During CWL London, our Community Manager Chris Trout had the chance to sit down with OpTic Gaming's Dashy as he spoke about what it's like being on OpTic and how to get noticed as a young gun in the Call of Duty scene.
How are you liking it being on OpTic? What’s it like being a team member on such a prestigious team in Call of Duty esports?
Being on OpTic is one of those things where like, obviously there is no other org in Call of Duty that’s like it. It doesn’t matter who you are, the fanbase and love you get from the community; you also get some hate too because of how popular they are, so you’re always going to get a few bad apples. For the most part it’s amazing, the organisation is really nice and the fans, the best part about it for sure is the Greenwall; so huge shoutout to them, always supporting and coming out to the streams and these events.
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Obviously you had the set back after Vegas, where you couldn’t to the Pro League and be with your team, that maybe had a knock-on effect coming into Fort Worth, but it seems like you’re back on form. Is there anything that has got you guys firing again?
So I just want to say that Fort Worth was a blessing in disguise, just because it was one of those events where because of how dominate we were in Vegas, we thought we could just walk it. We were still practicing, but we weren’t 100% focused like: ‘this is what we’ve got to do’ and drill things down so that we know what we’re doing at all times; we just didn’t do that. I guess the egos kind of got in the way, it was kind of a reality check, which is a good thing. So now we’re always going to, lets say hypothetical we win another event, we’re not going to take a step back and we’re still going to keep doing what we do and grind; I think it was a valuable lesson for sure.
As someone who’s so young, what’s it like coming into this esport and working alongside some of the most experienced players in the business? Is it helping you escalate your game much further than you expected it to?
Yeah, for sure. My prior team, no disrespect to them, but they’re obviously not as good as the team I have now: Karma, Crim, Scump, TJ as well. They’ve all won before, they’ve won multiple championships, they know what it takes to win. They know what to do at tournaments, what not to do and stuff like that. And just the way they practice, it’s just a different routine and different mentality. That’s also huge because before I just used to get on teams, we’d shoot our guns and just try to win the map instead of just learning that on this specific hardpoint we’ve got to do this, this and this. We weren’t being specific with our strategy.
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This is your first event outside the states?
Second! I was at Birmingham last year and we got destroyed!
How are you finding this event and what do you think of London?
I’m loving it, London’s really nice and a beautiful city. The Westfield Mall is nice, the people here love COD, which is a huge thing so shoutout to them! They just support the team so that’s all I care about. Obviously I have a lot of passion for COD, so when people support it I love it.
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So you’re saying it’s beautiful, I mean I saw the video the other day that Scump did about the graffiti. I know that he over reacted to it, I didn’t quite get the same from you?
[Laughs to himself] The thing is Seth can be quite a joker sometimes and anything he says to me is just hilarious. Obviously that was just, I don’t know what part of town we were, apparently it was a nice area where there’s graffiti art and stuff; Seth was just kind of joking around.
Going back to the crowd, lets add fuel to the fire. UK vs US crowd, which one's better?
Oh, that’s a tough one.
I’ll give you a break and say just for this year, we won’t go overall!
That Vegas crowd was nice, the Fort Worth crowd was really good too. But it’s just one of those things that the UK crowd only gets one event a year and people come from all over Europe to be here. I mean just for this crowd (European crowds); I’d have to put this at number one just because we’ve only had two other events. I love my NA brothers over there obviously; it’s just they only have one event so they support it really well, shout out to them for sure.
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For any guys out there that want to become top Call of Duty players, maybe they’re in the situation you were in (playing the game but not progressing through the ranks) how is it that you can get yourself to the top of the Call of Duty food chain?
My biggest tip for anybody trying to get your name out there, if you know you’re good and trying to pursue this, you’re going to have to make a few investments. What I did was I started winning S&D tournaments, and all the tournaments I won I saved it for a PC, Elgato all that kind of stuff so I could stream. That’s how you get your name out there so people can watch your livestream and watch how good you are because if you’re not streaming, people aren’t going to see how good you are. It means you’re only going to get seen by playing against other people and you need to be consistent. You have to also make a lot of sacrifices, play a lot, not spend that much time with your friends or family; it sucks but if you want to choose this as a career that’s the sacrifice you have to make.
If you're a big OpTic Gaming fan and love the squad we are currrently doing a giveaway on Twitter and Instagram to win an OpTic Scuf Impact Controller signed by the whole Call of Duty team!
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Written ByChris Trout@TheTrout91