Empire.Anahronix: 'We didn't win anything big yet'

Team Empire travels to Kiev as the best team of StarLadder's main round. They have an amazing winning streak online and can choose their opponents during SLTV's group phase. Are these the best conditions for the first big victory of this young team? Empire's manager Anahronix gives the answers.

Your team is on an impressive winning spree right now. How do you deal with the additional attention given by the community? Is it an extra burden or an extra motivation?

Anahronix: The extra attention is really nice, we got a win streak of 26 games and now many people in the community start talking about Team Empire. It is pretty nice to feel that people appreciate our teamwork and our games. In general however, we didn't win anything big yet and the support of every fan is very important for us. Continue cheering for us, please, because all the big tournaments are still ahead!

Empire.Dota2 consists of three Russian and two Ukrainian players. Looking at our GosuGamers rankings, we see Eastern Europe is the only region on the heels of China. What is the difference between CIS players compared to Western European faces?

On the one hand, for people from the CIS, the achievement of certain results in eSports is still quite significant, in some sense, even financially. But on the other, they are all players who try to reach their goals. It's just that not everyone can properly put it to himself and make every effort to achieve this. I replaced nine players on the team while I created this composition. After all, I can say with confidence that the players, no matter if they are Chinese, Europeans or CIS, they are all equal, if it comes to the game itself.

StarLadder TV finals in Kiev will be the first major offline event for your team, but not for most of the players in the current constellation. Did you set up a special boot camp exercise or do you trust in your phenomenal online results to carry on in CyberArena?

The finals of the third StarLadder season are very important for us. Indeed, we do not have a lot of experience in tournaments with this line-up, but we will try to change that and further improve on that matter in the future. There were no really special preparations for the tournament, like a bootcamp. We will just try to play our best in Kiev.

Which other offline events are on your "to-do" list for the next couple of months? Will we see you at DreamHack Winter for example?

We definitely plan to visit DreamHack Winter this year. And if we do not have any unforeseen circumstances, we will be there indeed.

Talking about Dota2 and offline events, as a 5-vs-5 eSport, it's quite expensive to fly your guys to events. Can you cover any trip with sponsor budgets regardless or do you examine the field of attendants before you confirm a tournament to calculate possibilities to come back with a share of the prize money?

Certainly, this is an important moment in any case, but this kind of eSports can't be called globally lucrative. The roster is very young and needs to be developed. Empire is trying everything for personal and collective growth. In my mind, trips to tournaments are among of the most important things to have. Team Empire will now try to send the players to all events they want to participate in.



The last couple of weeks have been shaky ones for a lot of teams, especially those who participated in TI2 but came home with disappointing results. Your roster so far didn't get touched. Do you bind your players with extra-serious contracts, do you pay them an outstanding salary or how have you been able to maneuver your squad around all this shuffling?

TI2 is the end of the season for the Dota 2 teams. I think it's okay to disband after such an event when the team does not see any common future. Contracts can't force someone to play together and win tournaments. Players themselves should want it, the organization needs only to help them doing this. Big salaries will never make a star out of the average player, this simply does not happen. Obviously every organization must raise the motivation level when a team gets new, big achievements. I hope everything will be all right for Empire.Dota2 in the future. It's all in our hands. I would like to say thank you to Team Empire and the players of my new Dota 2 team, who did so much work in such short time. Big thanks for our fans, we always need for your support and of course to our partners Seagate, Razer, Intel, Adidas and TwitchTV!

Thank you very much for the interview.

More Information: StarSeries Season 3