rapha: The thing was that at the beginning of the preparation for QuakeCon, the team that DaHanG said he was willing to play was with me, ZeRo4 and cl0ck. The reasoning was that I thought he would play very well with cl0ck on offense, because DaHanG is probably the best supportive offense player that there is, he’s extremely good at it. The fact that John (ZeRo4) and I would play on D (defense) for CTF, would mean that we would find the way to win enough points, and we would do what needs to be done. cl0ck and I have experience with TDM with DaHanG , and ZeRo4 back in the day used to play a lot of TDM actually. It’s just that he hadn’t played it for a while, and it would take a month to get into it. He’d be good.

But then he eventually changed his tune, even if he said he would play with us he then said “No, I said to id_ last year that I would play with him”.

Memento: This was DaHanG?

rapha: Yeah DaHanG. Long story short, it was one of those things where he kind of asked me: “You know what, would you be willing to give up duel against everybody but Cypher because I'd still like to play with you”. And I looked at it like “That doesn’t make any sense to me. I feel we should always discuss our given opponents, and delegate who is the best option at the time”.

I personally think in certain matches against certain opponents – For example: even if I have beaten Strenx a lot, I think that Strenx would have been one of the duel players that DaHanG's style clashes very well against. And I would be like “Alright, I want you to play against Strenx instead of me”. Even if we both have winning records, I think he just has better time or whatever. And I think that needed to go down for every match.

When he pretty much said that the only way I would play with you is if you only play against Cypher, I was like: that does not make any sense as far as overall team aspect and the fact that if we team up together in general, for the duel, we don’t have to run into each other, we completely eliminate that factor - we almost run into each other every tournament - we just totally focus on one match at the time that way.

Memento: Yep…

rapha: And then for CTF and TDM there are obvious reasons that I think it would have been very good that we play together. But he decided to go a different route, and he said “Look, I totally forgot that I promised id_ that I would play with him next year” and I was kind like “You know, I sort of understand because for instance I know Mark (cl0ck) and I kind of the last three years we’ve been trying to play with John (ZeRo4) and it just really has not worked out. Those past years, just the way things have gone and decisions that have been made and the timing of things; when teams were formed we just never were on the same team. And we said: “No, this year we are going to play together, we’re going to figure something out”.

We thought we had it in the bag. It just made sense for the team. But then DaHanG wanted to do his own thing, so the original team that DaHanG was gonna have after that point was DaHanG, whaz, id_, and viju.