We caught up with Rqt, the captain of dominant OCE team Fusion Girls, in an interview earlier this month. The team has been crushing Australian competition for months and exclusively scrims Korean teams now to better themselves; at that time, two weeks ago, Fusion Girls were searching for sponsorship opportunities and big tournaments to play in. Now, they have a $272,000 tournament to compete in as well as a new organisation: Blank Esports.

The name will not be familiar to you, no matter how avidly you follow esports inside or outside of Australia. The organisation appears to be brand new and there is no information about them publicly available; nevertheless you can be assured that Fusion Girls would not be moving forwards with them without good reason.

Their new look under Blank Esports coincided with their announced involvement in a new premier tournament for the Pacific scene. They are the sole Australian representatives in a $272,000 tournament - where merely being good enough to get an invite nets you $13,000 and winning lets you take home nearly $100,000 - fighting against other top teams from Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, and Hong Kong. All this, played live at LAN, from the brand new Blizzard eStadium being launched in Taipei in a matter of days.

It's been a breakneck move forwards into the limelight for new Blank Esports. "The fact that we even get the opportunity to take this game outside of our country is amazing," said Rqt, "it's something we've all been working really hard to achieve and we finally get a chance to prove ourselves in an extremely large and official Blizzard tournament."

Given that Blank Esports has already been demolishing Taiwanese competition with their ping disadvantage, they will be one of the favourites moving into the Overwatch Pacific Championship as well. They competed in the Los Muertos Cup, winning all five weeks online, and to an extent know what they will facing.

"There's definitely some familiar names we'll be running up against and it's been quite some time since we've played them so things could have changed completely by now - much like many of their rosters have." Although the production and spectacle of the event, along with the storylines of the teams, will draw in a lot of fans, not many will be familiar with any of the teams playing. Rqt expects most of the strong opposition to Blank Esports to come from Taiwan. "I am expecting the biggest competition to be Flash Wolves who is a reform of the old SyF and AHQ-S teams, the two strongest teams we played back in those weeklies and they've been living and training together since being picked up."

Although he was quite prepared to talk at length about the upcoming Overwatch Pacific Championship, for which himself and the team will be flying out to Taipei within a fortnight, Rqt was much more reticent about the relationship with their new organisation.

Although most information is yet to be announced about their setup and the identity of Blank, Rqt said:

Blank is a new Oceanic organization in the space that have really pushed to get us opportunities to prove ourselves against other regions. They may be new, but they've got some other exciting announcements coming soon.

Now that we've got the opportunity to prove ourselves, we're going to do everything in our power to do exactly that. Since we will no longer have work or university commitments throughout the team Overwatch will be our sole focus and I've already created a pretty hectic practice schedule to really get the most out of our time.

And are they sad to be giving up the incredible name "Fusion Girls"?

Haha, we really did grow fond of the name, it was entirely a joke when we made it - we thought of the dumbest names imaginable (and threw a few serious ones in too) and we took turns banning names out until we were left with Fusion Girls.

The new Blank Esports team is:

  • Jason ”ieatuup” Ho (DPS)
  • Ajay ”Aetar” Umasankar (DPS)
  • Marcus ”Kiki” Jacob (Flex)
  • Ashley ”Trill” Powell (Tank)
  • Jordan ”Gnb” Graham (Support)
  • Andrew ”Rqt” Haws (Support)