An interview with Elroy Pinto and Karthick Gopal on Starcraft II

Game Orbit felt that Starcraft community needs to come up and took a step towards its development. We went on for direct interviews with Elroy Pinto and Karthick Gopal, 2 of the Core guys from Starcraft India community and this is what they had to say about it:

Game Orbit: Question 1! Before anything, tell us about your experience in E-sports, and since how long you’ve been playing all these multiplayer games?

Karthick Gopal: Hey! My name is Karthick. I have been in E-sports in various roles for over 8 years now. I started with a wide variety of games. Around 2000 I started playing Quake 3 for which I won WCG India twice in a row then went on to play Warcraft 3 and some Starcraft 1. Now a lot of time in E-Sports is spent only on Starcraft 2, the game I play. I test games once a while since I work in gaming, but mostly it’s about Starcraft 2. I started off as a player in quake3 then an editor, I have worked with all gaming websites internationally then I took a semi retirement when Warcraft 3 was dying, now I’m back trying to grow our Indian Starcraft 2 community.

Elroy Pinto: Hello all! My name is Elroy Pinto aka Noname and for the longest part of my E-sports career I have been a General Manager for FnaticMSI. I started off in 2003 with WCG Mumbai being my first tournament as a gamer. I competed in WC3 and I was so bad^^ I lost in round 1, but after that I found a good community of gamers who were around and we got to know each other. I did end up playing a LOT of WC3 after that and we would meet up at LAN cafe’s fairly often. Nachiket Karnik, Rachit Modi & Aayush Iyer along with me was the founding members of FTGL (Frozen Throne Gaming League). I still remember the amount of work we put into it and till date I have to say I never really enjoyed myself in a team before – at our peak we had about 250 registered members which if you judge it by the year and the amount of people who played WC3 it was a sick achievement. Sadly by 2005 it came to a close as two of the founding members wanted to go abroad and do their under-grads. Aayush and I managed to keep the site running up for awhile but shortly my interviews got recognized and I got an offer from WCReplays.com to write for them. Another community job with no pay but they had about 55,000+ registered users and the views I got on my interviews was high. Oh yeah, I have been interviewing gamers for about 8 years as well. Till today I take time to write about gamers. After about 8-10 months I got an offer from MYM which had benefits. Back then the old MYM was just growing and it was an exciting time. I came on board as a writer and within a few months I was in charge of everything related to WC3. I even took over the entire website and headed their content in 3 languages (KR, CN, EN). Plus I took on the role of an assistant manager. You see I really wanted to be a manager, since I tried several fail attempts at creating my own teams in India without much success. By the time I joined MYM I decided to abandon any hopes of working within India for E-Sports. I worked at MYM for 2 years – working with the likes of Lucifer, Moon (Spirit_Moon) & their whole WC3 lineup. By the time I finished my Bachelors in Mass Media I decided to take a 2 month break for my exams, aced that shit and headed straight to Fnatic. I actually applied to get into Fnatic as they had approached me a few times in the past and I declined. When I joined up with Fnatic I was in charge of WC3 content and I was Assistant manager, but within a month the players asked me to take over as triMble was busy with real life and university. I joined Fnatic in April 2007 and within 6 months I was working with the upper management. Since then I have done a ton of things, good lord some of the things I forget, but quickly: I ended up working as General Manager in 2008, I went to Southampton and started working full time for Fnatic for about 6 months. I came back in 2009 and continued working while also being a content writer, I started up the Korean WC3 team, worked the first 2 DOTA teams (Indonesians & Loda & Co.). I started the SC1 team in Fnatic, not many might know but they there for a while on Fnatic, they were my squad. After they departed and WC3 came to a close I was a bit de-motivated and I spent about a year researching the community for SC2′s release. Once SC2 beta was announced I created the SC1 Rookie Draft and we picked our first members way back then. In 2009 I also spearheaded the development of Fnatic TV (All those videos you guys must see from Fnatic and I found a core team with whom I work till this date. Since then I’ve moved onto sponsor relations and sponsor management away from Squad management. But I still look after SC2 as it is my baby on Fnatic. So yeah, hard to encapsulate what all I have done, am sure I have forgotten a bunch of things but this is the gist. I have seen Fnatic develop from 2007 to its present I am grateful for the opportunities but I wouldn’t call myself lucky as I have given away an abundance of weekends and enjoyment in my college years to reach where I am.

Game Orbit: Speaking about the overall gaming scenario in India, what is your take on that? Do you feel India, in coming years could do some wonders in this industry?

Karthick Gopal: There are a few aspects to gaming. If you mean E-Sports, I find that very unlikely in the next 5 years for India to step up in the map for people to take notice as a destination like Korea or the US is. There is another aspect of gaming which is casual gaming and game development, I think that could be explored with much more success with a lot of people shifting focus and accepting it in main stream society. A big problem with people is not finding a staple E-Sport game or in shifting to newer graphics not making it a sport but a pastime.

Elroy Pinto:  It has been on a downturn for as long as I can remember. Sometime in 2005 to 2007 it was actually looking up; I remember admining a tournament in Mumbai – FragShack’s Blitzkrieg. If anyone reading this remembers that – a big holler . I think at that point in time sponsors were genuinely interested and the market was nascent all over the world. Sadly it took a downturn, am pretty sure the organizers are to blame for this but I think it’s not so simple to palm off whose right and wrong. I do think strongly that games like CS 1.6 and DOTA are very important for our growth as an industry. If we don’t end up nurturing these massive communities we’re going to end up with niche games which will make our biggest resource (sheer numbers) a HUGE waste. People need the right outlook, we need people to train the players properly, we need coaches or people who have been around to train a young generation. Sadly a lot of players who are experienced and been around forever still want the limelight and try to stay on top of the others. Which is great but the aim is to grow numbers not your personal fans. I personally hope we will see a shift towards online tournaments. That’s where my company 8x4Gamer is heading. We’ve done 3 tournaments for SC2 so far with a moderate response but with our first DOTA Tournament sponsored by MSI we had about a 170 registered gamers. Which is very impressive and definitely we’re here to set a precedent in Indian E-Sports. 

Game Orbit: What about Starcraft II community in India, how many serious and regular players are there?

Karthick Gopal: I would say about 20 players are those that play regularly. Rests of the 150 odd people are mostly spectators or are friends of people who play Starcraft 2. Pure passion with guys like me would be just a few 10 or so who live and breathe Starcraft. But we are growing quite quickly; 6 months before when we started the group we had 5 people whereas now we have 165.

Elroy Pinto: Well, The SC2 community reminds me a lot of the WC3 community except that there’s no one as anal as Nachiket Karnik (peace Koinek) which is a good and bad thing because we all end up flaming and spamming. It is a lot of fun as a community experience, am quite glad personally that the community turned out to be the way it is. I think there’s a few players like Naveen and Nickunj who genuinely want to pursue a career in E-Sports. There are a lot of regular players I’d peg the number at about 30-40.

Game Orbit: So do you think that could be reason for not having Starcraft 2 in these major tournaments probably because 1. Too less in number as compared to players who play other games. 2. People in India SC2 community are way too casual?

Karthick Gopal: we probably have the most insightful and engaging conversations among any gaming group in Facebook in India. There are many reasons I think.

1) The game is young most people haven’t gotten used to it or understood it well enough, i have myself to blame in lack of marketing

2) People are spending time on pirated games a lot like DOTA and Counter Strike; it’s easy to get connected. Starcraft 2 is much more complex than these games to get good at

3) People are not serious enough and are casual but mostly it’s about igniting interest in the community, I don’t think it’s about just being casual.

4) Too many games are there where teams are involved, one cannot play Starcraft 2, counterstrike, DOTA, League Of Legends and World Of Warcraft all together so one has to choose and most people choose games where the largest numbers are, that’s currently DOTA and Counter Strike

Elroy Pinto:  I can’t speak for everyone on SC2 India so I can’t say what they expect. From my point of view the most important things people need to maintain are the basics of tournaments. Tournaments lead to teams being formed & eventually everything grows from there.

Game Orbit: I see Starcraft II players complaining about lack of resources in India for playing the game. Any elaboration on that thought?

Karthick Gopal: Well a lot of people find it easier to complain. I think it’s mostly just not accepting the game and taking in a lot of people. Every tournament in India has dead games like FIFA or DOTA 1. Even if free we should have demonstrations of Starcraft 2, and play the game more. Resources lack though is not off target, we don’t have focus/community gaming/tournament. Being specific to Starcraft 2 except the ones we conducted and the ones run by 8×4 gamer for example.

Elroy Pinto: There is definitely less love for SC2 in India but that’s the whole charm of SC2 that only a few gamers get. Personally I think due to the low number of consistent players the community suffers. There are very few gamers who actually play SC2 daily. I think a few of us actually play it every day, even though we’re not super stellar players we change it into a social thing by playing team games. Good fun, getting on TS and unwinding after a hard day’s work. There need to be more competitions for anyone to the game seriously.

Game Orbit: Lastly, Talking particularly about Starcraft, where and how do you think India is lacking behind? As an individual gamer, what measures can be taken to bring this game up? And probably adding up to the question, how exactly can E-Sports in India rise?

Karthick Gopal: Elroy wrote it well in the thread. We are not serious. We don’t have a single top tier competitor player that can compete with the best in the world. We thus have no exposure to anything in tournaments. As Indian or south Asian players, we need to unite the community participate in foreign tournaments spread the word among friends, make it a mission to bring one new person into the game and spread the joy of gaming together. This is a social sport, just like you play cricket and compete, we should infuse that same spirit. As an individual I think we should learn to become better at the game and strive for excellence. The highest league is Grandmasters which no Indian player has reached, if we have 15 grandmaster players, and then we have a good competing field and a pool of talent to help other players come in as well

For E-Sports to rise we need an ecosystem of gamers, organizers, marketers, players and support from people to take it to the next level. We don’t lack talent, we lack unity and organization. For those people that have passion the means to do this are currently very hard because of the lack of support. Once this picks up though, I see no reason why we can’t be world level or elite. But it starts with professionalism, social cause and then unity to bring people together for a greater good, uniting people through gaming not just winning tournaments.

Elroy Pinto:  I think we need a LOT of tournaments, the players will follow, and the number can actually go up. But it’s a vicious cycle, unless someone actually takes a chance and opens up with a few tournaments that don’t get many returns there will never be actual growth. But hopefully we can all work together and achieve success together on SC2. I know a lot of people feel the scene is small but let’s face it I think there are a LOT of smart people in SC2 India who if work together will bring SC2 to the masses.