After Hubris won our first GosuGamers Overwatch Weekly NA, we wanted to get to know them a little better. Talespin shares the history of Hubris, their Overwatch group and his view of the game.
Can you introduce yourself and your team? Roles/Favourite heroes for each player?
Hello! My name is Ronnie, aka Talespin, and I play for team Hubris. My teammates are coolmatt69, ras, chump, Minstrel, and Esper. I mostly play the offense roles alongside coolmatt69 with ras and chump covering most of the tank roles, leaving Minstrel and Esper as our support players.
How did your team end up getting formed? Is it permanent?
(During the break) we might just take some time off before hitting the game hard again when it comes back online.
Hubris has a pretty long history, starting with chump and ras playing together in ET: Quake Wars, CoD: Black Ops, and Combat Arms. Coolmatt69 joined the team in Brink and then I joined up in Firefall after previously competing in Tribes: Ascend and Shootmania. Minstrel has played with and against us in a couple of these games and Esper is someone we first met in Overwatch who turned out to be a great support player.
Unfortunately, the harsh reality when trying to be the best in a competitive game is you can’t always play with your friends so as far as whether or not the lineup is permanent, you never know, but it’s what we’re going with for now. Luckily, we’re all friends because we began as top level players in other games and haven’t had any reason to change the roster since then and probably won’t in Overwatch for some time, if at all.
Do you all have previous competitive fps experience?
Almost all of us have been playing competitively for several years. I listed most of the games above already but it’s safe to say we have a very wide range of experience in competitive FPS games.
Do you currently actively work on improving team play/hero diversity in Overwatch, or are we still at the point where players focus on their mechanics and map knowledge?
We’re about a month into the Overwatch beta so everyone on our team is at least familiar with all of the heroes and more practiced with the ones they use in scrims and tournaments. Most of our time practicing is spent on trying different strategies and hero compositions and gaining experience on when to use certain heroes or positioning to deal with other team’s lineups.
How do you feel about all these Overwatch tournaments already popping up?
I’m definitely glad that there’s a lot going on in the Overwatch competitive scene so early. It might feel a little premature considering how small the playerbase is in the beta right now, but it’s not like these tournaments have giant prize pools that future competitive players are missing out on. I think everyone is treating these tournaments as just another opportunity to practice and play different teams. They also provide a chance for upcoming teams and players to stand out and get recognized.
Have you been watching the tournaments as well while not playing? To learn or just for enjoyment?
I’ve watched a couple tournaments, mostly to see what hero compositions other teams that we haven’t played yet are running. We also sometimes review our previous matches and learn anything we can from them.
Do you see major differences between the regions already?
I would consider everything but the three pure capture point maps competitively viable right now.
Yes, definitely. It seems as though since there hasn’t been many EU teams in the beta for more than a week or so, that they are still experimenting with a lot of different heroes and tend to counterplay a lot more.
For example, there’s a lot more EU teams running heroes like Zenyatta, Widowmaker, and Symmetra which makes other teams want to run heroes like Genji and Tracer to deal with them. Whereas in NA we seem to favor more stable lineups with McCree, Pharah, and D.Va that are very difficult to counter and can usually fight against any lineup pretty well. Keep in mind this is a very generalized outlook because everything can change depending on the map or a specific checkpoint.
What are your thoughts on the current beta state of Overwatch?
The game is running well, most heroes were surprisingly well balanced right away, and after the first week or so most of the long queue time issues in matchmaking were resolved. There’s not a whole lot to complain about apart from just giving more people access to the game so we can start seeing new players and teams in these tournaments.
We already see a big difference in map popularity, from Kings Row to Temple of Anubis. Do you feel this will equalize over time, or are some maps just fundamentally better designed than others?
Personally, I would consider everything but the three pure capture point maps competitively viable right now (Anubis, Volskaya, Hanamura). They just don’t seem to play out as well because of how random they can be. Since it’s technically possible to win either of those maps in 1-2 minutes, if you’re trying to defend and the enemy team gets a lucky headshot as Widowmaker or they surprise you with a 6 Winston team or something like that, you can just lose instantly feeling like you didn’t even get to play the game. There’s not a lot of time to adapt with a different hero composition or strategies, which is what Overwatch is all about.
On the other hand, If you lose a teamfight on a payload map they still have to push the payload instead of just running across the map and ending the game which means there will be many more teamfights and opportunities to adjust. This makes for a much more consistent result between teams.
Similarly, some heroes are picked in every match (Mercy) while some others aren’t ever played (Torbjörn). What heroes do you think could do with nerfs/buffs at this moment?
It’s pretty clear that Torbjörn and Bastion are in an awkward spot, being very powerful in lower skill pubs and almost completely useless in competitive matches. I’m sure Blizzard has some plans on how to remedy this but for now I’m enjoying my scrims without turrets. The only thing I can say confidently that needs a nerf is Mercy’s ultimate, which Blizzard is aware of but is still trying to find the right way to do.
There are a couple other heroes that only seem effective in very few situations, like Junkrat for example. He can dish out a lot of damage from a good distance but has a hard time actually landing a killing blow unless you’re close enough to hit them with his concussion mine and you usually don’t want to be that close. All of the damage his spam provides not only gives the person taking damage more ultimate charge, but since it will all be healed up it gives the healers ultimate charge as well. So unless you’re getting kills you are just boosting the other teams ultimates for free.
Symmetra is a very greedy pick and probably still not worth it most of the time. Zenyatta has very powerful abilities but since he dies so easily he just throws his orbs on people then hides while a Genji or Tracer do all the work. I’d much rather give Zenyatta more survivability and maybe adjust Orb of Discord to 30% to match Mercy’s, then you might actually get to play the hero in a teamfight and survive. There’s a lot of small tweaks that can make heroes more viable but overall the game is in a pretty good state right now.
What are your goals at this moment for the team/for yourself?
The goal is always to be the best in the world, for myself and my team. We’ve been waiting a long time for a game like Overwatch to come around where we can finally show off our skills so we’re not going to waste it. We are constantly trying to improve and learn more about the game to prepare for any tournaments coming our way.
What are your hopes/expectations for Overwatch?
Well, I’d love to see Overwatch become the biggest esport game ever, but for now I’m just happy for a legitimate competitive FPS other than CS:GO. I have high hopes for its growth though so I won’t be surprised if we start seeing some major prize pool tournaments by the end of next year. Fingers crossed, anyway.
What do you think about Blizzard temporarily shutting down the closed beta? Will you be doing anything during the downtime to still improve your play?
It’s probably going to be a very boring month but Blizzard knows what they’re doing so Overwatch will probably come back better than ever. We’re not really involved in any other games right now so we might just take some time off before hitting the game hard again when it comes back online. There’s not really any other game like Overwatch out there to the point where practicing it would help our gameplay.
Anything you would like to add?
Just want to give a shoutout to my team; everyone has been performing well lately in scrims and tournaments so give yourselves a pat on the back. Thanks to Blizzard to creating such a great game and all the employees that scrimmed us during the first few weeks. Also, thanks to Gosugamers for starting up a weekly tournament series and giving me this opportunity to tell everyone more about team Hubris.
You can find Hubris' players on Twitter and on Twitch:
- Talespin - Twitch, Twitter
- coolmatt69 - Twitch, Twitter
- ras - Twitch, Twitter
- chump - Twitch, Twitter
- Minstrel - Twitch
- Esper - Twitch, Twitter
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