FunnyAstro discusses rejoining the Fusion after long visa wait

August 4, 2021

by Jessica Scharnagle

Daniel "FunnyAstro" Hathaway finally joined the Philadelphia Fusion in time for the Overwatch League’s Summer Showdown tournament. FunnyAstro has been with the Fusion since late 2019, but with the team playing in Korea this season, joining the team required an extra hurdle.

It had been a long time coming for the English Overwatch player who was stuck in his home country while his team continued without him in Korea. He signed a two-way contract so that he could play with the Fusion’s Contenders team, Fusion University while he awaited his visa to Korea.

Nerd Street caught up with FunnyAstro to talk about what the process was like and how the team planned on navigating the hero pools introduced in the Countdown Cup.

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Nerd Street: What was it like waiting in England while you awaited your visa to Korea?

FunnyAstro: So I don't know much about the visa process like, legally, how it works or whatever, but it was pretty rough being stuck in England for a few months. Of course, it's really demotivating just to be there for months while the season started and the team's already playing, we're watching them play. And it's obviously great to finally get [to Korea] even though it's the middle of the season. We've barely had much time to integrate everyone in, but other than that the mover was quite nice. Everything is set up here.

Nerd Street: What was the process like moving from England to Korea? What did you bring with you?

FunnyAstro: I pretty much just bought a bag of clothes and a laptop. I, of course, had to do the two-week quarantine, which is mandatory to come into Korea. So I brought my own laptop so I could at least play ranked while I was in the hotel. Other than that, literally just a bag of clothes. We have team apartments, not everyone's in the same apartment block, but they're all like 10 minutes away from the office. So we're really close. They’re nice apartments, they’ve got air conditioning and everything.

Nerd Street: What did you do during quarantine?

FunnyAstro: I actually was just playing ranked all day. You wake up, you get the free provided meals a day and it's just kind of depressing. You sit there, you eat the depressing food and you play ranked and then you go to sleep and do the same thing again tomorrow. I think the second week of quarantine at least we started scrims, and I at least got to watch scrims and be in Teamspeak and get to talk to everyone which was better than just playing ranked for 12 hours.

Nerd Street: What was the depressing food like?

FunnyAstro: I don't know, it wasn't that depressing this time. Also, something that I packed and brought with me, I packed freeze dried hiking food, which you can just add boiling water to and you get a hot meal because that's one of the biggest problems I had with quarantine last time was the meals just weren't hot, and it's kind of sad eating cold food every day. So I bought a few of those and they were good. Slightly less depressing.

Photo credit: FunnyAstro

Nerd Street:What was it like finally playing with the team again?

FunnyAstro: It felt good to get back into matches. I remember the first match of the first round on Ilios, I was super, super nervous, I was actually shaking, which was a really weird feeling after being a pro player for like three or four years, it almost felt like my first game, being back. It had been so long since I'd played a properly competitive game. I know, we played in Contenders trials, but that wasn't really as competitive. I wasn't nervous at all about that. So it was just a great feeling to get back and just actually be nervous and excited, and working hard, and have a reason to work hard for the games.

Nerd Street: What do you think about the changes in hero pools from the 2020 season to this season? Do you think having hero pools for a specified period of time is better than week-by-week?

FunnyAstro: So at the start of this year, I probably would have told you it was a good idea that I thought hero pools were good, because we'd had so many different stagnant metas, which just didn't change and were really boring to play in. But the way the game is balanced this year, there's never really been one solid team comp that just everyone plays. And especially with the cross-regional tournaments, you see different metas developing in Asia and America. Having the [cross-region] matches each month is always really interesting, just to see the two metas play against each other and see who got it right.

I think this year, we would have had that without hero pools. I don't think hero pools really added anything other than just being an already weird thing that the fans are going to watch and be like, why are they not playing Sigma? Why are they not playing these heroes? Because it's not in the actual game? So I think maybe for more casual viewers, it's gonna be a lot harder to understand what's going on. And there wasn't really a need for it.

Nerd Street: What kind of meta do you think we’ll see based on the hero pools?

FunnyAstro: I'm expecting a pretty heavy dive meta with Brig/Zen. There were a lot of teams playing it before the hero bans even came out, and it looked pretty strong there. So the hero bans only make it stronger. Pretty much the only counter comp involved is either playing Lucio or Sigma. So I think we're gonna see a lot of dive. I'm not really sure what else you can pick really, all the heavy bunker-type comps can't really play with Ashe and Sigma being banned. Rein is pretty much an unplayable hero when Lucio was banned.

Nerd Street: To wrap up, how has playing in the East Region been compared to previous seasons?

FunnyAstro: I think this year, to be honest, I'd personally prefer to play in the Western region. I think the general level of teams, at least at the start of the season, looked a lot higher in the West. But I think as the season has gone on, APAC has improved drastically. And a lot of the American teams have fallen down. You've got teams like [the Washington Justice], where they had this crazy star-studded roster and they've just not been looking good. I think there's other teams like [the Florida Mayhem], where at the start of the season, they looked really strong. I look at their roster, and I'm like, ‘wow, that's a crazy roster,’ and then they don’t look very good. But in APAC, I think there's less star-power rosters. I think it's only really us and Shanghai, have crazy star players.

All of the middle of the pack [East region] teams are actually pretty good now, they clearly work hard. They've got a different sort of culture over here, I think. All of the middle-of-the-pack teams have been improving through the whole year. And all the middle-of-the-pack NA teams have been getting worse and worse.

Lead photo credit: Overwatch League