Interview with Miss*Rinoa
Hey Neha! Can you tell us a little about yourself, and a little about your new team?

Hey, I'm Miss*Rinoa or PinkPriestess. I'm a long time TDA Moderator, head of GotFrag DotA coverage and I shoutcast as well. I recently decided to reform my team into the new Excuse Me Miss! I've known Eva for over a year now and recently met her in person! Kristina lives close to me and I hang out with her a lot. Caryl is in Clan TDA with me on Azeroth and I found Daniela on the meetyourmakers site. Eva told me about Jenny, who is dating AMXZaku.

How did the team form?

I formed Powerpuff Girls months ago because me and Eva always wished to have an all-girl DotA team someday since there are so many girl teams for counter strike. Since then we have lost IceQueen, Angel_Eye and fortunately Visarka. Losing three members and adding two is pretty much a new team so I decided to give it a fresh start. Adding Daniela and Caryl made me feel like restarting the team and we decided on the name Excuse Me Miss! Most of us share the love for final fantasy so we decided to name ourselves after some characters.

What ever happened to the Powerpuff Girls? There was a huge hype about PpG, but nothing ever happened!

When I first started PpG so many of the girls were busy. Myself, IceQueen and Jenny had final exams. Eva was graduating from college and Angel was busy with stuff too. We didn't start playing until a month after we formed the team. Only three of us had any experience of DotA skill outside TDA so the competitive DotA scene was completely new to the others. We played really well in our first WCL match, which we won and then lost our second. We couldn't finish the WCL playoffs because I had problems with my computer and monitor and I was DotA-less for over four weeks. I also hadn't recruited Daniela or Caryl yet so we only had like four girls.

Why did you change your team name?

I was tired of people asking if we named ourselves PpG because of that warcraft girl Cassandra. Also, I'm the highest level on GGC now- level 18. You have to be level 25 I believe to create a clan. I found out there is another team Powerpuff Girls from the Phillipines. They had already made the clan on GGC and I've played with some of them. We decided Powerpuff Girls is too generic so we brainstormed for almost two days for a new name and tag.

There seems to be a few new faces on the team, can you tell us a little about each one?

Daniela hails from Argentina, she's friends with metro and other Argentinian players in real life. She has translated many of inde_ed's guides from English to Spanish on forums. I was worried when IceQueen quit DotA what I was going to do about soloing but this girl rocks! She farmed an 18 minute refresher on warlock in one of our scrims and she's a strong player. Caryl is in Clan TDA with me and she plays DotA with her boyfriend, SpeedHavock. She had seen our old team profile posted on some forums and she approached me on battle.net. I talked to her over ventrilo and played a few games with her. I was impressed and asked her to join the team.

PpG was supposedly going to play the all girl team Asterisk* from Singapore, will Excuse me Miss! now be playing them instead?

We were scheduled to scrim them on June 23rd. It was pretty funny, everybody was ready to show up...we had scheduled it a month in advance. The day before though my monitor crapped out and stopped working. I was on my brother's laptop for four weeks which doesn't have ggc or warcraft so we missed our scheduled scrim. I talked to Tammy (furryfish), who is the leader of asterisk* and she said we can try it again sometime.

It seems that Miss* has been placed in HTGN Pro, how do you feel about this? What other leagues will the team be playing in?

We had originally signed up for HTGN Open but the administrators moved us up to Pro. Initially my whole team was appalled. I guess people failed to realize this really is a completely different team. I talked to Cubswin and told him I didn't think we were ready for Pro. He explained to me that my girls are good and we are capable of beating many teams in the Pro division. I'm still a little hesitant but recently we scrimmed vs an HTGN Open team and we completely destroyed them. I suppose we will either own or get owned. Hopefully WCL will work out for us next season as well too!

Looking through the roster, there seems to be ladies from all over the world, with the time zone difference, do you find it hard to practice?

Argentina and Peru are only an hour ahead of America. I actually had a harder time with scheduling when we were PpG. IceQueen and Angel were so hard to get on and we'd almost always have four instead of five. Now I have Daniela and Caryl who are on A LOT. Almost every night when I want to scrim we have five if not all six on!

What has been your best experience with the players on the team right now?

My team has gotten extremely close and we play with each other almost every night now. Instead of just playing scrims we do a lot of lane controls as well. I have to say I love our late-night vent sessions that include me and Daniela singing songs like "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" and talking about which DotA guys are cute!

Is there a big difference with playing with a group of girls instead of mostly guys?

There is definitely a huge difference. Right now when I play DotA it's either an IHCS with 4 guys like LightOfHeaven, vigoss or Merlini. If I'm not playing IHCS its a scrim or match with 4 girls. When I play IHCS I'm usually stuck with the low hp support hero that has to buy chicken and wards. There's always someone telling me what to do and the games can be so much more frustrating. It's different when playing with my girls. When I play with my team I'm usually playing solo Queen of Pain or Tinker and I'm the one leading the game the entire time. I definitely enjoy playing with my girls more, because they trust me and that makes me play better. But I also love playing with guys because I learn so much from them. With my team, most lack confidence and aggression..it's harder to push one of them to initiate. In IHCS it's usually me getting carried :P

Last question, will Miss* ever attend a LAN event?

It would be really hard to get Daniela and Caryl to an event, they haven't really traveled outside their countries and it would probably be expensive. I guess we'd need to be sponsored! :P I'm sure I can get the American girls, but that's only three. I will definitely be at LAN events myself though, for news coverage.

Thanks for the interview, would you like to give any shoutouts?

I would like to shoutout to my girls and gotfrag staff, I love them! Shoutout to Merc, Kaiser the magnet and inDe_eD who rang in scrims for us. And of course my favorite DotA friends: Naz, Pendragon, Whisper, Wedge, the MYM guys, Loda, Protoss, FocusIRE, LightOfHeaven, vigoss, ARS-ART, Rwar, Krabe, Majin, and Lego!