Hey guys,

I’m sorry for the long blog hiatus, but since I haven’t done a blog in a while I guess I’ll do a more comprehensive one now.  A lot of things have happened since I last wrote something; three players left the team, three new players filled their vacant spots in the team, we won the IEM European Championship and we had a poor showing at the IEM World Finals. I’m obviously very happy about our win at the IEM European Championship, but our poor showing at IEM World Finals feels more of interest to discuss.

So, why did we play bad? I think our losses can be blamed on two things; not hitting our shots like we should’ve and bad team play. If I had to pick the most deciding factor I would snap pick our bad team play since I feel that it was the more deciding of the two. That is obviously something we need to look at and try to improve in our preparations for our next tournament, Copenhagen Games in Denmark late April.

One thing that people discussed quite a bit when it was topical was the disbandment of the old Fnatic lineup, so I’ll try to give my insight to what I feel about the situation and how things went down. I guess that somewhere along the road Gux, GeT_RiGhT and f0rest decided that they wanted to replace cArn and me with RobbaN and allen. It was a bit sad for us, but that’s how things work; we are needed to perform at all times and if you feel that somebody isn’t performing at the level needed your confidence in the team will be damaged and it’s usually solved by splitting up/replacing somebody. I didn’t really agree with their arguments on performing, but what can you do, they had already made up their minds. I don’t really want to discuss what I feel about their abilities, they are all very good players, but there’s a lot of work behind a team and when I say that people have different roles it isn’t an excuse for not being able to frag. Some players are aggressive and looking for entry kills and some are more passive looking for good late round situations. You need a good balance in a team and I think a lot of people don’t realize that.

I’m excited to do well with this new good team, and while our start couldn’t have been any better, our result at the World Finals was disappointing and we all hate the feeling of losing. I think our preparation before the tournament was bad and we will certainly have to work harder to come better prepared next time.

Before I wrap this up, make sure to follow me on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Harley-dsn-Orvall/134473393253889

I post smaller updates there more often than I write blogs.

The last thing I want to leave with you is this interesting lecture about happiness by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Have a nice day,

Harley