Last week Crash went out to have a 'Meet Meats' with one of Australia's top OPL competitors, Aaron 'ChuChuZ' Bland to talk about the state of eSports in Australia, Riot setting up shop, the challenges Aussies face on the global stage and much, much more. Then this week Team Legacy who ChuChuZ represents made it through to the semi-finals -- we'd like to think it was Crash's good luck that helped out with that.

With just over a year of competitive play under his belt, young prodigy Aaron 'ChuChuZ' Bland is the anchor of the Winter Regional Champions and has proven he has the chops to play with the best. He represented Oceania at the IWC and has pushed Legacy to third place in the OPL this season. He has just begun a Bachelor of Arts in Communication (Digital &Social Media) at UTS.

As the eSports scene defies all odds here in Australia by blossoming, we were invited to have a chat with one of its rising stars -- here's a little from Crash's interview:

AusGamers: In major sports, for example in Basketball, you have spectators or fans who watch a team. It’s usually because they have some association to that team whether it is their local home team or maybe they follow a specific player who’s on that team. In eSports the way players move around quite a bit between different teams can be fairly jarring for a lot of people because sometimes fans can’t keep track of who’s coming or going within the scene. Being amongst the professional players do you see any ways of addressing that or is it not much of a problem?

Aaron: That’s a really good question for our region in particular because were so small. It’s been very difficult for people to find a reason to dedicate more time to playing this game. With Riot setting up the Oceanic Pro League it’s given players especially that reason to dedicate that time. So one of the biggest issues that we saw was players just kept on moving, for example if a team just wasn’t doing well then they would move players in and out of rotation. That’s just the way things were working. Now there’s a constant tournament of games being played every week and players are being more dedicated to stick towards the same 4 other members. It allows them to go through some of their issues and problems which in the end builds them up into a stronger team.



Click here for our interview with Team Legacy's ChuChuZ.