By: Nicole Hamlett:

With a win rate of 95%, these women are proving that they can kick ass and take names in any situation. I had the chance to sit down with Katscratch, Rhoulette and Jinx and get a good perspective on what they were all about. My questions were candid and unscripted. They were very responsive and honest in return. When the Frag Dolls launched in the Fall of 2004 there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding them. People called them nothing more than booth babes and a PR stunt. Guess what? Those rumors couldn’t be more wrong. Intelligent, funny and savvy, these girls are showing that girls are hardcore gamers too.

I started off easy with them. But don’t worry, we get to the down and dirty soon enough!
Awenyddion: What do you think makes the Frag Dolls such a strong cohesive team? You have obviously gone to the conventions and events and have walked away victorious.

Katscratch: A huge part of it is the friendship we have together as a team. When you are practicing for a competition, I am doing it as much for them as I am to win. No one wants to let the other person down.

Jinx: Well, obviously it helps when we play and practice together. We've had the chance to learn what play styles our teammates have, and we can try to complement that. It also helps that, as girls, we don't have a problem communicating. We talk to each other a lot even during the matches, forming and reforming plans. It makes the process a lot more fluid.

Awenyddion: How often do you practice together?

Katscratch: depends on if we are in competition mode or not. Now we are practicing 3-5 times a week together

Rhoulette: It depends, but we try to get up to 10 hours of team practice in a week.

Awenyddion: So you all live in the same area or do you do it online?

Rhoulette: We do it online.

Katscratch: we are in SF and Texas

Jinx: We all play online, because we're a little too spread out to get together quite that often.

Rhoulette: 4 of us live in the Bay Area, 2 are in Texas and one is in Colorado

Jinx: Having practice together locally would be great, but we work with what we've got.

Katscratch: XBL is awesome though!

Jinx:Agreed. It really does cut down on the disadvantages of distance.
Rhoulette: Yeah, it's a great communication medium.

As I was reading their answers I really got the sense that they were a very in-tune group. It’s not easy running a team from a few different states, but they’ve come together like a close-knit family to overcome that obstacle. We had some background. It was time to get to some issues. A part of me expected some pretty staged answers. After all I was talking to representatives of a publisher. I was very pleased with the candidness of the answers that I got.

Awenyddion: There has been a lot of negativity about the miscommunication with Ubisoft sponsoring you guys. How do you think that it could have been done differently so that these rags wouldn't have had that fodder?

Rhoulette: Naturally, in an ideal world we would want everyone to like and support us and understand what we're trying to accomplish. The reality is that there will always be critics, especially with something that's never been done before. We weren't aware that our connection to Ubisoft wasn't obvious to some people until they voiced their concerns. We've been very open in talking about our relationship with Ubisoft and writing about it in our blogs. Our mistake was in misjudging how people would read our About Us page (apparently a large contributor to the confusion) and in doing things differently, we would make our involvement with Ubisoft explicitly clear there.

Katscratch: I was personally floored when people said they did not know we were sponsored by Ubisoft. The forums were always hosted at ubi.com - so um... you get my point.

Rhoulette: She's right. We felt that there were so many connections to Ubisoft on the website that it couldn't be misinterpreted.