2p.com catches up with Alliance star [A]kke to talk about his favourite heroes to play, Alliance's recent form after The International 3 as well as his plans to celebrate his 10 year friendship with fellow star Lod[A].
Best known for his top notch supporting role in Alliance, [A]kke takes time off to answer questions about his favourite support heroes, managing a full time gaming career and a part time job as well as Alliance's recent slump after TI3.
This year is the 10th anniversary of both your friendship with Loda and your first Dota game. Will you do anything special to celebrate? Do you have a plan of how long you intend to play professionally for before you retire or do you just take every year as it comes?
Haha, well me and Loda did joke last year that we would have a dinner together at TI4, drinking wine and holding each others hands so maybe we will make that happen.. :D
It's really hard to say how long I will keep on playing, it all comes down to our team and the situation if something would happen. I love playing with Alliance right now so if we stick together and keep on playing It's gonna be hard for me to take the first step and just quit. As long as I'm able to balance it with my personal life it's not hard for me to continue playing since I love Dota2.Many people might not know that, in addition to being a professional Dota 2 player, you are a part owner of and programmer for http://mobilestorytelling.se/. At TI3, you told Hotbid that you don't think it's actually that hard to do both – that is, having a job and being a pro player. Is this only because of your position in your company allowing you flexibility or do you believe that in general it is viable for a Pro Dota 2 player to have another job at the same time?
I do think it's viable to have a job but not a full time one. If you play "full time" I'm sure people have enough time to do something else a couple of hours each day. But as you say, one of the reasons I'm able to do both is that I'm a co-owner of the company so I always make sure to not have too much work to not be able to scrim with the team or go on events and such. But it's a lot of work to make everything fit together.
When you and s4 were interviewed after winning Dreamhack Summer last year, s4 said he would prefer to be seen as an underdog because the team people see as the top team will receive more scrutiny from opponents than others. Have you experienced this to be a small benefit of failing to win any titles for a while? Do you feel like you guys are under a lot of pressure to win something due to high expectations of your fans after you guys have won The International?
Even if we haven't performed as well as we did before people still see us as a top contender for the first place so I haven't felt any difference. I don't really feel any pressure but instead I think people are overreacting a bit. Even though we didn't win some LAN events we performed very well and qualified for almost everything we played. We topped the Dream-League, D2L and Starladder group stages and finishing 3rd and 4th isn't that bad. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. We are still up there fighting. Also we won 2 titles lately, Fragbite and D2CL. But I do agree we can perform much better and we are fighting hard to do so.
When people talk about Chen they mostly talk about great micro or dramatic Test of Faith saves. As a Chen player, what do you see the main role of the hero as – does it depend on the draft it's in? If so, how?
It does indeed depend on the draft so I would say the decision making is what's important when playing Chen. Of course you have to have decent micro to be able to control the units but it's the decisions that can decide if you win or lose a game. If you make the wrong decisions if you should gank mid, top or even just farm you can end up being really useless and I think that is the problem that many people faces when they play it. If you have to focus too much on the micro because you're not used to it then you can't think so much on where to go and such. I always make scenarios, like if they lane like this I will go here. If they do that I will do this. By doing that I have the choices ready and can just pick one of them that I feel is the best.
Read the full interview at 2p.com.
