Kingsurf Interview-Ks'Papaxiong Speaks Out After SGNDT!

Team Kingsurf, still one of the best Dota teams in Malaysia, performed admirably in the SMM tournament. We felt obliged to interview them after their recent performance. To help us with our interview, we had our Dota correspondent Underminer interviewing Ks-Papaxiong. He replies in length about his opinions, such as the way Malaysian Dota and gaming can move forward. Also on the agenda was Cybertime underperforming and his golden advice on how to play the game. Enjoy the interview.



1. Malaysian teams in general performed admirably, knocking out the European powerhouse MYM at the group stages but came up short in preventing a top-3 finish by the Chinese. How you rate our nation's overall performance and what do you think we, as a community can do to improve the scene further?


I will rate Malaysia’s overall performance as a modest 60 as I see an improvement in the scene’s capability compared to last year even though we failed to prevent a 1,2,3 finish by the Chinese teams.

From my observation, o move forward Malaysia’s drafts and styles needs to be adopted and in some cases copied from others.
To learn something new and win, we have no choice but to train more with foreign teams and adopt their styles to beat them as this is the only way I see Malaysia to stand a chance in future tournaments.
The scene in general have perfect in-game skills but lack the tactical acumen and macro game knowledge to win big games and this is where analyzing replays of outsiders comes into play.



2. Cybertime, our nations's Asian Dota Championships III representative under-performed considering the hype they got pre-tournament. What do you think went wrong for them?

Perhaps its due to their team is relatively new because of their frequent roster changes and they have not been accustomed to each other's play styles yet. They are a deadly online team as it can be seen from their ADC performances but even us would not believe how hard they fall when losing to Quas and Winter’s new team. Perhaps they were underestimating their opponents?
However their loss to AEON is not surprising to me. AEON members has told me that they have researched their style fully before their matchup and is fully confident that they can take them down as evidenced from hyhy’s Tiny show throughout their game that knocked them out of SMM.


3. How do you reflect upon your SMM tournament? Which are the games most memorable?
Our most memorable game is no doubt against the Singaporean powerhouse AEON.SG. This is because in that team, they got a monster player that is Bouncy. AEON’s Specter getting a 30 min radiance did not really help our game. However, the supporters behind us at that game are unbelievable. Due to their support, the pressure we are facing are significantly lesser and I really enjoyed that game.
As for Kingsurf’s performance, we rate ourselves 80 marks as the results are secondary compared to what we really learnt about ourselves in this tournament. What excites us most is that even the loss did not set us apart as most teams would, it however united us into a common goal that is to get back to the top of Dota once again in the coming year.



4. What do you think of the Champion for this year FTD? Are they worthy champions? If so, what are the qualities we can learn from them based upon your experiences facing them?

The only thing I learnt from FTD is that in the current version, Farm and Pressure is the way to go.

Virtus Pro, the closest team that people would regard as a World Champion won MYM 6 ,7 and 8 but they all lost their passion in Dota soon after. This is due to their forte : blink dagger has been changed into something totally different in subsequent versions and the way to play Dota in the later versions just made them lose motivation
To me, Dota is so much more than that. If Icefrog managed to make a map that has a balance in farm and gank, the real World Champion will emerge.



5. Do you think competing with the best players in the world in Malaysia is a good way to promote ESports and Dota?

There is of course benefits to this as we can gain more experience from facing the best. The exposure arising from these events is certainly a good way to promote E-sports to the mainstream media.
The bad part of it will be Malaysia will find it hard to compete as the Chinese for example treat Dota as a job while most players here treat it as a pastime or hobby. The amount of effort they put in enable them to be one step ahead of the field in terms of strats which warrants the results they got.
I hope that E-sports will develop to be a worthy profession here in Malaysia to enable us to level the playing field with the other nations.



6. How do you reflect upon the year 2009? A success or failure?

There are positives and negatives for the year 2009. Results wise, we definitely missed out on a lot of the big events. At times, I was feeling a bit frustrated of certain failures of the team in not achieving victory. When Sakura and co told me to forget about it, I was pretty pissed at first.
However, as times gone by I slowly learn to take it as it is and try not to hang on to the disappointments for too long.

After SMM, there were certain teams who totally wrote us off by labeling us as a “washed up” team of non-achievers. As a message to them, I will say that Kingsurf prefers to use our own way to improve and win games and sincerely hope that they would not lose to such “non-achievers” when we meet in tournaments in the future.


7. Any advice you'd like to give to dota teams who wish to play competitively?

For the newer teams, my best advice is to spend more time into researching the game by looking at different replays of the best. When you are in game, focus is important, not to get distracted. Also, quit smsing, put your phone on silent and do not alt-tab out to chat. Focus in the game and analyse your mistakes real time and make sure to not make them again in the future.

For Ks, the main reason we can maintain our team for so long is because we got a very good sponsor. Thank you once again to Kingsurf Cyber Café for believing and sponsoring us all this time.


This article is also published at Rapture Gaming Network.