FNG Interview: “It will take some time for me to practice and become relevant again”

As they were just about to enter DreamLeague Season 22, we spoke to Virtus.pro captain, Artsiom "FNG" Barshak to see how the team is recovering and adjusting after an underwhelming performance at the recently concluded BetBoom Dacha Dubai event.

We talked with FNG about his return to active play, about the work he is doing with the young Virtus.pro squad and his collaboration with coach Sergei "G" Bragin. We touched on Virtus. pro’s top 8 run at TI12 and what that meant for the team, and we also discussed the new patch and how he likes the new competitive system without the Dota Pro Circuit.

You were on a bit of a break, before joining Virtus.pro. It was about a year before you returned to active play. What made you come back?

I don't even remember what was actually the plan for me when I took the break. I mostly took the break for mental and overall health stuff. I needed to refresh, to recharge, things like that. It wasn't like a Chinese retirement thing where you say that you retire but you come back in a month or two.

I was kind of looking for opportunities during my break, but I didn't try hard, I was actually streaming non-stop for two months. Then I got the invite from VP, they wanted me to be the captain, to play as position 5 and after I discussed the details with the management and with the whole roster I decided that what they needed from me fit me.

You know, when you are not playing competitively for a long time, you also need your teammates to believe in you, because it will take some time for me to practice and become relevant again.

And it’s now almost a year since you have been in the captain role of this team, are you happy with how things progressed?

We are definitely happy about the work itself, but we are still not good enough. It's not like we are totally unhappy; we understand that sometimes it takes even more than a year to achieve greater success. TI12 was definitely a turning point for us. We were the underdogs there and we knew that we would need to adapt quickly and find the right way to play against tier one teams. We didn't really beat any of the tier-one teams at TI and we are not happy about that, but overall we achieved a top 8 and we feel like in all our matches we managed to put up a good fight.

Now, if we look at our BetBoom Dacha Dubai run, it's kind of a disastrous one. Again, we didn't win against the super strong teams, yes, we won some games with Undying-Morphling, but that was something that we didn't actually practice too much. I would say that it's still hard for us to easily beat these tier one teams, but we are slowly doing our work and I'm confident that we will get there. We have issues and we are trying to solve them. So far it seems like we have ideas on how to work on them and will see what DreamLeague Season 22 will bring to us.

What would you say are some things that you need to do differently at DreamLeague to make a deeper run in the tournament?

To put it simply, we just need to play better. We just make mistakes that we could have controlled better, unforced errors if you want. For example, if you are going to smoke gank but you don't bring enough heroes for that, it's your mistake, right? I don't say that if we smoke with more heroes, we will instantly win this event. What I mean is that there are a lot of small details that we need to fix.

At BetBoom Dacha we also threw some games that we should have won because we had a big lead, we had every single thing needed to close the games, but we didn't do it. So, we also had to work on that after the tournament. Also, the drafts were not the best in Dubai and we are now working on that too.

G joined you last year as well. How important is it to have him in the team, and how is helping you guys? Is he taking care of the drafts or is he more of an analyst?

You know when I say something about G, the next day he is like "FNG said that I do this work," and we kind of laugh about it. Usually, when it comes to coaching, it's hard to pinpoint what you do exactly.

As a coach, you do what the team needs from you. For example, our players love to play a lot of Dota and because of that, they don't spend too much time on watching replays. That's something G does a lot. He is watching every single replay, he is watching our opponents' replays and he is doing the analysis and all these outside of the game preparations for the team.

He is also monitoring how our communication works because we had an issue with that at TI as well. We lacked communication in Seattle, so he started to listen to our voice coms and obviously, he also has tasks that players provide him with. For instance, I would ask G to look for macro game composition. So basically, I bring the idea to the team, I say we need to play this way or that way and he is the guy who is watching everyone on the team to see if we execute what we say we would, or if our macro composition was right.

We had a balance patch a few days ago. Are you happy with the changes from the 7.35c update?

I love it when new stuff comes out, especially after a big tournament because this way you avoid everyone copying whatever the meta was. When there are no patches between the tournaments, it becomes quite boring to play the same type of games that you already played before. What I like about this patch is that it doesn't have super big changes. I like Dota being more consistent in that way, I like that you don't need to play 200 games after a patch just to figure out things. That becomes very tiresome very quickly.

At the same time, if the patch is not big enough, it becomes too boring to play the same style. When you are looking at the tier one teams, they are basically doing the same stuff with small changes. Some details are different because maybe some items became stronger, some heroes became more viable because of an item change. But pretty much, the macro game doesn't change for them because you play on the same map, with the same economy, and everything is the same, except for some small details. So, in that sense, it becomes a bit boring, but that's just my personal opinion.

Now that you have had some time to look at the format of the current Dota 2 season, do you prefer it to the DPC Leagues system of the last three seasons?

I would say that this new system is fine, but the DPC was kind of fine too, at least for me. I would say that the biggest upgrade for this year is the amount of LANs we have. And because we have more events, the tournament organisers have to do it faster when it comes to qualifiers and the LAN itself, so this is one of the best improvements.

On the other hand, we don't really have room for the tier two scene. In the DPC we had six leagues with 16 teams in every region. That was like 96 teams in total playing Dota at a professional level and that was quite good for the scene, I would say. But now, we are on a different scale because we don't have this second division and what it means is that basically, a lot of teams are struggling to survive. That saddens me.

DreamLeague Season 22 unfolds between February 25 and March 10 with 16 teams from around the world fighting for the title and a share of the $1,000,000 prize pool. As being a part of the ESL Pro Tour, DreamLeague Season 22 also offers a total of 18,550 EPT points to be split among the 16 participating teams. This is the first time Virtus.pro qualifies for a tournament of the current ESL Pro tour season, so they start with zero points to their name.

At the end of the season, the top 8 teams with the highest EPT points will be directly qualified for this year’s Riyadh Masters event at the Esports World Cup 2024.