We sat down with EnVyUs' Happy at IEM Oakland after his team went out in the group stage. Now, the French team will be looking forward to WESG Barcelona and DreamHack Winter.

Vincent "⁠Happy⁠" Schopenhauer's Envy qualified for the Major Qualifier in Bucharest two weeks ago, but were unable to follow up the good results in California, going out after just two days of best-of-ones at IEM Oakland.

EnVyUs will be at WESG in Barcelona next week, playing with kioShiMa

Envy will now look forward to WESG Barcelona, where they will play with Fabien "⁠kioShiMa⁠" Fiey, and DreamHack Winter before the season's end and the continuation of the Major cycle. In this interview, Happy runs us through the changes to the team's structure, Cédric "⁠RpK⁠" Guipouy's play, and upcoming events, amongst others.

Going back to before the event, how did you feel coming into it? What were your confidence levels?

I think this team is doubting itself a lot. We didn't have much time to practice after the Minor, and even at the Minor we knew that making it through was hard. We couldn't win any matches against Space Soldiers. We know we can show some good stuff but then be completely clueless the next day, and that's the face we showed at that tournament.

It seems sometimes you have some losses and everyone on the team gets a bit nervous, and there's a lot of back-and-forth talking about how the match went or what the bad plays were and so on...

We had that problem especially at ESL New York, and we worked a bit on that. One thing that has improved with time is the mental strength. Even though we threw some really key rounds against for example NiP, with an advantage... but for example against SK if we would have played like three months ago I think we would have lost 16-12, much earlier, so definitely some progress has been made on part of the team, but yeah, still a lot to work on.

It seems you've been at the same level, this place where you can make it to the events but you're beneath the top teams where you keep coming short. What atmosphere does that create in the team? Do you ever feel like there's something you need to change? Maybe even a player?

After so many group stage exits, yeah, I've started to doubt a bit about how we structure the game, how we apply the game plan we want to apply, and it does make one think twice about how we do stuff and it can be a bit painful for our confidence. It's a tough question because sometimes everything goes smoothly, and suddenly, players don't even know why themselves but they start playing bad and mixing up some strategies and not communicating well enough, not playing up to par, to our level, so yeah... one of our many problems is our consistency. We don't perform really good in the long run.

The Major qualifier is coming up early next year, anything particular going into that?

Well, we have a couple events still, we'll be going to WESG in Barcelona right after this with kioShiMa and then we'll go to DreamHack Winter with our full roster, so we still have those two events to focus on.

And your expectations going into those?

WESG can be good to fire up some of our other players, playing without ScreaM, but we don't know. We don't have any practice going in with kio, and we don't have the advantage we could have of going in as a real team. I think it'll be tough, but then DreamHack is a pretty solid event and I think it could be really nice if we did something there.

RpK has been playing really well lately, and it seems some people have started to consider him one of the star players of the team. What do you think caused it, has he been more comfortable in his positions?

I think he pretty much has all the spots he wants to play. He has a certain way he plays and once you remove that comfort zone he can be a bit lost, but right now I think he is really happy with how the team is working.

I think he has been doing well lately because as a team we need a lot of structure that we couldn't implement at the beginning because some players didn't want to do that, but now that we're in the process of becoming a structured team I think he filled a void that we had in the team, and by playing really well he just stood out for most of the year. But yeah, we're leaning towards really a better structure and a way more organized structure than what we used to have.

With this structure, you said consistency is a problem, do you think it is and will bring more consistency? Have you seen progress?

We're still working on it because we just now finished the terrorist side, and we still have the other half to do. I mean, some players just felt way more confident and more comfortable playing a bit more freely on the CT side, but I think it has gone too far, it's supposed to be a balance but now it's way gone. Obviously, we know that our CT side for at least two events is terrible, and even though we can grind T rounds and be good on T side we need the CT side, which we used to be really good on. Now it switched, and my goal now is to find the balance again.

Cédric 'RpK' Guipouy Age: 28 Team: Envy Rating 1.0: 0.99 Maps played: 794 KPR: 0.70 DPR: 0.70 Vincent 'Happy' Schopenhauer Age: 25 Team: Envy Rating 1.0: 1.08 Maps played: 1169 KPR: 0.75 DPR: 0.66 Envy #13 Vincent 'Happy' SchopenhauerChristophe 'SIXER' XiaCédric 'RpK' GuipouyAdil 'ScreaM' BenrlitomAlexandre 'xms' Forté Fabien 'kioShiMa' Fiey Age: 23 Team: FaZeB Rating 1.0: 1.02 Maps played: 983 KPR: 0.68 DPR: 0.64