Today, we're interviewing one of the most well-known and popular Command & Conquer Rivals players & streamers – Entsorger, grinder of Rivals & push-ups, slave to a cat & his chat, master of voice memes & vocal meows.
Q: Hello Entsorger! As usual, let's start with personal questions. Who are you and what do you do when you are not playing Rivals? What other games do you spend your time on?
Entsorger: Sup chat! My name is Carsten, I’m 34 and originally from the USA. After living all over the place I settled in Germany where I have now lived for almost two decades. I’ve worked with computers doing web development for a while and then did a career 180 and became a pyrotechnician! Now as I am still waiting for the industry to recover I stream, pretty much full time together with my very loud and deaf cat, Augustine.
Q: How did you find Rivals? How did you find the community on social media? How did you choose the name “Entsorger”?
Entsorger: I found it when it was recommended to me on the front page of the app store one day. I never watch E3 so I had no idea it existed. The find was bittersweet, as I was happy there was finally a new C&C but disappointed it was on mobile and P2W, so I kept the game at arm’s length. I have no desire to join the community for a game that I do not take seriously, so it was a while until I reached out.
Q: Most people probably first heard of you by seeing you play MG at the top of the ladder in 2019. This strategy has recently become more popular. What do you think about this recent surge in MG usage? How would you change the unit to make it less polar and what is your opinion on how playing MG is perceived in the community?
Entsorger: Well, MG is the last very strong unit GDI has at this point. The Global Disadvantaged Initiative has seen a nerf of so many core units. I don’t blame new MG players for finding ways to win in this NOD Meta. If I had to redesign it, I would try to make it less of a core deck unit and more of a support unit. Increase speed and setup time and maybe health a little bit, but also drastically reduce damage. That way it is kind of like a permanent Strongarm turret that you use to solidify your position when you have map control. This would have to be play tested, of course. Alternatively you could also just reduce vehicle damage and it would immediately be less viable. The surge is also partly due to the fact that the economy was severely nerfed and any nerf to global income is a buff to MG which is simply one of the most cost-efficient units. In addition, a lot of classic MG counters like Kane and Solomon are harder to play with less money, so it all makes sense. 2-Range units are often inherently frustrating to play against if you are not running any counters. I don’t think that is exclusive to MG. MG just does a much better job of it than any of its cousins and is much easier and cheaper to play, and thus the perception or image of the deck follows suit. I never understood how frustrating it was to play against as there were no other MG players at the top of the ladder back in 2019, but I certainly feel it now. However, at the end of the day, it is only game; why you ‘heff to be mad?
Q: You took up streaming at the end of last year? What made you try it out? How is it going?
Entsorger: A good friend of mine had been pushing me to stream for quite a while. I never wanted to do it as I thought I would be too awkward or self-conscious and didn’t know if I would be good enough at it. Then once I saw other people streaming without a camera getting viewers I decided to give it a shot with just my headset, and once more and more people kept showing up I went ahead and bought a webcam. It’s going well! But the twitch community is unfortunately too small to support a full-time streamer so I am attempting to also branch out.
Q: That branching out is why you are playing WarCraft 3 on your stream nowadays, right? How does that game compare to Rivals? What have you learned from WC3 that helped you in Rivals and now that you are going back to WarCraft, vice versa?
Entsorger: Correct! Wc3 is very different to Rivals of course, the only similarity being they are both RTS. Warcraft 3 is a much more complex game, with a lot of decks and strategies. They are similar in the fact that they’re both kind of “player out’. Everyone knows what the best units and strategies are and so there is very little that is changing in terms of unit compositions and strategies.
Being fast about my decision making and good micro-management were the pillars that helped me get better in Warcraft which to an extent carried over to Rivals. Especially as I play Rivals on PC via Emulator, good and fast mouse movements are essential.
Q: As of this interview, you are a moderator on the community discord, stream the game 6 times a week and organise tournaments usually once a month. Is the sky the limit? Where do you see yourself and Rivals a year from now?
Entsorger: Haha, yeah things have taken off. I just really, really love the game. When I am passionate about something I get deeply involved and have no problem devoting spare time. I guess the limit is when I am involved in running the game! I could see myself getting more involved if we ever achieve our goal of a community-driven Rivals. Should that pertain only to balance or maybe custom maps or skins. If Rivals would open up to the community and allow modding or something or the sort, great things could be done! And to achieve financial success the Pay-to-Win model and levels could be dropped and EA could reap a cut from custom mods or skins.
Q: You started hosting tournaments this year on your twitch channel, where you usually commentate together with Jeffrey. How was this experience? Was it hard to pick up casting? Do you feel like you got the hang of it?
Entsorger: It was exciting, for sure. I hadn’t even gotten used to streaming and all of a sudden I’m supposed to cast, which I of course had also never done before. I really took a dive into the deep end with all of this. But Jeffrey has such a natural flow he makes it very easy to work with him. I bet Jeffrey could cast with a rubber ducky and it would still be great. I can tell I have made a lot of progress and have gotten some good feedback, but I still have a long way to go before I am as good as Jeffrey or Blade.
Q: If you could change one thing about Rivals, what would it be?
Entsorger: There are a lot of things I would like to change of course, however if I have to pick only one it would be remove levels / Pay 2 Win (which would automatically fix unit swapping!)
Q: What's your thoughts on the community around Rivals, living in Discord & Twitch chat?
Entsorger: I’m honored to be a part of this community. It’s the first time I’ve ever been so deeply involved in a gaming community and it’s so heartwarming to see how much people go out of their way to keep this almost hopelessly abandoned but fantastic game alive! I’m flattered that people like me enough to come watch my stream and would even want to read my interview. I feel confident that with our combined dedication that there is still hope for Rivals in the future.
Q: From your perspective, what are the traits of players like Quasar and Srpss that are making them stand out from the crowd and winning the tournaments in 2022?
Entsorger: I think they are very good at dancing, have extremely fast reaction times, impeccable micro skills and understand advanced strategy. By advanced strategy I mean things like not only taking favorable encounters/exchanges, but also thinking ahead and using leftover or weakened squads to move forward and dance or block incoming units until that exchange is finished or would otherwise become unfavorable. Combine that with almost no mistakes and you have a flawless game that will often come down to the deck.
Q: Do you still think the game is "dying"? - you mentioned in the interview with Greg Black "The game has SO much potential, it feels like such a waste to let it slowly die because of its business model and platform."
Entsorger: Well, in that context I meant in the eyes of EA as a lucrative game. The financial success of the game has a butterfly effect for everything else as we can clearly see now. We may not want to let the game die, but I think that since no new units are coming out anymore and balance patches are as rare as an oasis in the desert, its player base will continue to decline as the game does not offer enough replay value for its players.
Q: What would your ideal Rivals patch look like? Say there is an actual balance patch coming and you were somehow in charge of it. What would you change?
Entsorger:
- Significantly reduce Giga infantry damage.
- Make Liang great move again. Slowest movespeed + increased cost. Maybe give it an animation-less move delay on spawn kind of like with the drill pod, if possible.
- Reduce the hitpoints, damage and cost of most tech units.
- Move wolverine and widowmaker out of the tech lab.
- Revert banshee to previous state.
- Move inferno to tech lab.
- Increase Razorback HP vs Phantom.
- Reduce chuggy and/or cloud damage significantly.
- Give Slingshot a ramp-up time like Giga so that it takes longer to kill weak air squads but also eventually becomes better vs heavy air.
- Revert the economy back to previous state.
Q: Let's say the Rivals servers shut off tomorrow. How would you spend the last day in Rivals?
Entsorger: I wouldn’t spend it in Rivals at all, I would be looking at flights to India to try and get them to leak us the source code so we could make a community-built PC port.
Q: Any last words?
Q: Is Rivals for life, yo?
Entsorger: Fo’ sho’, yo
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