Transcription (english) - Interview de Pughy, décembre 2014

[M] Corto : Hello everybody, Robert Pugh, also known as Pughy is a British StarCraft II caster that you have probably seen recently, since he has been casting many different tournaments.

He is also organizing his own tournament, the Pughcraft Invitational, the second edition of this tournament took place recently, and Rain won the final very convincingly against Trap.

To know him better and discuss about his future projects, it is my pleasure to have him with me today, so hello Pughy !

Pughy : Hello

To begin this interview, I wanted to speak a little bit about your beginnings in StarCraft II, and as I recall, I think you started as a player. You’ve played in different teams, and attended several British online competitions.

I found an interview that you gave in May 2012 during the Insomnia 45, I think it was James Banks who did the interview, and at that time you said that the thing you enjoyed the most was playing and I wanted to ask you: today you don’t play anymore competitively, I wanted to know what has changed since this offline competition, and is it something that you miss ?

Yes, I definitely miss it. As a whole, back then I was very competitive and I focused on playing so I was a lot better that I am now. I still, as a caster, try to play as much as I can, because I believe that you have to be good at the game to be able to teach people, and sadly I really don’t have enough time. I was former, say, close to Grandmaster, I was playing Grandmaster level players.

And these days I’m around low-Master to high-Diamond. And I’ve also had to play other games for past projects, played a lot of Counter-Strike last few months, which takes me away from StarCraft. And I love playing other races, I like to play Unranked Terran and Zerg. My main race is Protoss, but at the moment I’m probably better with Terran, as a whole. I like to mix it up and also it helps as a caster to understand all the races.

It’s sad it just takes away from being able to focus just on StarCraft Protoss and playing competitively. Also, I’ve gone into the habit of trying to cast tournaments as opposed to play them, so if I go to mentality to play them, I end up missing an opportunity to cast them instead.

I don’t know if it’s related to your story, but everybody knows that StarCraft II is a very frustrating game, and there are a lot of European players at the moment who have a hard time to find motivation to keep training seriously, some of them are even considering switching to other games, like Heroes of the Storm, some did it already. How do you explain this trend today and do you think things will get better in 2015 ?

It’s an interesting trend, it’s kind of follow down from the "StarCraft II daedgaem". In my opinion, Swarmhost was a big catalyst for that because it was a very boring style and felt impossible to beat because it has the most cost efficiency in the game, so it feels somewhat unfair to the other races.

I guess some people to an extent realized that there’s not as much opportunity to go far or make up a good career of themselves. With esports, where I know there is a lot of people or personalities, gamers, pros, they’ll kind of hop wagon, they’ll change wagon to the next to be one of the first people to a new game so when it becomes popular, they already have an established fanbase like we’ve seen at the start of games like Hearthstone, StarCraft 2 in the beta, ...

I think it’s a conflict of that and we should to an extent see it with Overwatch, which is going to be a very exciting game, and of course at the same time we do have Legacy of the Void which will have a high impact especially, like I am super excited to see some of the core design changes that they will be bringing. I think that will bring a lot of stability for the future of StarCraft II.

Do you think that during next year there will be a couple of things that Blizzard could do to motivate these players even further to continue playing the game ?

Yes, the most requested feature has been said to be brought into the game which is automated tournaments. And that will bring a lot of hype because it’s automated so it’s nice and easy, and one of the hardest thing is that StarCraft II is a very frustrating game because you can play a thirty minutes game and lose because you move command into the opponent army and you can literally lose with a silly mistake like that when you are ahead and it’s incredibly frustrating.

And on top of that, it’s a very lonely game because it’s isolated, it’s a 1v1, so you don’t exactly get that, said, more support from teammates that you had in LoL or CS. They share that feeling with you, so there’s a lot of isolation and people I guess in extent they have a hard time get their anger or frustration out. For example, I know Miniraser (who is currently teamless, former Fnatic) used to be quite an angry player, and he’ll admit this but he started running, he’d go for like 5-10 minutes joggs. Just something gets your energy adrenaline out of yourself, it’s a good way to calm yourself down.

Let’s switch to your other passion, which is casting, other times you have become one of the most regular StarCraft II caster that we can see on different competitions, you have covered a lot of them: last week you covered the DreamHack as a community caster, we’ve also seen you a lot during the Gfinity tournament, Fragbite qualifiers, MSI Beat IT, I could name a lot of other competitions.

You’ve also diversified your activites, because as I was saying in introduction, you’re also organizing your own tournament, the PughCraft Invitational, and if you look backwards, what are for you the key moments in your eSports life that have pushed you to become what you are today.

Quite a number of things, that’s actually a question I would have to think about for a moment. Within esports, it kind of snowballs, you gain an opportunity and sometimes you nail it, and it kind of comes from that, you meet more people and a lot of esports is meeting people in my opinion, I would say one of the first things was of course joining Definitive esports, with Banks, who interviewed me at i45 which you mentionned earlier.

At the time we were sponsored by Antec, who were running the Antec Attack. I pretty much asked "Can I cast this ?", Banks asked Antec and of course they said yes, I managed to broadcast them through the Definitive esports channel, and that’s how I first started getting off. That was a big opportunity. Then a little bit later in August, I got the cast at the biggest UK LAN i46, which was also very exciting.

But why did you ask for that ? Was it something that you were interested in, how do you explain that you wanted to do that ?

There was a combination of two factors. I knew the staff from Insomnia, and Banks was very familiar with them as well, so he, as my manager spokes to them, they sadly didn’t accept me originally as the caster, but unfortunately the caster that did accept had to pull out like two days before and they asked me, and I was going as a player, and I just went there instead and then casted.

And then, I guess I didn’t really do that much for a few months, I think I had actually very lucky opportunities I guess, like I won’t put this one down to more luck, but at the start of WCS 2013, the very first season, during qualifier #4, the ESL Studio computers kind of died, when Kaelaris was broadcasting them, and there was a community caster check for ESL, and Rogue, one of the admins, was like "Hey, can anyone cast it?" and I was like "Hey, I can!". And he gave me the stream key for WCS Europe, and he was like "OK, just broadcast this".

I got tuned in on it, very casual, I had like 8000 viewers, and that allowed me to kind of get a little bit more reputation, because ToD, who I kind of interacted with prior to that, he spoke to me he was like "You can cast with me pretty much now". And a little bit later we casted the Millenium Proleague Cup Final, which was another great opportunity because casting with ToD was a dream come true, he was a great commentator, and at that time he was the highest level of commentator I had co-casted with. That was a very big opportunity for me as well. And it just kind of snowballed from there as well, I applied for DreamHack, I got there, I applied for IEM, got those, ASUS ROG, HomeStory Cup, Acer TeamStory Cup, I just asked around I managed to get into them.

[…]

Final question, we’ve seen during this interview that you are doing many things about StarCraft II at the moment, many different things. Is it something that you would like to keep doing in the future, do you intend to stay in the professional esports scene in the future?

Yes, I’d love to. There’s a lot of aspects in the esports scene, especially as a commentator. For me, having fans is fantastic not because in a sense it makes you feel good about yourself to know that people appreciate you but to have fans, to have people that respect what you would say, your opinions, and also in a sense you do have these people that look up to you so you can in a sense motivate them as well.

That is something I love, and then on top of that, I love the people, nearly every person I meet in esports is fantastic, and there’s such a wide variety of people that you do get to meet so it’s very interesting, because I’m a very people oriented person, I love to meet people.

That’s why you love offline events?

Yes, I really do enjoy meeting people, actually I never went to a foreign even yet which is the biggest downer for me, I can’t wait to do that like a DreamHack, a Gamescom or an IEM maybe.

As a caster you mean?

Yes absolutely, I’d love First and YoDa to go just to manage them, just to meet people. It’s such a big thing to put a face to a voice, a name, an ID that you’ve known for many years. It’s very surreal. And also like a former competitor to put face on someone you might hate, because they always beat you, people you have a level of respect because they are good at the game.

And on the top of that, I love StarCraft, I don’t want to see it die or stop playing it, because even if, right now with the second Gfinity, imagine if StarCraft is dead, you’re fired, Twitch shut down, I’d be still playing StarCraft. I’m in it because I love it, not because I’ve gone to a point where I can’t quit now or something. It’s still driven by passion.

It was great to have you with me today and ... I don't know, if you want to add something ; we talked already about a lot of things but maybe I forgot to mention other things that you are doing currently so don't hesitate to talk about it if you want.

There is not a huge amount, the MSI Beat IT did recently finished. So, I was a former team Fnatic, I left them back in June and that's when, of course, TCM contacted me and then I was also with the MSI Beat IT until it ended, because I was the head admin for that.

But right now I'm just with TCM looking after YoDa and First, Gfinity making good StarCraft runs as well as they can and just pretty much with those guys making things possible and of course... I'm a bit thrown off right now because I have got twelve days of extra leave because I was expected to be recuperating for my teeth, I'll be a bit thrown off for the next week or two.

Ok

Just give me a follow on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and, of course, Twitch and just keep up to date with everything I will be doing.

Perfect, thank you a lot see you !

Goodbye !

Transcription by TinkeR