Q: You're the first american ever to be interviewed for Unsung Heroes. While I'm pretty sure you're already starting to feel the pressure, could you please present yourself to the community, especially to the EU side.
Hey guys! I go by the name of Arys, I'm 19 years old currently living in the United States, more specifically New York.
I was first introduced to the game in the winter of 2013, by one of my best friends. We were looking for some "medieval" game to play, and stumbled across this gem. What really caught our interest was a module called Persistent Worlds, we would hop on that module and just mess around for hours. Consisting of things like saying something stupid to a guy in plate armor then running away, or stealing from the Lord's chest. It was just so much fun, eventually though my friend got bored of the game, and stopped playing. But I couldn't, I got hooked. I ended up spending like 600 hours on that module alone, both administrating and playing. But alas, nothing lasts forever, and my days of playing PW ended when Nexus (the server I spent all of my time on went down). After that, I wasn't really sure what to play, but I definitely wanted to play this game and get good at it. So one of my friends suggested that I should check out competitive native, mainly because I'm big nerd when it comes to things like eSports, in fact he specifically told me that I should join a clan called The Midnight Watchmen, which at the time was pretty intimidating considering they were one of the best clans in North America, and I was just some PW scrub. But I contacted the clan's leader, Rurin, asking him if I could join the clan and I was put into the prohibitory (trial) period. And from here my journey into native began.
It's funny really, when I started off I was basically that one player in the clan who could barely even block a basic attack. But even though they were really good, they didn't care. They spent a lot of their time helping me get better at the game, and assimilating me into the community. For example, SotaMursu making me block two directions for like 4 hours, whilst constantly telling me how much of a "noob****" I was, Unicorn giving me some infantry tips, or Clockwise just telling me the callouts for the maps and inviting me to team scrims, etc. They really didn't have to do any of that. Which says a lot about them really. Anyways, eventually after training and learning for quite some time I got into my first native tournament, UNAC S2, which started around 2014. It was actually like the dopest thing, just watching the way they played and the environment during a match. We ended up getting second place losing in the finals to wK. But after that tournament, I knew I really wanted to get better at this game and win some tournaments. I wasn't really "involved" with the competitive NA scene during S2, but that changed when UNAC S3 started. I signed up as a referee, and slowly got more and more involved in the community. Which eventually lead up to me becoming admin for UNAC S4, which is really when I started to become a community organizer for NA. I'll save the details about administrating for next question. So after S4, I got to partake in my first nations cup, NC 2015, both administrating and playing, which was definitely one of the best experiences I've had in warband. After NC, I participated in UNAC S5, which eventually lead us to now, administrating and playing in the WPL.
Q: Rather than the player, that’s the organizer I would like to interview first. You have been doing quite an excellent job since you have been administrating the major tournaments on the NA scene. Could you please tell us what it is to organize such important events, how you started, and how have you been doing it so far?
Not sure if I've been doing an excellent job, but I've been doing my best. Administrating has always meant a lot to me, even back when I just started in PW. It allows me to give back to the game and community that I love. That's really why I do it, I want to see the game grow, and I want as many people to play the game as possible, administrating is the only way I can do that really.
I started administrating for native back in UNAC S4, which was in the summer of 2014. At the time, the scene was declining fast. So I knew that in order to stunt the decline, I had to make moves and I had to do it quick. So I set goals, knowing that if I could reach them, it would stop the decline in it's tracks. The goals were; to contact every clan leader, modify our rule-set to appease more, and to get sponsors. The first two goals, were pretty common goals for administrators, I'd say the are essential to every tournament. However the third goal had never actually been achieved in NA, it was discussed before, but thrown aside because practically everyone thought it was unrealistic, as you can see in
this thread. However, after seeing WNL3 accomplish it. It made me believe even more that we could do the same, even though Europe is and was like twice our size. Long story short, I was able to achieve my goals, getting 14 teams to sign up, both old and new clans, modifying the ruleset to the communities satisfaction, and landing Phreaky and MarkMods as sponsors for the tournament. Which in turn prevented the scene from dying. These goals I set became apart of my "blueprint" for administrating a tournament. The blueprint being a set of fundamentals a tournament will need to succeed, said fundamentals are (not in any order);
1. The contacting of clan leaders or known team captains.
2. A competent staff, with staff delegation.
3. Incentive for players to partake in the tournament, whether it's sponsors, top-notch competition, or money.
4. Solid ruleset that the targeted scene is satisfied with.
5. Flexibilty, things aren't always going to work out through the course of the tournament. So you have to be sure that the tournament is able to adapt.
6. Livestreams.
7. Hype, whether it's something like a betting corner, banter thread, or rankings thread. People love this kind of stuff, and it adds to the overall atmosphere of the tournament.
8. Pre-planning
9. Develop and plan the system you'll be using.
That's really how I organize, I use that blueprint for every tournament I partake in. But you do have to keep in mind, every situation is different, and this is really just the groundwork for the tournament. You will still have to do a lot of work after this implementing those fundamentals like making sure the tournament is running smoothly and resolving disputes.
Q: One of the events which has made quite a lot of noices recently has been the WPL, an international tournament opened to both EU and NA, but hosted in North America. As a main admin of this tournament, could you please tell us a bit about it, what are its specialities, how it is going (we're in the final phases), ect ..
The idea behind WPL was to essentially move the NA scene towards a more competitive environment, whilst also creating uniformity throughout the native community. So that when Bannerlord does release, the competitive community can transition to it smoothly. So in order to do that, we basically took aspects from the NA & EU ruleset, and created our own ruleset. The WPL is really the first tournament with equal participation from the NA & EU scene, having eight NA teams and eight EU teams and I believe it brought our scenes closer together. Which is sick really, we got to see how talented some players from Europe are, and they got to see the same for some NA players. And you can't forget the great banter that both scenes were able to partake in because of that. That's really the speciality of the tournament, it's the only tournament that is uniting both scenes, and I personally love it. With all that being said the tournament has had it's up's and down's as every tournament does, but I personally learned a great deal from it, and I believe it's second iteration will be amazing.
But on another note, as you mentioned the tournament is reaching its final stages, with our finals match coming up! Please stay tuned to see who will win the grand prize!
Q: The NA scene often appears to be a level bellow compared to the EU one. Rather than going for the usual "fight" bewteen the two communities, what is your point of view on this specific matter? As someone who is working hard to make the NA community as competitive as possible, do you think your effort aren't always rewarded or is there any progress you noticed?
My perspective of the matter is that, the top tier players and clans in North America can compete with the top tier clans and players in Europe. Whilst the upper-tier and middle-tier clans in Europe would body the upper-tier and middle-tier clans in North America. Therefore, the overall "skill" of European players is greater than North Americas. The reason for that is quite simple really. Europe just has a lot more players and teams. The average player count for an NA tournament is around 250 players, whereas for Europe it's about 600. So naturally the skill for EU players would be higher than NA's, because they have a lot more teams and players to train with.
Q: To conclude on this interview, if there is anything left you would like to share with us, then that's your special moment!
Just some shoutouts!
Shoutout to Tardet for being awesome as usual, you deserve to be interviewed far more than I do.
Shoutout to TMW for being amazing people, I wouldn't want to be apart of any other clan <3
Shoutout to BattleBuddy, Phreaky, MarkMods, SimRai, and GameServers for sponsoring tournaments I've been apart of.
Shoutout to the NA community for sticking with me, throughout the mistakes I've made as an organizer.
Shoutout to Rake for being a shoe.
Ps : Thanks to Arys for having accepted this interview. I'm glad I got the opportunity to met such a great personality and work with him. I really do hope it will bring some lights on the NA scene, aswell as the other interviews of NA people I want to conduct, but also give some interest to the NA scene following this project that is Unsung Heroes.
Not related to this, but I also would like to apologise for any grammar mistakes you will find in this text. The interview got quite delayed already so I decided to post the non-revised version. However, Arys has an, american, yet excellent English so it shouldn't be a problem.
Hope you had a good read.
Yours as always,
Tardet.
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