Bsr #0, April 22, 2007 at 4:25 PM EST Introduction Bsr: I'm here with Demanufacturer the founder of Australian Multi-gaming clan Modus Operandi. A staple in the ET community, perhaps your reputation hasn't quite reached the same heights in other communities so could you please introduce yourself to our readers? Demanufacturer: My name is Andrew Townsend, I'm 24 years old and I live in Melbourne, Australia. Apart from managing MO I work in the IT industry providing tech/desktop support. Can you give us a brief rundown of how you got started in the world of online gaming and did you ever envision that you would become involved to such an extent in the E-Sports scene? Back in the late 90's my mother had gotten a 14.4k modem because she had to mark reports for a University over dialup. I ended up getting into games like Doom2 and mostly Descent. I sent an e-mail to a guy named Andrew Quested who used to write a weekly column in TV Week asking him if he wanted to play 1on1 sometime. We played some games and he ended up telling me about a board called PlayNET, where you could dial in and play against up to 7 other players. This was the first time I’d played a multiplayer game and I got into it but not too heavily. Back then I used to play Descent with the keyboard and consider anyone who used a mouse lame =) I never really got into anything after that and it wasn’t until a few years later after I downloaded the RTCW MP Demo on 56k dialup that things really changed. I never thought downloading a 50mb file overnight would eventually lead to me playing games in another country, no =) Personal Playing Career Now correct me if I'm wrong, but RTCW was the game that saw the creation of Modus Operandi. Exactly how did you form the team, who were the initial members and was this the moment when you decided to give up the life as a simple pub star and enter the competitive gaming scene? MO was alive in RTCW for about 2 weeks. After the Season 1 shakeups and breakups I formed MO with some players I was good friends with. I'd picked up one of the hottest players from season 1, but things went pear shaped fairly quickly. A few disagreements and a lack of practices saw the team disband before it played a game. I ended up taking some of those players to another team called Anarchy, which had a lot of championship winning Quake 3 talent where I ran the team alongside a guy called Presh. It was a very ego driven team based on skills above all else, and for the most part that approach worked. We ended up getting to the grand final of Season 2 against O2/Oxygen. Ironically that O2 team featured my hot property from pre-season - Evil Homer – who ended up being integral in their success. O2 took us down 3-0 on Ice and it was the best example of a champion team beating a team of champions I’ve seen to date. It was the empty feeling after that loss that later drove me to form a team that I would want to be a part of, a team that focused on teamwork as much as aim and professionalism as much as winning. That then happened once ET was released where I took the foundation of an old school RTCW team called coffin Dodgers. I didn’t know what I was eventually getting myself in for though =) You are of course commonly associated with being the leader of Modus Operandi. Were you responsible for calling the strats and leading the team from the outset and how would you describe your leadership style and any changes that it has undergone in the course of your playing career? In the very beginning, I was very democratic in how strats ran, and the team. Interestingly that worked for some players and not others: some want freedom, some want to be told exactly what to do. I was always calling the strats in MO, with the help of co-captains developing them. It wasn’t something I was naturally good at and it didn’t come overnight. The biggest turning point in my leadership style was a post match conversation I had with Warmachine where we were talking about the calls that were made and how something cost us a game. He gave me what became one of the keys to my leadership style. He said "Andrew, you're not always going to make the right call, but the call HAS to be made" - it wasn’t all smooth sailing from that point, but it still comes to mind whenever there is doubt about a strat or a play. You know whenever you make a call it could cost the team the game, but that’s a pressure you learn to deal with in time. And time is something you have had plenty of in the GA ladder having played a number of the seasons for the most part with Modus Operandi but also with YOY. Let's reminisce for a moment if we may, can you provide us with your fondest memory while playing ET? Wow this is a really hard question haha. We've had so many good times even just practices, the friendships we've formed. Personally for me, the win that I always enjoy the most was the Season 3 Championship. I had been copping a lot of flack from a lot of people in the lead up to that game, and taking out the championship was a vindicating experience I'll never forget. The feeling of achieving something you’ve worked very hard for with your friends is one of the greatest feelings ever and I always look back on that night and smile. The win in Season 3 led to the production of the movie showing the final few minutes of the deciding round on SOS against your opponents Dodge. The movie was aptly titled Vindication, as the team had finally managed to buck the image of a team with so much potential of which had failed to bring it to fruition. Obviously the win was a great moment for you, personally how did it feel to finally get the monkey off the back? As I mentioned earlier, we were copping a lot of flack. We had things like people threatening to DOS attack us during the finals, people targeting my friends, other inactive MO players. It was a really tough time, and put the stakes for that season through the roof. The plan for that season was to just stick to idea of taking it easy/not getting too invested. Of course, we quickly got past the point of no return. Looking back I wouldn’t have had it any other way - it made it that much more satisfying. 2005 provided a memorable moment for Modus Operandi as they became the first Australian team to be invited to compete at QuakeCon. Qualification was secured after overcoming European team Kreaturen in an intense match, one in which the odds were highly stacked against you. What was the feeling like to have qualified and did you expect the struggle you would have to gain funds to send the team over? Qualifying was great, we knew we had the goods to do that, but it was still a matter of pulling it off - and nobody tipped us. One of the best things about that was the support of the Aussie community, cheering us on in ETTV, it really helped. With the struggle for funds we knew it would be tough, but we didn’t know it would be that tough. Thankfully even though Warmachine had retired, he was still around managing and he was instrumental in the whole process. It really halved our ability to prepare for the event, as I was working with Warmachine half of the time, maybe even more, to secure funds. Later on it ended up being another compelling reason for me to focus on managing full-time. Preceding the tournament there was quite a bit of hype surrounding the team, the win over Kreaturen drastically changing many people’s view on Mo* as a team with notable community figures tipping mo* to finish as high as second. In the end the team finished a respectable 5th, were you happy with the showing and when did it become clear that you would have to pull out something very special to fulfill some of people’s lofty expectations? We were mostly focusing on our own goals, but we knew we had a lot of pressure on us given the communities generous donations and all the support we'd received. Placing off of the podium wasn’t the most satisfying experience, but none of the guys regret it. A lot of our trip wasn’t just about winning Quakecon, and we achieved a lot with our 5th place. TosspoT famously wrote after Quakecon 2005 that he worked to turn the hype machine on for MO to generate more expectation and anticipation for the event. I never really felt that put more pressure on us; we had all dealt with insurmountable pressure before. It was just good to see that kind of thing happening in ET. Another of the obstacles pre QuakeCon was the departure of BennyB. As with all kinds of teams there are clashes between individuals that lead to changes and Modus Operandi seems to be no different. How did this affect the team and how in general do disagreements cause you to act? Yeah BennyB leaving was a big shakeup for us. I had played with BennyB in the later seasons of RTCW and I was a huge fan of his work and attitude. I honestly saw the potential in him to be one of the best players in the world and I wanted to help bring that about. The obvious choice was to pick up a wolf veteran with tons of matches under their belt for the quest we were going to embark on. Unfortunately Benny didn’t fit in with how the team worked, and my real regret there was losing that friendship. We had to soldier on, with shaggy not being able to commit to our Quakecon roster due to University, we brought schism in to fill the lineup out. How in general do you deal with conflict? My teams are known for having a lot of conflict, haha. Basically I got to a point where I wouldn’t accept anything less than everyone’s personal best, and as long as I objectively knew I was already adhering to that same standard, I would be ruthless and unforgiving. If things escalated I would always seek the counsel of the co-captains and asses what was really an issue. If it was important, what was good for the team and its future would be the factors by which we’d decide how to go ahead. Let’s head back to the GA ladder and another controversial move was the shock move to YOY in Season 5 of the GA ladder. For those of our readers who don’t know much about the Australian ET scene there had been considerable acrimony between Modus Operandi and YOY to that point and if one was to predict that the leader of one team would join the other they would have received plenty of incredulous looks. How did this move come about after the aforementioned issues? After Season 3 and Quakecon, I got to the point where I had fulfilled my competitive needs. I had gone undefeated for a year, I had taken it overseas. There was never a middle ground between not playing and giving 100% if it was playing for MO - I ended up just wanting to play for fun, and even though there were enough MO players to bring MO back, not enough of us were motivated at the time. Joining the YoY roster was half just for fun and half for the shock value. I made some good friends in YoY and had a lot of fun there, which is exactly what I wanted. It was interesting to play the game and not have to lead and just focus on my personal game, even though I ended up running the team with trac1d towards the end of season 6. Well it certainly did cause a bit of shock as there were ramifications being felt fairly close to home so to speak. What was the fallout from the move? A lot of the team was shocked by my decision to join the YoY roster for fun. From my perspective, I’d had the biggest grudge against YoY of anyone in the team, and I was at a point where I wanted to mend bridges. Before my achievements, there was a lot of macho/ego driven posturing because I guess I still felt I had to prove myself in some small way. After Quakecon, I cared even less about what anyone thought of what I did - with the exception of my fellow MO players. Unfortunately tensions with angelus came to a head at that time, with him leaving along with Xenz later on. It was really disappointing as both came to Quakecon with us, but these things happen. Some other MO players were shocked but they accepted my reasoning and understood I just wanted to have some fun. I felt I had earnt it =) Your move to YOY was one of the memorable moments of Season 5 as was the Semi-Final against Infernal Chaos, a nail-biter on the sands of Beach. Widely predicted as an easy win for YOY, Infernal Chaos pulled off an amazing win with only seconds to spare. In your career there have been plenty of close calls, just how disappointing is it for you to lose a match? It was really disappointing, given IC weren’t even able to field a proper squad for the grand final; YoY would have made more of a game of it. At the same time, it was a learning experience outside of MO. In my perspective, MO won either way - with shaggy in narc (who won) and our signing of ringo (who made all of the game winning calls in that IC game) to our ET team, all the winning experience in those finals served MO in the end. Obviously because it was YoY and not MO the loss didn’t mean a lot, losing a game as MO is a different story. Well considering we have plenty of time would you like to tell us a bit about that story? What story!! =p what it’s like to lose as mo? Yep! Its good to forget what its like to lose, but sometimes you just need a loss to kick you into gear. Losing has never sat well with me, ever, in any season or situation. If MO take a loss it’s a big deal for me, playing or not, and it requires analysis and work to turn it around. Losing should raise a squad’s motivation, instead of taking it down. Season 7 saw the return of the ET squad to the GameArena competition. Perhaps mirroring the past, the team has managed to figure in the finals consistently but is yet to take out another GameArena title. With a reshuffle of the squad bringing in players such as Ike from the past two season’s champions Adversus, Serp and Trac1d back your obvious desire to see the team triumph; do you think this is the season? It's been a rough ride coming back into ET, but it’s been much different to how things were back in the day. Season 7 ended for us in a pretty controversial way, and I was keen to turn things around in Season 8, however I then retired to manage the team fulltime, which led to a major shift in how the team worked, was managed and how strats were called. We've shuffled our deck a few times and it'll just be a matter of time before we get back into our old form. Modus Operandi - The Organization Starting off as a predominantly Enemy Territory focused clan, in the past few months has seen Modus Operandi mature into a Multi-gaming organisation with the additions of a CS 1.6 squad in September and more recently a COD2 team. Quite a significant change if you don’t mind me saying, and without an in-depth involvement in the CS community for instance what were some of the challenges of this expansion? It’s been really interesting seeing the insides of these other communities I'd only heard about before. There are a lot of differences in how the teams work, attitudes, approaches etc. We had been looking at CS teams for a while, but the vast majority of the CS community had no idea who we were. We wanted to focus on bringing in a division that would be a MO team rather than just a re-badge. We've been able to do that with both CS and COD2. The only real challenge the teams face is our set of roster shuffles across the board, so we aren’t seeing the solid results people are used to from a gelled MO team just yet. Now running such a large organisation it is clearly something you couldn’t do all on your lonesome. Who provides the backroom support that allows a smooth running of things and the manpower that allows you to bring in the extra squads? The addition of Jono "flip" Borrill really helped in the biggest transition we've had, bringing in the CS division. Jono usually works on marketing and media for the team along with overseeing small projects. My retirement from my love of playing has given me the hours I need to manage our divisions, sponsors, etc. You will see more staff come on board in the future as we move to specialize aspects of MO which will most notably be seen with a head of content & coverage for the MO site. Adding to the above just how much support do you require from sponsors? Although your ET team may not have to travel much there is a decent sized LAN scene in Australia for CS 1.6 and a developing one for the COD2 team, do the sponsors cover all the costs or are you forced to look elsewhere for funds? Finding financial backing for eSports is always a tough ask, especially in Australia. There are always events that you can’t attend due to financial constraints, but every one of those situations is handled differently. Our kind sponsors also assist in outfitting our players with gear they need to maintain consistency and play at their best. Personally the addition of fUnc and Plantronics to MO has been fantastic as I used those products when I went to Quakecon. How would you describe your approach to the management side of things? Critics of your style have described you as aggressive and lambasted the organisation for taking things too professionally especially in the ET community. Can you give the readers an insight into what goes into managing the players and why it is necessary to make some of the choices you have made? Professionalism breeds competitiveness which leads to big games which leads to coverage which leads to more support for the community. There is a bigger picture, and with the more professionally minded teams that have popped up in ET, the better the community has become. We have good GameOps, good servers and now fairly consistent ETTV coverage. MO is always my primary focus but I had goals for Australian Wolfenstein as well, and that was to put it on the map - and following international standards, showing respect for the competition and other teams is the only way to do that. If we’re playing 8v8 ET, no matter how good the games and teams are it won’t help us break the international scene. Sure, this doesn’t affect the casual gamer, but I bet you the same casual gamer would love to be seeing an Aussie ET team doing well overseas. A team doesn’t have to prac 5 nights a week to contribute to the community with a positive attitude and good sportsmanship. Some people are just there to have fun, and that’s great. But people also need to realize that there are teams that are putting in 15 hours a week into the game and just like real world sports watching 2 of those teams go head to head is a fantastic experience. An issue that has cropped up on more than one occasion to do with Mo* has been that of poaching. You stated above that "showing respect for the competition and other teams is the only way to do that (put Australia on the map)”, a noble goal but one that has bought a degree of public condemnation. Does it ever occur to you that perhaps there is a better way to go about trying to accomplish this goal? The way I look at it, I don’t poach players as much as I create opportunities for ambitious gamers. If a player is in another team, and we want them for one of our divisions, if they accept what we can offer them and want to come on board, the other team is better off without them. "Poaching" is a two way street, if a player wants to leave a particular team for us they either want a change or want to be a part of MO. Either way, we have never really had issues with people "poaching" our players, so we must be doing something right. So do you feel contracts are necessary in the running of a multi-gaming organisation? Definitely, just as much for the players as for the organisations. A player needs to understand what their organizations responsibility is to them, and vice versa. They are also an integral part of bringing stability to lineups and to separate the serious gamers from the not so serious. Contract buyouts aren’t unheard of already in eSports, although we’re yet to deal with a situation like that. The willingness to contribute to the community has been a strongpoint in Mo*, whether it be via a workshop to enhance players understanding of a game or through movies such as Vindication and Truc1dio. Can we expect to see any movies in the coming months or perhaps another workshop, not necessarily in ET? We have some things coming up that won’t just be for ET, but I can’t really go into that. There will be more workshop-type projects coming up though. With ET, we really want to keep the game alive as much as possible, but whether workshops would help that at this stage is unclear. Movie wise, Jono is currently working on a project which is looking fantastic. There is no ETA for its release though. On the topic of the future, where to from here? After the addition of the COD2 squad is it likely that we will see any more added, perhaps a few Quake players in light of the CPL stop late this year? Or is now a time for consolidation? We've had the opportunity to move into a few games but we really want to focus on getting the right people. Quake is a game we'd likely move into, depending on the size of the scene with the lead up to CPL. Time will tell there. At the moment the focus is definitely on our current divisions, getting past the transition periods and working towards the future. The difference now is that we have full time management we will be able to stack community initiatives on top of that. As we touched upon before, QuakeCon was obviously one of the organisations highlights and huge achievement to attend. If, for instance it was announced that ET would again be one of the major tournaments, what are the chances that the current squad would attend? There are so many factors involved: money, motivation, qualification, etc. The current squad is starting to click, so only time will tell. Gaming in Australia With the three squads all active in the Australian scene at the moment, what are some of the major tournaments Australian or abroad coming up that we will see the Mo* teams operate in and what are their goals for these? Basically MO squads operate with a sky is the limit mentality. It’s all or nothing. You'll see the Wolfenstein division competing in ET up until the release of Quake Wars where we will reassess our goals for that division. The Call of Duty boys are going to be focusing on GameArena along with CEVO, and if other invite leagues pop up in the mean time, we will look at those. With the growing amount of COD2 LANs we will also be looking at attending some of those. The CS guys will be the busiest of all with their focus being on all Melbourne LAN competitions along with CAL, CEVO and CPL. A country like Australia throws up a lot of difficulties for a gaming organisation not in the least the disparity between the size of population and its sparsity. Do you think E-Sports in Australia can get over this hurdle and make a better name for itself not only locally but on a global scale? A lot of Australian teams have proven to the world we have what it takes. We don’t have the same resources as Europe unfortunately. Comparatively to Europe, NSW and VIC would be separate countries. So one hurdle is that to be the best in Australia, in CS most of all, you have to be the best in comparison to 3-4 other mini-countries. Not an impossible goal, of course. Once gaming becomes more mainstream, which is already happening in Australia, it will become easier. It will be some time before you see Australian teams flying to every international event possible however. 2007 like any other year brings with it a plethora of new gaming titles, what games are you looking forward to personally and from the viewpoint of someone running a multigaming organisation? Obviously from your above answers Quake Wars is eagerly anticipated? Yeah, we are definitely hanging for Quake Wars and of course RTCW2 if it comes out this year. COD2 is starting to heat up in terms of its exposure and competitiveness, but what is really up in the air is CS. With a lot of big overseas names moving to Source, it will be interesting to see if that bleeds over to us. Should some new games come out and develop a competitive community we will definitely look at them. Conclusion I suppose I should finish the interview by saying something along the lines of thanks for taking the time to give the readers a better understanding of who the person behind the persona of Dman is. Would you like to give any shoutouts? Thanks to our sponsors, irc idlers and those who have stuck by us through thick and thin over the last 3 years. Your continued support helps more than you know !

MadaajR #1, April 22, 2007 at 7:06 PM EST Really good read. Nice to get to know more about Dman and the creation/running of MO. Excellent interviewer as well :)

Bsr #2, April 23, 2007 at 12:10 AM EST Epic interview ;o

Dead #3, April 23, 2007 at 12:41 AM EST nice interview

hal #4, April 23, 2007 at 10:38 AM EST great interview cheers

moto #5, April 23, 2007 at 4:32 PM EST awesome interview thanks dman for contributing to the aussie et community!

lky #6, April 23, 2007 at 4:57 PM EST he's just a big cuddly teddy bear underneath that gruff exterior

Evil #7, April 24, 2007 at 8:47 PM EST That is indeed an interesting read, surprised the hell out of me to get a mention. I must admit, as much as Dman hated lossing to O2, I enjoyed beating Anarchy even more :) Sadly, Dman whom I considered a good online mate, well, typically online friendships can be a frail thing, sadly our friendship ended and we never really got over it. That said, from my perspective, always found Dman to be a reasonable personal with great skills and a lot of fun to associate with, even when we argued like little bitches. I think if one is honest, much of the Dman v Homer arguments whilst the point was whatever it was, I think a lot of it really came from me leaving MO, something I actually regreated at the time. Nice to see MO still going, you have done a great job Dman.

evilsteel #8, April 28, 2007 at 12:36 AM EST ur a big name dman :p

riCo #9, April 28, 2007 at 10:17 AM EST he knows it evilsteel

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