s usually Hugh.

A: I still can’t believe how much trouble we had on freight. It’s easily our worst map.

H: I won’t tell anyone.

M: Nah, it’s going to be one of our main focuses for next season.

G: Along with CEVO playoffs next week…

A: We’re way better at gravelpit.

M: The main issue we ran into was our roster shuffling around. Our main roamer actually took a job that required him going to Europe for a few weeks, we went 7-3 in UGC last season and I think the 3 is a result of that.

A: We also want our backups to stay as backups.

M: We’ve only been a team since about August, is that right Atom?

A: Oh let’s see… I met you in June or July? You asked me to play soon after that, but we didn’t actually start in leagues until about August.

M: Yeah, the big problems starting out are just finding players. I think that’s why 6v6 and Highlander leagues have such a hard time retaining a playerbase because people just don’t put in the time. Or the team breaks up because they have nowhere to find new people.

H: Yeah that’s definitely a problem in the Highlander leagues.

G: My nights were definitely packed doing 6v6 and Highlanders scrims at the same time.

M: You might be more familiar with Collide and Goomba; they were both on KA for a bit.

H: Perspectives on a 6v6 team starting out?

M: A lot of the really hard work goes into deciding what kind of team you want to be. You can be really quick and DM-y, or you can play intelligently and sort of reacting to the other team instead of forcing them to fight you instead of fighting them.

A: I’d say that’s more characteristics of a team, once you get to invite level you have to be both.

M: Haha yeah, but starting out, we kind of went the route where we played intelligently and its served us well!

A: At first we’d lose because they would rush us and all go for Marxist, both scouts and two others, and they’d maybe pick him off but then there were still five of us left versus a medic and soldier. It was very odd trying to figure out how to react to that kind of suicidal aggression, but you just… weather it.

M: The first couple games of the season were a struggle, we had to find our niche, what kind of play style we’d go for. What really helped us was a nice surprise, at the beginning of the season Collide didn’t even know how to rollout on Badlands, and after a lot of scrims and practice, one day we woke up and had this unreasonably good for our skill level demoman on our team!

A: Yeah Collide definitely came a long way.

G: Best matches worst matches?

M: I’d say our best match was definitely the final, we were firing on all cylinders, didn’t have too many terrible decisions and we brought our A-game there. Our worst was when we played Blame The Lag on freight.

A: Yeah, they brought a permanent heavy! And freight is such a slow meticulous push map, that we didn’t know how to react to that. My reaction? Recruit him for our highlander team. So that’s that.

M: Didn’t help that Sandvich isn’t banned in UGC. Yeah, as far as UGC goes, the admins were really helpful when we needed them, the people in the league were pretty good, but the items did throw you some loops.

A: Yeah, double crit-a-cola shortstop scouts? Pecking you from across the map and running away!

H: Well thanks for your time guys!

A: Hopefully we’ll get to do this again sometime, maybe when we take CEVO or something.

M: We’ll ask for you by name.

H: That would be awesome! Good luck and congratulations again!

Videos of the finals from Atomsk's perspective, with Mumble comms:

gBs v. lil, UGC 6v6 Platinum Finals, Map 1 - Granary