English interview - For Is Here #7 - Namshar

Today, we're going to Sweden, and especially Karnage eSports team, to find there one of their most "famous" representatives in the person of Christoffer « Namshar » Kolmodin.

Unknown from the general public just over a year ago, the 21-years-old Zerg player has since started to know a great progression. We wanted to know more about a player that we currently see more and more among the last challengers of the brackets.

From one Blizzard game to another

[M] TinkeR : I'd like to know how did you get into eSports ? What was the first videogame you ever played competitively and how did you end up choosing StarCraft II ?

[KRN] Namshar : I played World of Warcraft for many years and did mostly Arenas at a decent level. But I didn't end up playing it competetively and during the Cataclysm expansion one of my arena partners introduced me to StarCraft II.

I've always been a very competetive person and I love to just play against other players. With StarCraft there's always so many things you can improve on and every game comes down to your own skill. The game really grew on me and I ended up playing StarCraft II a lot more. Having only seen a few World of Warcraft tournaments before, I started getting into eSports for real during the later parts of Wings of Liberty.

And from that point on I've just started enjoying StarCraft II as a game and eSports more and more! So StarCraft II is the first game I've played competetively. I've just begun competing in tournaments this year, playing in many of the Swedish Championship offline qualifiers, the Championship itself as well as 3 DreamHacks.

 

And what was the very first league placement you had ? It looks like you came in StarCraft II quite late, how much time did it take you to reach Grandmaster league ? How did you react then? :)

I think I just worked my way up from Bronze league ^^ Yeah I guess you could say that. I was playing during the first half of Wings of Liberty at least, but it was like a slow transition for me from World of Warcraft.

I think I'd advance maybe 1 league per season or something like that. I had more or less completely dropped World of Warcraft during the later stages of Wings of Liberty, and that's when I started getting quite close to Grandmaster. But then Heart of the Swarm was released and during its second season I finally got my Grandmaster promotion ! I was ecstatic, and I remember just feeling great for several days haha.

At this point or shortly after I started streaming almost every day. There's a highlighted VOD on my channel *cough* twitch.tv/Namshar *cough* [note: link is here] where I get Grandmaster for the second time in Heart of the Swarm, which I was also really happy about ! Of course I do the Namshardance™ and it's just an awesome feeling ^^

 

Were you cheering for someone/a team back when you started or not at all ?

When I started getting into eSports and watching tournaments I was a fan of both EG and Liquid-players. People like Stephano, Suppy, HuK, HerO, TLO and Sheth. Watching their streams is mostly what made me cheer for them.

 

What about the Proleague and GSL ? Are you usually watching it or maybe just focusing on the Zerg players ?

Nowadays I watch more or less everything haha. Koreans are of course a great source of inspiration and whenever my sleeping schedule is good enough I love watching both Proleague and GSL.

I might pay a bit more attention when good Zergs are playing, but I enjoy watching all three races. It all depends on who's playing. Some players just have playstyles or just great play in general that inspires me in different ways!

 

 

Today's situation

Let's talk a bit more about you, you've been in Karnage team since the beginning of your career so far, how much do you like teamleagues and how would you compare it with individual leagues and tournaments ? What does teamleagues bring you that individual leagues doesn't ?

I like both teamleagues and individual leagues, but they do differ quit a bit. Team leagues bring you closer together with your team. You cheer eachother on and watch eachother play vs a common enemy, or something like that haha. It's a lot of fun, but I feel like the biggest thing for me is that it's almost always BO1s that you play.

There can be a lot on the line and mistakes are very unforgiving. If you mess up and lose a match it can feel like you're letting your team down, and it can take a while before you get a chance to redeem yourself. Whereas in individual leagues, when it's often BO3, you can learn from your mistakes and come back into a series, and if something goes wrong it doesn't always feel quite as bad.

I guess you could say that winning as a team can be more exciting, but losing can be even more disappointing =P

 

Since around this summer, everyone started to see you more often on the last spots of brackets and other qualifications. You came close to qualify for WCS S3, you had a pretty good run on IEM Toronto qualifiers, won Go4sc2 and you manage to beat players like Sacsri on 32 Boys 1 Cup.

Is there anything that changed in the way you practiced at that time or would you consider it a "normal" evolution and nothing changed much ? How do you basically practice ?

I haven't really changed the way I practise, I actually feel like that's an area where I have lots to work on. I think the biggest reason as to why I've been able to improve a lot during the summer might be that I've gained a great deal of confidence. Competing in offline tournaments have been epecially good for me.

Getting to play against different koreans and other good players have made me believe in myself, which means that I get a lot less nervous than I used to. Sure vs someone like Sacsri in game 1, I was stressing out bigtime and shaking haha, but then in game 2 I believed in myself and went for a very standard and safe macro game and it worked out great.

Confidence is so incredibly important, and it's something I try to improve on by just playing in as many tournaments as possible, both online and offline. I almost exclusively ladder because I find the huge variety of builds you face from all the different players to be the best practice, but of course I will play CG's every now and then. Especially if I have a big match ahead of me, like when I was preparing for TLO in Challenger League.

The amount of hours I practise vary each day, which is something I'm working on. I don't always practise as many hours as I feel like I should. Even though I find it harder to be creative and evolve my play when I stream, I still feel like I get decent practice. I also tend to play more on days that I do stream, up to 8-9-ish hours. So I try to do that as often as I can !

 

Are you currently playing full-time or are you student/working ?

I'm full-time, chasing my dream ^^ Of course I don't make enough money yet to live on my own, so I still live with my parents. I'm very lucky that they're so supportive.

 

Talking about your parents, what do they think of you hobby ? What about your friends ?

Well originally they didn't really like the idea, not knowing too much about eSports and so on. But after this year in particular where I've improved a lot and started travelling to different events and gotten some decent wins here and there, they've become more understanding. They've begun to realize how big eSports is and that it's always growing. Both my friends that are and aren't into computer games are supportive of what I do and they cheer me on! ^^

 

Do you have any other hobby beside StarCraft II ?

I play the piano/keyboard in a band with my brother and 2 others!

 

Oh that's cool! Is there any place we can hear a bit ?

Haha no unfortunately not, we've not been playing for very long and don't have anything recorded yet =P Maybe in the near future you might see me tweet about it, we'll see ^^

On another note, I heard in an interview that you were casting, from time to time, on BaseTradeTV (with Rifkin). Unfortunately I didn't hear you yet, but I'd like to know how did you end up casting and how much are you enjoying it so far ? Compared to actually playing.

Yeah that's right ! Well basically a while ago I'd been thinking that I wanted to try casting out for real and I considered my overall game knowledge to be pretty good. I always loved talking about the game and analyzing it, which people probably can see when they watch my stream. So I thought casting might be something that I'd enjoy doing.

At the time I'd seen Rifkin solo-cast quite a few times when ZombieGrub couldn't make it for whatever reason, so I figured I'd ask him to see if he wanted to try casting with me the next time he'd otherwise be casting solo. Sure enough he tried me out during a couple of Go4sc2's and we both thought it went pretty well. After that I've joined him from time to time and I always have a blast doing it.

I am of course primarily a player and competing is something I'm very passionate about. But casting basically let's me relax a little bit, talk about the game I love and often get to analyze some really fun games!

 

I'll try to catch you next time you cast ! And talking about your streams, do you often do some pull-ups when losing or was it just one of this times I watched you ? ahah that was pretty fun :)

Hahaha no not always XD. I used to do some push-ups or sit-ups everytime I lost a game for a short while back before WCS Season 3. Then I decided to stop streaming for a while to prepare for various tournaments and so on. After that I kind of stopped doing it but just recently I decided to get back to exercising a bit !

I'll go for jogs every week and not so long ago I bought my chin-up bar to be able to do some more exercises. It's actually a very fun way to use your body a bit more and it's a good way to keep your mood up when playing (and losing) ^^ If anyone else think it sounds like fun I definitely recommend it !

 

Actually I've seen Dayshi doing it as well not so long ago, I thought it was a pretty good idea, when you pass so many hours seated, it can only be good.

Yes, exactly. I didn't know that, that's cool.

 

Yeah well it was few months ago but he was doing 15 push-ups every time he lost or something like that.

 

 

 

StarCraft II more globally

Legacy of the Void has been officially introduced at BlizzCon. Overall, what are your thoughts about the changes that will be made ?

I really like the direction that they're taking with LotV, lots of micro-oriented changes which I think is very exciting. I like to off-race both Protoss and sometimes Terran and while I know that some things will be tuned and changed, the new units definitely interest me and they look fun.

The thing I love the most is probably the economy-change. The most dull moments of the game will just vanish and even though some cheeses might lose their efficiency altogether I think it's a great decision to up the worker count from 6 to 12 when the game starts. Of course I haven't personally been able to try out the game yet, so I don't have too much insight, but I'm very positive about the changes and I'm looking forward to the beta!

 

Along with Legacy of the Void, Blizzard has recently released WCS 2015 changes to come. What are your thoughts about this new format ? It looks like the Koreans are starting to go "back home" (Bomber, TaeJa,...), do you think this is globally a good thing as we'll finally see Europeans/Americans in WCS EU/AM, or do you think that's not as good as the overall level will decrease with that exode ?

I think it's great that they're finally hard-locking WCS EU and AM. Of course there will still be some Koreans with working visas and so on that will continue participating in these regions, but I definitely think that's a good thing.

I think it's important to get experience playing against koreans to ovecome the common mindblock that it's almost impossible to beat them. But if there's too many koreans playing in "our" regions, like we've seen in WCS AM, then both players and viewers lose interest. I'm sure that with some Koreans going back to KR it will renew the hope of aspiring foreigner StarCraft II pro's, maybe mostly in AM.

We've already seen some players coming back from breaks which is a good sign. Long-term I think this is a necessary change that will improve the scene globally. It's also going to be fun to see foreigners from different regions battling against eachother in the combined Premier League !

 

Yes, I'm definitely looking forward to see this as well, going to be a big change.

Who would you consider the best Zerg player in the world right now (well, OK, currently you have some choices ahah) ? What about the best foreigner ?

Haha yeah, Life definitely impressed everyone with his performance at Blizzcon, but despite that I still almost feel inclined to say soO. His play has inspired me for quite a while now.

In terms of best foreigner ... there's a lot of good foreigners Zergs right now. But I'm going to go with Snute. Even though I'm not much of a Swarm Host player, his builds and play is something that has evolved my play by a lot this year.

 

 

 

Beside StarCraft II and bonus questions !

Where do you see yourself in five years ? Still in eSports in way or another, or ?

Well you never know, I suppose. Five years is a long time! But I sincerely hope that I'm able to be a part of eSports, either as a player or in some other way!

 

Where does your nickname come from ?

Well to give you the full story, as mentioned earlier in the interview, I used to play World of Warcraft. When I was very young and made my first ever World of Warcraft character, I was trying to come up with a name I liked. I remember being at my friend's place and as creative as we were, we'd read random words on the screen and swarp them backwards to see if it sounded cool.

I was making an Orc Shaman and if you swapped Shaman backwards and then changed the place of the last 2 letters we ended up with Namash. I liked this name and for quite a while that's the one I used. One day however I was transferring from the server Lightning's Blade to Talnivarr for anyone interested, to gather up with friends and play arenas, but the name was taken !

Not wanting to name myself something like "Namashh" or go with the "xoxoqtlolz" in the end of the name like some others ... hahaha, I decided to change my name to something similar. Eventually I came up with Namshar which I thought was fitting for a big hench male Orc. And that's been my ID ever since!

 

Let's say you have to make a bootcamp for a whole month, and you have to bring one Zerg player, one Terran, and one Protoss with you. Who would you pick and why ? : )

Hahaha ! How can I answer that without leaving anyone out ?? xD I'm just going to feel so mean !

 

Ahah yes, I love this one :D

Ahaha, oh God, this is a rough one. Well in my dreams I'd probably have to go with soO, Zest and INnoVation hoping they'd make me super gosu.

Slightly more realistically I'd love to bootcamp with any of my teammates (heart) I can't make any picks here without feeling bad haha.

Another dreamteam would be with Battlesumo (Terran) the micromonster, Reliza (Protoss) the early-game tactician, Björn (Desu, a Zerg) to teach me the art of Roaches and Dillon the analyst as head coach. I think we'd reach new heights together.

 

Do you watch any TV shows/ movies? Which ones are your favorites ?

Yeah I don't watch a lot of movies, but I do watch at least some series and anime. Currently catching up on How I Met Your Mother. Some series that comes to mind that I quite liked are Heroes, Breaking Bad, True Detective and House of Cards. Some of my favorite animes are Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Sword Art Online, Fairy Tail, Naruto and Kuroko No Basket!

 

What's your favorite country ? Which country would you like yo go, you never went to ?

Apart from my home country Sweden I actually really like France ! But I wouldn't say I have a favorite country, yet anyway. I like many countries.

I love travelling and there's many countries I'd like to visit ! Of course Korea is very high on my list, as well as Japan, Australia, USA, Iceland, China, the UK - the list goes on haha ^^

 

Well, to finish this interview, do you have any fun or unusual story you'd like to share with us ?

Hahaha well I got a good one just for you. Earlier this morning I played your teammember ForGG on my protoss account and managed to win with 4Gate-blink on Metalopolis haha #dreampool.

For those of you that don't know I've been streaming a little bit of protoss off-racing recently and I'm going to try get into Grandmaster when it gets released on Sunday/Monday for fun =P And yes I did feel very dirty ... the dreampool is bringing out the worst in me.

 

I'm sure he has been quite happy about that :D

Well then, that concludes the interview, I'd like to thank you a lot for your time ! Do you have any last words for our readers, and do you have some shoutout to make before we wrap up ?

Thank you ! You guys will be able to see a lot more of me in 2015 and I'll try to practice as hard as I can for WCS Season 1 and other tournaments.

Big thanks to the people cheering me on, and massive shoutout to my team Karnage eSports, they're awesome ^^