Week 6 is over, and now is a time to recap. Recap on matches, upsets, and in this case, player of the week. This week, Player of the Week has been selected as a well known name in the DoD community, Dan “scorch” Schey. I got the chance to talk with Dan and ask him about DoD, and the hundred other games he plays.

To get started tell us a little bit about your gaming career and yourself.

My name is Dan Schey. I'm 23 years old and working full-time in Los Angeles, CA. I've been gaming on and off my whole life, starting in the days of commodore64/intellivision/NES 8bit, but I started playing a lot towards the end of first year in college. The guys in my suite used to play basketball every afternoon, until I ended up rolling both my ankles a couple months apart, which kept me out of commission for a good 3-4 months.

During that time I started playing quake 3 with the guys in my suite/building at nights, and when they would go shoot hoops I would play in FFA pubs. After a month or so, punkbuster was released and you needed a cdkey to play online, so instead of buying quake, I ended up buying a half-life cd for 8$ off ebay. I started playing counter-strike towards the end of cs1.0 and would play in the UCSD/UCLA/UCSB public servers. In April or May, I read a little writeup about a new HL mod being released to the public, and I decided to download it before I went home because the UC connection is sick and I don't even remember if I had broadband at home at that time. I didn't end up playing that mod until around September when I heard that a new update (b2.0) was being released, but I've been playing cs and dod since then with varying levels of activity.

I started playing DoD competitively with KIR near the end of 2.0, but when the good players (god I can't remember them all, but I remember leaving when Civil stopped playing) left, I decided to look for a serious team. After getting denied by DiNk (they were the only pacific team listed on the CAL-I team list), I ended up joining UGA on the same fateful day as a lowly pubstar named Mr. Garrison.


Now, you have always been known to play with CAL-Invite powerhouses like complexity, and check-six. And now you are playing with a higher tier Main team. Are you playing for pV because you have friends on the team, or has Invite just gotten a bit boring?

To be completely honest, I was tired of DoD. After Summer CPL, I didn't really want to play at all anymore, but we needed to play out a season to receive our CPL money so we did. Six months of thinking endlessly about DoD, followed by a season of not playing DoD at all had left me ready to stop playing. I was lured back with the promise of not having to practice and still being able to win. Unfortunately, we've learned that cal-main is now filled with CAL-I level tryhards.

pV has a great chance of winning the CAL-Main title this season, but there are also some very good teams that you have to go up against, like Knox, GIMP, n2p, and careface-_- (GR). Are you worried about these teams, or do you think you will be able to beat them when it counts?

Obviously, lots of teams have proven they can beat us when they come prepared. I heard knox kind of died last week? If not, they, checkmate. and gimp are the only teams I'm worried about. If we actually practice, I don't see anyone stopping us, although there might be a close game here or there.

pV is a CAL-P Counter-Strike team, and when sEn merged with them, they were just a 3.1 reform, that not to many people knew about. Do you know how pv ended up picking up sEn?

If I remember correctly, Frank Calise (dawg) happened to live with one of the pV cs guys at UVA(??) and that facilitated the merge.

Arguably the competition and skill level in CAL has dramatically gone down since recently. Most of the big name players have retired, moved on to different games, or gone for the CAL-O glory. Do you think that the game will ever get back to the competition level of pre CPL times?

If there were to be another CPL tournament, I could see the competition level go up a good amount, especially since coL and x6 (and just as importantly u5/hb/pandemic/etc) haven't been playing in awhile. There are a lot of pretty good teams that could get up there with a good leader and smart play. However, I don't see the old x6 team making a comeback as most of us have other things we spend our time doing. Max, Jeff, and Kellen have basically disappeared from the internet and I talk to them on aim/irc a couple times a week, and I think Kellen shows up to play matches for BnG. The amount of time I spent playing / thinking about playing DoD before last Summer was pretty absurd and I don't think I'd like to return to it without that team. Without that team, only coL and u5 would really be at that level of play, and that doesn't make for a very exciting and competitive tournament.

To some a scapegoat for the low level of competition in CAL has been Source. Source is another one of the many games you play, but do you think that it is what is needed to revive the limping DoD community?

I will say this much, the source engine is not as bad on LAN as it is online. It plays a fair bit more like the HL1 games, but online the movement is totally beyond repair. When I heard that DoD:S was going to be a straight port to the source engine, I had high hopes for it being an awesome graphical update with already-proven gameplay. It was such a disappointment the first time I actually played it. I'm of the opinion that there is zero chance of the current DoD community ever being revived by that game.

Many DoD fans have been trying to set up local, small LANs that usually don't happen. But recently Batman, and a few others have been working hard to get CPL to host a Day of Defeat competition. Do you think that this will be possible after they announced recently that Counter-Strike Source would be held as a third game for CPL?

Of course, there's always hope. The CPL has seen what the DoD community can do for them.

You have been able to play with complexity, one of, if not the most famous syndicate in all of e-sports. Do you think that this has affected your gaming career?

Other than people that I've never talked to pm'ing me like I'm their best friend, not really ;o

You are, and have been a top player in the DoD community for a long time. What makes you such a dominant player, the long time you have been playing, or is it just natural skill? I would say that everyone has some level of natural skill, and that kind of sets the ceiling for your ability. People like Kellen who are intelligent and have reaction times less than 150 ms have the ability to be absolutely insane at FPS games. When I played cs, my quickness was something I prided myself on, and it was pretty rare that I would play someone that would get the first shot on me. Whether or not I hit them was a different question, and that's where experience, practice, and knowledge of the game come into the equation. Sniping for a good three or four seasons, and having the patience to put myself in advantageous positions ended up being a bigger part of my game than being quick. No matter how fast you are, hitting certain shots is very difficult. Putting yourself in position to have an easy shot while the person peeking you has a hard shot is what sniping is. In fact, the majority of the six months between Winter and Summer CPL tourneys, I spent working on slowing down my shooting, hitting people when they stopped moving and not wasting a bullet on impossible flick shots. I think the most important reason was that I made friends with the right people. It takes all the pressure off when you know that you can go 5-25 and your team will still win. As for rifling, I'm still pretty bad, although I started competing with KIR and UGA as a rifle, so hopefully I'll eventually get back into it at some point.