This time Heroes Lounge has had the pleasure of speaking to the ever lovely team of Elite A.I. - Elite A.I. is the living proof, that Blizzard's latest A.I. buffs have paid off. The team has had a clean win streak in division 5 this season and therefore managed to plant themselves solidly at the very top of the division. Without further ado, let's meet the team.
Greetings Elite A.I., would you be so kind as to introduce yourselves to our readers?
bdemirel: Hey, I'm bdemirel, since this season in-game known as ButterDuck. I'm a co-captain of Elite A.I, along with Vision. I started playing this game as my first MOBA soon after release thanks to some IRL friends who have now left (FeelsBadMan). My role currently is feeding as the main tank, as I fed too much more as melee flex. I'm also a OSslothy WebDev for Heroes Lounge, and still an international CS student IRL in Germany.
Vision: Hi, Im Vision, 17 from the UK. I’m the shotcaller for Elite A.I. I play mostly ranged but often play as a flex but splitting off to a select few supports. I have been playing Blizzard games from a very young age, and I started playing more frequently as I got older. I started off playing World of Warcraft and then branched off into other games like Hearthstone. After a while, I began playing HotS. I enjoyed it so much, that I went to the launch event in London. After a while, I got burned out and took a break, but 4 months ago I returned to playing HotS and haven’t stopped since. Before HotS I was scrimming in Overwatch 4 hours a day 5 days a week as an amateur support player. I came to Heroes Lounge due to how much I enjoyed competitive Overwatch, and now I can enjoy an amateur HotS league.
Arthur: Hello! My name is Arthur, I'm 23, and I live in the Netherlands. I study linguistics and culture. I always loved gaming and started playing HotS about 1.5 years ago. I played a bit of Dota when it was a WC3 map. I also played some LoL, but it didn't get my attention as much as HotS did. I main support heroes, and I like this role a lot.
GentleSwalot: Hi, I'm GentleSwalot and I started playing HotS as my first MOBA close to the end of closed beta so roughly 2,5 years ago. I joined Elite A.I. this season, and I mostly play the offlane heroes but occasionally transitioning into tank or second support.
Heilong: I’m Heilong. HotS is my first MOBA. I have been playing it since 2016 and find it really enjoyable. I mostly play ranged heroes such as mages and carries. As a div 5 player, I rely heavily on my teammates to salvage my greedy plays and bad positioning.
Where did you guys meet, and how did you come together as a team?
bdemirel: We were a FAT team in Season 3, known as FAT#11. Our FAT was assigned as a team of 4 at first, but then I complained and they gave us a fifth. After quite a few roster changes/role swaps in our first season, we’ve been relatively stable this season with just one new member (RIP our lovely Li-Ming OTP Armani).
Vision: After we had a few leavers, we made a new solid roster with a lot of substitutions during season 3 and pleboffs we ended up finishing season three 6-3 if I recall correctly. We thought this was great, but we also knew, we could do better, and we set out to improve for season 4. Being a free agent team we just went with it and ended up becoming great friends. Our current roster includes 3 original members: Bdemirel, Arthur and me. GentleSwalot and Heilong are our new and great additions to the roster.
Arthur: We met because of the tournament. I saw a post on Reddit regarding Heroes Lounge and it caught my attention. I always wanted to try playing in a team, supporting and helping each other. I'm glad that I applied, it was a good decision.
GentleSwalot: I wanted to play more organized HotS, and Heroes Lounge being an amateur league, I thought it would do the trick if I found a team to play with. I eventually ended up in Elite A.I.
Heilong: I’m the newest member of the team. I joined during week 5 after the team posted in the Lounge discord and played the last 4 games with the team.
What is the story behind your team name “Elite A.I.”?
bdemirel: So towards the end of the last season, we were thinking of a new name to replace FAT#11. One of the initial ideas was using A.I. in the name because we’ve spent so much time as a 4, rather than 5. Then that idea was ditched and other suggestions were made, but still one of the suggestions was Elite A.I. Then we basically made a vote and Elite A.I. won (thankfully, otherwise TinyOwl wouldn’t have picked us to Pleboffs), but I’ll always have a place in my heart for “I Li’Li like Li’Li”.
Vision: I suppose we were just looking for a cool name that was relative to the game, and we’d prefer any name over FAT#11.
You have five wins on Infernal Shrines this season out of five. What do you find appealing about that map, and do you have any special tactics for the map, that you want to reveal to us?
Arthur: Guys, I think, I'm not that good with strategies yet, maybe it's better if you describe it :D
bdemirel: I’d say team fights. A lot of our opponents have said to us that we’re really good at team fights, and even though Infernal Shrines is relatively big, it still favors team fights a lot more. Especially in Div 5 where people can’t really out-macro you that hard. But we don’t have any special tactics. We just play what we’re good at.
Vision: Infernal has been one of our go-to maps for a while, and we are quite flexible on the map. Often we like to take shrine-control and do a lot of wave-clear to try to get ahead in rotations as well as clearing the shrine. We also like the limited choked space it provides, it gives room to maneuver with Genji and Malthael, and gives our opponents nowhere to kite to or escape. We also often use Greymane as one of our go-to heroes on that map, and we have several Greymane players. Also, it has 3 lanes...
GentleSwalot: I guess it’s mostly because you’re somewhat forced to team fight when you’re trying to get the objective. We think we can beat most of our current competition in team fights. Also one of our favorite combos works well there…
How do you feel this season has been for you. Has it lived up to your expectations?
bdemirel: I mean, obviously it did, as we’ve just finished the season with 9 wins over 9 games, but we’ve dropped quite a few maps where we shouldn’t have. But it has become a quite a bit of joke between us, that it’s just a warm-up and that we haven’t lost a match where we won the second game.
Vision: Well, we set out to at least win 8/9 matches and ended up winning all 9, though we dropped a few maps here and there. But we ended up being able to pull it together and secure #1 seed for playoffs. We knew it was going to be really difficult with teams like Puppies in Shark Tanks threatening our spot to the playoffs, but we pulled through somehow.
Arthur: Victory was our goal for this season and we reached it. We improved a lot, both individually and as a team, but of course, there are still many things we have to get better at. I think it transitions into the next question - our goal is to constantly learn and improve.
GentleSwalot: I don’t think we could’ve wanted much more than a 9/9 run. We went into the season trying to win Division 5 and now here we are.
Heliong: Yes we do, and I hope we’ll improve enough to make it into the playoffs again.
Do you have any plans on participating in the next season, and what are your hopes for season five?
bdemirel: Yes, absolutely. These two seasons have been a blast for us and we’ve already registered our team for Season 5. Now that Season 4 is finished and we moved to playoffs and then Division 4, we expect harder and more competitive matches where we can try and improve ourselves a lot more.
Vision: We are looking to play in the next season and hopefully we are being promoted to division 4. In division 4 we have some familiar names from season 3, and we are ready to prove, we have grown stronger. Hopefully, with the addition of the new heroes, we can try some new comps and styles due to our versatility.
Arthur: I hope that we'll keep participating as long as the tournament lasts, I really enjoy it. I also hope that we will reach Division 1 :D
GentleSwalot: I guess we want to establish ourselves as a notable team in Div4, we might not take one of the top spots but we’ll surely try our best.
Any shoutouts?
Vision: I’d love to shout out Potatoes 007, we basically shared players for 2 weeks due to holidays and work, but it ended out great. More specifically thanks to Maxi and Luci for helping in so many scrims and games as well as performing well when I couldn’t. All the players from Potatoes 007 are great players and have a really good attitude to playing as well as just being a really nice set of people.
Also, Bobtehnoob helped us improve our in-game communication as well as macro play with general feedback. We couldn’t have improved so quickly without him.
Thanks, Heroes Lounge and the great community that comes with it.
P.s. Thanks, mods and Petman <3
Arthur: Yes. Potatoes007 are our very good friends, they always stand ready to help us out if we need a sub or practice. We cheer each other on whenever we have a game.
Bob, our analyst who helps us a LOT, teaching us strategies and pointing out our mistakes.
My team. We became very close and we will always help and support each other, correct our mistakes together and never blame each other whenever something goes wrong. I love you all guys <3
My girlfriend who started playing Heroes of the Storm to understand what it is and to support me :)
GentleSwalot: Shoutouts to everyone that helped us practice, most notably Maximonster and Luci who even subbed for the team. Shoutouts to Armani who was our ranged player for the first half of the season, and Bob who helped us get better at communication and teamfighting.
Heilong: Shoutouts to the other team members of Elite A.I. that were kind enough to let me join halfway through. Shoutouts to the other div 5 teams and our scrim partners.
bdemirel: Apart from my team’s shoutouts, I’d like to do a shoutout to mods and captains that have been really helpful to us during these 2 seasons, especially Robb, Epixors, Celtic, xRei and Physicsman. Another shoutout to our old players like Azmodai, Brammerham, Armani and many others.
And a special shoutout to DevTeam. It’s great to be a part of them, and I promise I’ll work more Rikki.
This concludes our interview with Elite A.I. Thanks to everyone who participated: bdemirel, Vision, Arthur, GentleSwalot and Heilong, and to all of you readers supporting the Heroes Lounge blog. I hope to see you all again for my next Inside Lounge interview where we’ll have a look at the div 2 team Battle Beast Boys. Should you have any suggestions or criticism, you would like to share with us, you can always find us at the Heroes Lounge discord.
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