Hi, my name is Maximiliano González a.k.a maxter, i am an argentinian quake champions player. Currently finishing my degree in Audiovisual Arts, currently i work as a Digital Compositor.

Hi Maximiliano, thank you for joining QUAKE PUB, for this little Interview – from what I understand, IRONFIST will be first international top tier LAN for you. Excited?

Hi Hawr1x, thanks for this opportunity btw;

The first and obvious answer is: FUCK YES, finally I get the opportunity to play on Lan on a Big Event, unfortunately Covid has denied me LAN tournaments since Quake Pro League Season 1 Stage 3 when I qualified for the first time to a Lan Event for relegation, so imagine how excited I am to finally be playing, flying and meeting the best in the world.

How different it will be for you to be at LAN with "unknown setup" and face to face with your opponents?

Honestly, I only had 2 LAN experiences in the past but those were LAN tournaments on Quake Live back in 2013-2014, and so far my performance tend to be much better on lan as i tend to manage the pressure very well, but these are different circumnstances, where i will be facing players that are the best in the world and they have plenty of experience, so i will be ready to face whatever "unknown" situation in front of me.

I dont feel like there is some kind of pressure on me, beyond the fact that there are viewers that want to see me prove the same performance i have online, i think the other way around, the experienced players are the ones that should feel more pressure as they are facing someone that doesn't understand the LAN behavior as well as they do, there might be "tricky" situation in-game where i will be moving myself as i do online where they will punish me, so if they dont take those kind of advantages, it will a lost for them, for me, it is my first experience, so i will learn from it as i will go as far as i can in the tournament.

Do you think that there should be more events like IRONFIST, or is Quake Pro League so demanding, there is no space for such events?

Quake Pro League is demanding for the best players in the world, and we are 100% into it, but, it will be really nice to see tournaments like these with qualifiers but flying the players to the event.

There are many players that would love to play on lan, but i understand that paying for your ticket and your place in the country before competing it is so much money that if you dont have an sponsor or savings, it might be really hard to go and compete.

How much Quake Pro League impacted your practice; can you now give 100% to Quake Champions? You basically established your position on Season 2, Stage 1 – which means about 1yr of this experience.

To be honest, i would have started to practice even earlier in the game, but as many know already, i used to have a really poor setup, my pc used to crash a lot and i was playing in really bad situations and as well, on high ping.

Once i qualified for QPL, i bought a powerful pc and a 144hz monitor, so that was the moment i started to practice more often, having sets with QPL players mid-week and starting have a different mindset towards my matches on sunday.

I knew already once i got into the league, that i would need to go harder on my practice as i had to catch one year of full practice and experience to the rest of the players, and i think so far it worked out very good.

I went from "yeah probably maxter is going to face relegation on stage 1 for being the newest one" to defeating cooller, killsen and very close to take my series against rapha on stage 2 finals.

You mentioned bootcamp in Poland before IRONFIST on your stream, will this be main portion of practise and can you mention who are you going to be part of that bootcamp?

There were a couple of changes on this bootcamp, Nosfa and I were going to be around 10 days there since UK covid rules needed us 15 days outside a red-listed country (ours, for example), now we are going a week to poland and we will be bootcamping there, and then we are going to UK to continue our practice.

For now only nosfa and I will be bootcamping, and we will be facing europeans in that time, probably in UK we will have more players to play with there.

Does your presence at QPL impacted local Quake community? I saw 2-3 more Argentinian players trying to leave their mark in Americas Challengers.

After our performance on Stage 2 finals, there were a lot of south american players motivated to compete, we showed that, beyond the fact that we have to play on high ping most the time, we have the fundamentals, the mindset and the willing to play and defeat the best in the world.

I think we play a role model for the players of our community, and i am always glad that they feel that they can compete and defeat players on high ping because the game allow us to play on that condition.

It's not ideal to play in those conditions, yes, but we came from no tournaments for us in quake live, to ‹you have this opportunity to compete›, and we will take it, no doubts.

What is – according to you - your strongest point in Quake?

I would love to be part of some team in the future, I think that after my performance has increased over the last year, teams can understand what kind of player and professional i am, but i am not in a rush trying to be in a team ASAP, i know there will be an opportunity in the future, in the meanwhile, gotta work hard and focus on myself, the rest will come after.

Thank you for your time! Good Luck on LAN!

Thank you!