WAR — We continue our pre-i46 team interviews today; in the hot seat today is the man/myth/legend (delete as applicable) Byte-me, who’s leading another incarnation of TCM-Gaming into iSeries with high expectations. Let’s begin…

How do you and your team feel going into this LAN event? With a second place in the ETF2L finals it must be good knowing that you’re close to the top.

We’re happy we ended 2nd, makes us still the under dogs and will want to push us even harder to try and prove a point at i46. We feel fairly confident we can end in the top 4, and get to the final at least.

This LAN will feature two of the best American teams and once and for all we can finish the debate about who is the best. Do you think that they will be genuine contenders, or will the Vanilla rule-set cause an issue for them?

You can never write off the American’s, having watched them since it was a huge thing in the US they have just got better and better, their dm is phenomenal very brave, gutsy but also on the line of stupidity. They are professional gamers I can’t see the Vanilla rule-set being an issue at all, it takes them a matter of hours to adapt without a few unlocks…

i46 is set to be a really big event, do you think we will see more of these large showings in the future?

If hype and interest is kept in the community then yes it will be, i49 will probably be bigger and we will have a bigger TF2 pool of players, we have various organisations trying to pimp up TF2 atm, in specific twitch by offering various resources and services for certain TF2 members…

How is your team preparing for the final stages? Are you playing a lot to try and get as much PCW time? Or are you just practicing as normal, are you going through some tactics and discussions with the team to iron out any problems from your play before you hit LAN?

Playing alot, reviewing our demo’s, how we can improve and so on…

What team are you most afraid of at the event?

Absolutely nothing…

With the amount of players and teams attending, what team and which player do you feel will be ones to watch and cause a surprise?

Epsilon – stefan, Classic Mixup – Ruwin, Classic mixup^ – TLR

What do you think the final standings will be?

Epsilon
Classic Mixup / TCM,
Infused,
LG

What are you hoping to achieve at this LAN? What do you think will happen with TF2 going forward?

In terms of achievement, would be nice to win one of the biggest TF2 events and probably will be the most memorable one with the Yanks coming down, so to win it is the aim. After the LAN TF2 will take a break no doubt for a few weeks, so that everyone can recover from playing so much TF2 but for the near and long future of TF2, things can only get better and better, I’m sure we will attract the crowd so much more than any other game at i46 and probably get a large amount of spectators who’ve never played the game before wanting to play! :D

Any thanks and shoutouts?

Shoutout to TCM, Xman & Walkah, also shoutout to Twitch for supporting this game even more so now! Major thanks to my staff here at VanillaTV, and a final shoutout to Gubbins :D