Interview with Spachala

Interview with Vincitori Spachala

Bio:

List of achievements

• 2010 - SGL 4.0 CoD4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2010 - CyberGamer BFBC2 OMGWTFBBQ Competition - 1st (Team Immunity)
• 2010 - SGL 3.0 CoD4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2010 - CyberGamerBFBC2 CCL - 3rd (Team Immunity)
• 2010 - SGL 2.0 CoD4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2010 - SGL Resurgence CoD4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2009 - CyberGamer Call of Duty:World at War Invite League - Season 1 -
1st(eXile5) (9:1 W/L Ratio)
• 2009 - CyberGamer Call of Duty:World at War Open League - Season 1
1st(eXile5) (Undefeated)
• 2008 - World Cyber Games Australia CoD4 LAN - 2nd (eXile5)
2008 - SGL CoD4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2008 - NewSchoolGamer Thermaltake Call of Duty 4 Ladder - 1st (eXile5)
• 2008 - GoodGame CoD4 6v6 Sabotage Competition - 1st (eXile5)
• 2008 - GotGames Beyond Internet Gaming Call of Duty 4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2008 - GotGamesiStarZone Call of Duty 4 LAN - 1st (.winrarz)
• 2007 - Cybergamer Call Of Duty 2 Open League - 1st (teaminq.)


Name: Achala "Spachala" Mataraaratchi
Age: 20
Location: Sydney, NSW
Main Game(s): Call of Duty: Black Ops
Current Team: Vincitori

Questions:

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hello all! I have just completed my third and final year studying Bachelor of Computing at University of Western Sydney. Now that I've finally finished, I'm hoping to get into the computing industry; specifically the networking field.

When did you first start your gaming career?
My gaming career started in 2005 when I was in Year 10. At the time, a close friend of mine (In-Game name: Impalist) was playing Call of Duty 1, and was telling me how fun it was to scrim and war on GameArena against other teams. He came over one day and let me try out the single player and as CoD1 was my first FPS game, I was absolutely horrible at the game. Despite that, I loved the game and after that day, I really wanted to play online. I managed to get a CD-Key from a friend of a friend of mine and I started playing multiplayer. I joined my first team (Soldiers of Sin) and my journey began.
Although I had played other games casually in the past, I really owe it to my friend for introducing me to the Call of Duty series and competitive gaming. At the time, my friend was a decent player and after playing for a while, I learned many things from him. There is one thing he told me that I will never forget; "One day, you will surpass me". And although I wrote it off at the time, surpass him I did.

You've seen a lot in your time of gaming, what would have to be the highlight of your career?
The highlight of my career undoubtedly has to be World Cyber Games AU 2008. At the time I was in Team eXile5 alongside Grumpy and Frantic. We beat Sequential Gaming in the Semis and came out second best to Team Immunity in the Grand Final. WCG AU '08 was the first large scale event I had attended and the whole experience was memorable.
Also, at WCG, City Hunter (an Internet Café company) had set up a Kingston Free-For-All competition at their booth. Just before the Grand Final against iM, I entered the FFA comp along with Frantic. During the competition I could hear these two kids behind me commenting on shots I was doing, "KID1: Wow! Did you see that shot? KID2: Man...that's why these guys are sponsored and we're not." It was pretty funny. I ended up winning myself a 2GB Kingston USB stick and 2GB Kingston HyperX RAM.

Most people would know that you recently played with Team Immunity in numerous Battlefield Bad Company 2 competitions, what first enticed you to move away from the Call of Duty scene and into the Battlefield series?
After the Alienware Competition, the CoD team decided to take a break as there weren't going to be any worthwhile CoD competitions for a while. Grumpy didn't have much time to play due to his new job at ASUS and Frantic didn't have much time either. Meanwhile, Katalyst had offered me and Savage to play for a clan called deathnet, which featured some of the best BF2 players in the country. There was also the prospect that there may be a large LAN competition after the game's release.
Savage had some previous BF experience, but I felt honoured that Katalyst wanted me to play in his team full of veterans while I had zero experience playing in any Battlefield game. We took Katalyst's offer without hesitation. As time went on, deathnet were picked up by Team Immunity and came third in the CCL league, we then went on to beat the previously undefeated "Anarchy Krew" in the OMGWTFBBQ competition. Unfortunately, the game died competitively shortly after, due to the lack interest caused by the lack of support by the developers.

Playing a completely different game, was it hard at first to adapt to a completely different playing style?
Yes, it was very difficult at first to adapt to the completely different play style. I felt like I had to forget everything I knew from CoD when coming into BFBC2. When I first started playing scrims, I was so clueless and I was bottoming often. However, because Katalyst had given me this chance to play in his team, I didn't want to let him down and was determined to get to the same skill level of the others. In the end, I ended up performing equally as good as the veterans of the team and I'm glad I was able to achieve that goal.

What are your views on the newly released Call of Duty: Black Ops? Do you believe it has competitive potential?
I believe Call of Duty: Black Ops has the most competitive potential in a CoD game since the release of CoD4. Black Ops is incredibly popular in the public scene (record breaking number of sales) and every man and his dog has heard about Call of Duty: Black Ops. As a result, there will be a steady influx of players entering our competitive community which means a larger audience for potential sponsors.
The more popular a game is, the greater exposure sponsors will gain by promoting their brand, hence making it viable for competitions and events to be held. Because of this major popularity, there is a high chance of medium-large Black Ops LAN competitions to be held in 2011.
In order for a competitive large scale event to be run, Black Ops needs mod tools to be released so that a competitive mod can be publicly released. I'll admit that there are some teething issues from the release of the game, however, Treyarch have a good reputation of patching their game to fix bugs and errors. As soon as Treyarch patch the performance issues and mod tools are released, we can have a competitive mod in a very short amount of time. Just today, an unofficial competitive mod has surfaced on the internet, and although it is far from perfect, it proves that a competitive mod can be available the moment mod tools are released.

There have been many threads about "When will Black Ops have a CG Competition?" how far off do you believe we are from CyberGamer running a smooth competition? Are they likely to wait for a mod to be released or try and run it with similar rules as the MW2 competitions?
In order for CyberGamer to run a smooth ladder competition, the following issues need to be rectified:
• Ability to configure servers automatically
- At the current moment in time, servers are required to be set up manually, which requires a great deal of man power. Until it is possible to automatically control servers using scripts, it is difficult to run a ladder.
• Ability to police Third Person spectate and Radar Glitch exploits
- Currently, there is no way of policing this. We require either Treyarch to add a server variable to disable them, or for mod tools to be released whereby the variables can be enforced via the mod.
As you know, we recently had to cancel the planned Kingston Knockout Cup, due to the Third Person and Radar Glitch exploits. Once these exploits are able to be policed, we wish to reinstate the Knockout Cup to give the community something to do and to keep the interest. Due to there being only 16 matches which need to be set up; we can manually set up these servers without too much hassle.
As for how long it will take for a trial ladder, it depends on Treyarch's patching schedule. I can't give you a concrete time frame, but if I was to hasten a guess, I would say probably early-mid January. We will try to keep the community occupied the best we can in the meantime.

What does Vincitori mean, and how do you think your newly formed team will stack up against the likes of Archaic e-Sports, Frenetic Array, Team Immunity,eXile 5 and even the higher up MW2 teams?
Vincitori means "winners" in Italian. We came up with the name because ".winrarz" is a non-serious LAN team that includes myself, grumpy and savage. We decided to use a suitable iteration of ".winrarz" to define our newly formed team; winrarz = winners = Vincitori. Although we are a newly formed team, all the players within the team have played together at one point or another. Grumpy, Savage, Frantic and Ifor example have been in the same team for over two years.
We will need to put a great deal of effort in, but if we persevere and stay determined to reach our goal, I believe we will give the above mentioned teams a run for their money.Once we have finalised our roster, I believe we have a fighting chance at being in the Top 3.

When you look back on your career, do you believe it was time well spent?
Although there were situations where I probably should have spent my time more productively, overall I certainly believe that the time spent while gaming was worth it. I have made some great friendships over the years and have many good memories that I will cherish for years to come. Many people may declare gaming as a complete waste of time but it's really just like any other "normal" hobby; it keeps the mind ticking.

Is there anything else you would like to add? Any shoutouts to the fans ?
I'd like to give a shoutout to my teammates in Vincitori and I hope I didn't put any of the readers to sleep .
I thoroughly enjoyed the interview and thanks for having me. Keep up the good work
P.S: Happy 1000th post Presto


Thank you Achala "Spachala" Mataraaratchi for taking time out of your hectic life in the kitchen for this interview!
I'd also like to thank everyone for the continued support over this last week, and I'm hoping to bring out many more interviews just like this one in the up-coming weeks. I'm also heading down to 'City Hunter' LAN this weekend (4th December) and possibly flying up to Melbourne for the upcoming Respawn LAN (11th-12th December) so keep an eye out, and if you see me come and have a chat
Until next time,
Presto.