Cloud9 recently participated in the PCZone Readers Challenge Tournament and came out victorious. They had some hard fought matches throughout and ended up defeating Team Dignitas in the final match. They've also lost Performance, one of their pilots, to Team Dignitas.

Cloud9 has been around since Battlefield 1942 and is the result of a merger between two previous clans, GN-Crew and reG. They are on a quest to once again become the number one Denmark team. They are currently playing in Team Warfare's Global Crisis 2005 European Theater and their first match is against the Multiplayer Gamers. We'll try to have a demo of this match for you to view when its completed.

With Performance leaving their team, we'll have to wait and see how they perform without him. I recently go the chance to sit down with demetri and ask him a few questions about their recent win and about the loss of Performance.

Please introduce yourself and your role with Cloud9.

demetri: Hi there! My name is Viktor Sandstrøm, in-game: demetri - I mainly play the assault class, who run around in the front dealing with anything that moves ;).

You recently won the PCZone Readers Challenge. In the final match, you squared off against Team Dignitas. How was it playing against them?

demetri: Oh yea we did :). Well, it was of course a very intense fight! I can tell you that there was absolutely no silence on our teamspeak server while the match went on. Both teams made constant attacks on the flags, making a really hard time for each other. It was without any doubt one of the closest match we have played in BF2.

What do you think allowed you to defeat Team Dignitas overall?

demetri: Practice. That’s the keyword for our good teamplay atm! We had some good and well prepared tactics against Dignitas that night, and sure, something good came out from the hardwork :).

How did you prepare for your final match?

demetri: Before signing up for the cup, we had to decide which map to play throughout the whole tournament. We picked Dragon Valley, and "unfortunately" Dignitas did too. So the final map was Dragon Valley twice. The good thing about having the same home map as Dignitas was that we were very well prepared since all our past practice matches have been on that particular map.

You recently lost Performance to Team Dignitas. How will this affect your team as a whole, strategy-wise, and are there any hard feelings between you?

demetri: It's a big loss! Performance was a really great chopper pilot (you can ask TsN|deman) and had outstanding infantry skills. So that he decided to join Dignitas (after we beated them) was of course a very sad thing. But
don’t worry, we will come up with another great pilot!

You are competing in the TWL Global Crisis Tournament as well. How do the other teams stack up and who do you think will make it to the finals?

demetri: It’s a hard question. There are even more skilled clans competing with each other this time so it will be even more exciting to follow! I'm really looking forward to this tournament :). It’s too risky to give you
two names, but Cloud9 will put in a lot of effort to be one of them.

In your opinion, who are the Top Five European Battlefield 2 Teams out there?

demetri: There are many good teams right now. This is only the beginning, and a lot is
going on from day to day. I still think that the best clan, would be the most active clan that has the time to really play the maps through, and create some very good tactics. I think teams like Pactum, HFD, Cloud9, Dignitas and lehnitz have showed some great skills!

If CAL decided to open a European Division, do you think they would get a lot of the European teams to sign-up?

demetri: There are a lot of tournaments atm! Really nice to see the support. More attention to BF2 can only be good. I’m sure that if CAL opens a European Division many teams will sign up!

As an assault-style player, what do you feel is your most important role while playing in matches?

demetri: That depends on what map we are playing. For example, on city maps like Strike at Karkand it’s very important that you are good with the grenade launcher, it’s a one shot one kill if you can aim precisly (of course its also very
useful on other maps too) - and everyone knows that deaths = ticket drain. So it’s important to shoot a lot of people in my opinion :).

Another really important role is to give the commander of the opponent team a hard time by doing a lot of sneaky missions. It can turn the match around if you, for example, take their rear flag by using the squad spawn system.

Do you have any advice for new, upcoming players to Battlefield 2?

demetri: It’s really about practice the class you like to play, and then become really good at it. All around players are really good (and rare) but try to focus on about 2 classes, for instance: assault and anti-tanker.

Thank you once again, do you have any shoutouts you'd like to make?

demetri: No problem! uhm.. I want to thank the European community for their great support we at C9 feels right now. Also a big thank to Deman and his crew for the great covering of the tournament. Good luck to all the clans! BF2 Rocks :).

Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors listed below:

None ;).

I'd like to thank demetri again for answering my questions. Good luck to Cloud9 in the Global Crisis tournament, good luck to all the teams competing. We hope you guys find another great pilot to help you out. We have recently uploaded the demo of their final match against Team Dignitas to GotFrag. We have split the demo into two parts, a part for each side. You can download them here and here. You'll need to unzip the demos into your My Documents/Battlefield 2/Profiles/Default/demos/ folder in order to view them in-game.