How's the difficulty of schedules and the new matchups thus far?
Hard to say. It's certainly not been easy, but I don't want to bitch to much about the schedule. It's not been easy, and it hasn't been prohibitively difficult.
Have you guys been improving a ton since you've started playing in the season?
Honestly, no. We've definitely improved, but imo not that much. Most of our real improvement has been reassessing maps and what people are doing on them currently. We've all been playing together for awhile now anyway, so most of our quick improvement was early on. It's been much slower growth since then.
What has stopped you from improving, if something is?
Well, like I said, we've already played together for awhile so the things left for us to improve are the hardest to improve, or potentially impossible with current team make-up. Some level of time constraints has held us back. We scrim plenty, but whenever we go over a map it takes a really long time and people have a hard time committing to a full on map review to make sure we're all 100% sure what the team wants to do on the map. Everyone tends to know the overall meta, but figuring out all the small things that swing games is hard and takes a lot of time. Or figuring out which scout we want where, what forward hold we want to go for on Viaduct, all that sort of stuff can take a lot of time to talk out with the team assessing the pros and cons it has with what we have to work with.
Has anything on ESEA caused trouble while playing?
No, not really. We all got the client working first day. One team member plays on a non-admin Windows account so he has to switch every match time to his admin account, and that was really the only problem when we first started because he couldn't figure out why his ESEA client wasn't working. The ESEA server freezes sucked, too, but that was a problem for everyone. A minor gripe, but it's not ESEA's fault really, is that our team is all over the continent. 2 Pacific Northwest players, 2 Texans, 1 New Englander, and 1 Georgian. I know I wish one day I could play on a team that always has low ping, but that definitely won't happen for me because I'm up in Washington and everyone wants to play in Chicago and Dallas.
How do you feel about playing in ESEA?
It's fine and fun. Most of the fun is the scrims for me. I just enjoy playing 6s, and ESEA keeps all 6 of us motivated to keep scrimming. If we weren't in ESEA no one would feel the need to play 6s all the time which is the main draw for me.
What have you noticed about your team that has made it very fun?
I enjoy hearing the reactions of my usually-quiet scout. He's a quiet, DM-focused scout, but occasionally he just says the most ridiculous stuff and it's the most entertaining part of my night.
Same question, but what has made you guys improve?
Map reviews and reinforcing class roles. Sometimes people just don't notice that they overstepped their bounds by a minor amount that let a scout through the flank, or I as demo took a step slightly too far forward which got me bounced into the choke and getting myself killed. And obviously scrims tend to make us improve.