In this week's Inside Lounge, we bring you Lounge veterans The Forever Alones. The Forever Alones are an imposing team, often causing teams to quit at the prospect of facing them. As a result, they've gotten more free wins clocked than any other team last season (citation required).
Before we go on, I'd like to advise that the interview was done and completed in actual OSsloth speed, over the span of several months. Answers may vary depending contextually on the time it is written. It was also completed before Undead was officially added to the team, so your editor took the liberty of putting words into his mouth.
The Forever Alones, not so alone this time around. Would you like to introduce yourselves to our audience?
Rabbit: Hi i’m a Rabbit, renowned Sonya and Greymane one-trick and captain of the team for this season. I took over captaining duties from Bayaz last season because no one else wanted to do it, and for some reason the rest of the team were foolish enough to put me in charge. My primary duties include feeding and griefing my team (although CaptainG seems to have taken over the feeding duties this season), playing ranged flex (Sonya is ranged right?) and attempting to organize the team.
Bayaz: Hi folks Bayaz here! I’m ranged flex, ex-captain, drafter and sometimes shot-caller for TFA. I am also a caster for Heroes Lounge and can often be found streaming from the Heroes Lounge channel!
CaptainG: Hey i'm Captain G- Solo laner/flex , I am a DJ n try-hard streamer in real life, while i'm the funny and sexy one of our team and only one that's not British :D I'm well known Hots farmer with largest hero pool from my team and shortest attention span at that. (editor's note: since then, TFA have added three non British players)
Horus: Hey, I’m Horus, was brought into the team to do whatever role that everyone else doesn’t want, which seems to change regularly!
Empix: Hi, my name is Empix and I’m a German girl who loves to support. I hope I can prevent Captain and Rabbit from feeding to much!
Undead: OSsloth
How did this team form, and why the name?
Rabbit: Bayaz came to me one day having watched Khaldor cast some heroes lounge games and proposed forming a team. I invited my mate Fallout and his brother Horus to join us, and West failed to sign up in time to join the team for the first couple of games. Originally we were going to be called Muffin Dragons (random name generators FTW), but when i realized this name was taken by a kids book and we needed to have a logo, I asked one of my friends to design us a logo. He said he could only do it if we called ourselves “The Forever Alones” and this name seemed to fit the team members quite nicely. The rest as they say, is history.
Bayaz: The team formed when I found out about Heroes Lounge from a Khaldor cast of season 1 and when season 2 was announced I got in touch with Rabbit and West to setup a team and we invited Horus and his brother Fallout to join us. In season 2 we ended up with a free agent since someone couldn’t get themselves sorted in time to sign up! We have had some minor roster changes between seasons to get where we are today.
Horus: My brother knows a couple of the other guys so asked me to get involved and I have outlasted him!
Let’s talk about the season. How do you think you’ve performed, and would we see more of you in the future?
Rabbit: well this season has been tough for us, adjusting to roster and role changes, coupled with some free wins at the start of the season that pitched us against better opponents led to us getting stomped in a couple of matches. We managed to sort ourselves out a bit towards the end of the season though and it felt like we were doing better.
Bayaz: Moving into season 4 our support player Perry decided not to continue in the lounge so we ended up picking up CaptainG as a free agent to fill out our roster. I think in the early weeks we were a bit slow getting our synergy together so our overall result for the season was a bit disappointing however I am hopeful that moving into season 5 we may be able to pull together to post some better results!
CaptainG: After first few weeks when we were on other roles and had different shot callers i think we are improving slowly as we get integrated together since im only one thats not RL mates with rest but i think we're getting better and you should definitely keep an eye out on us especially next season.
Horus: I think we have done ok but are still ironing out a few things after some role swaps and trying me on the shotcalling, which I am still getting used to.
How do you feel about the level of competition this season in your division?
Rabbit: Div 3 felt more competitive this season and i don’t think that is just because of some free wins that boosted us a bit. There were some veteran lounge teams who are very strong (30 sec to mosh, crocodocs) and also some newer teams who stomped us pretty hard towards the end of the season (MILFits, Team snOr).
Bayaz: I feel like our division was very competitive this season and TFA ended up getting some free wins at the start of the season from opponents disbanding which meant we got much harder match-ups when we started getting actual matches to play. Despite that I am really impressed with the Swiss matchmaking system implemented this season.
CaptainG: As its my first season in heroes lounge i'm surprised by the quality of teams even when having lower ranked people the macro and coordination skills are very impressive with most teams we faced and it's definitely most fun and competition i faced playing since alpha
Looking at the statistics, your top 3 heroes picks are Uther, Stitches and Greymane. However your winrate on these three heroes have been rather abysmal (45%, 25%, 0%). Where more success have been seen in Leoric, Johanna, Cassia and Auriel picks. What prompts the high Stitches priority? Are you planning on switching up your drafts?
Rabbit: So Stiches is pretty strong in the meta at the moment and we like to draft meta comps where we can. Unfortunately we as a team are terrible at executing Stitches comps (What? Follow up you say? Why?). I will decline to comment on the efficacy of my Greymane play. SirSloth
Bayaz: We have really been looking to try to find our identity as a team through this season and have been trying out a lot of different styles of comps. We did try running pick comps in quite a few games however these setups have not been very successful for us so we have now moved away from that style and I think we have found some setups that work better for us so watch this space!
CaptainG: woohoo my Leo getting some love :D i think we been switching lately off that Uther n stitches as we found out our playstyle don't fit those too much, tho Greymane is our Rabbits bae character so that's the one you can count on keep seeing. We been switching the drafts now a bit when you can see who's more of the brain behind the draft as usually Bayaz goes for our safer picks while i'm always for the all in dive comps that we been scrimming with.
Horus: Since switching to tank Bayaz has been keen to have me on Stitches as he has always been one of my favourites but we haven’t really pulled it off, we will have to work out if we want to keep that strategy or switch it up a bit more.
Let’s speak more about drafts. Bayaz is known to be a Kael’thas one-trick. Despite that, he’s only featured once this season (100% winrate). Is this because teams are locking you out of it?
Rabbit: Yes that’s right everyone; keep first banning KT. Nothing to see here………..
Bayaz: We have certainly seen some bans on that KT and several teams have picked it away however now we have managed to get that pick twice (still 100% winrate PogSloth). Fear my salami!
Are you returning for Season 5, and what are your goals?
Rabbit: Yea I guess I can herd these cats for at least one more season. I’d like to win some matches for once.
Bayaz: TFA will be back and I hope stronger than ever for season 5! My goal is to continue to ensure CaptainG never ever gets to play Garrosh.
CaptainG: get to play Garrosh while Bayaz plays KT just so i can friendly throw him to their gates just as like during the launch...that is why I am banned from playing him anymore :(
Jokes aside we definitely gonna be back, hopefully with more wins and some entertaining games.
Horus: Plan to be, love the format and being involved, goals are definitely to work on main tanking and shot calling.
Undead: OSsloth
Any shoutouts?
Bayaz: Shoutout to Fallout one of our OG roster who we lost to IRL, Celerity who played with us for our first season in Heroes Lounge, Perry our support player (and irl friend) for season 3 and West who is stepping back to a sub role in season 5 after 3 crazy seasons! Shoutout to the Heroes Lounge team for creating such an awesome league to be a part of and to all our scrim and match opponents who have made our time in Heroes Lounge so much fun. Come check out the Heroes Lounge stream at twitch.tv/heroeslounge to find me casting some HL matches and say hi! Also big shoutout to Rabbit who took over the captain responsibilities for me this season to enable me to get more involved in casting :D
Rabbit: Everything Bayaz said and also huge shoutouts to Hally, Xiphosura, Mahotsukai, Rockstar, Arquine, Vik, Valrock, Celestina, Pudzy and everyone else involved in custom games that I have forgotten. Thanks for putting up with our clowning. :D
CaptainG: Want to shout out to my team for adopting a crazy, never sober maniac; to Shadowmoon, Empix, Arquine and rest of our scrim partners , it's always fun killing Shadow in the solo lane and to my bro C1Martin that always cheering me on during the lounge games. Ow and check and follow my stream twitch.tv/DJCaptainG ! Horus: Shoutout to my bro Fallout for getting me involved and my wife for not shouting at me too much for playing games!
Undead: OSsloth (and something something cake something)
That wraps out our interview with The Forever Alones! Thank you for the interview, I hope you guys (and gal) enjoyed it as much as I have.
As always if you have any feedback, suggestions, interview requests, or would just like to tell me how awesome the interviews are, you can always find me on discord. Any other kind of feedback, suggestion and criticism can always be directed at us through our Discord, or via Twitter or Facebook. Don’t be shy to come say hi, and meme with us.
On other news, we have a new hot item in store, a sloth chibi shirt .
.png){kind=small}
