By day they work at a solar company and a service station, but after dark take to their computers and perform on the world gaming stage for big-figure prizes and prestige unknown to their real-world colleagues.

Swedish transplant Christian Safko is a 33-year-old general manager for a solar company in Melbourne, managing solar energy instalments for commercial enterprises. His friend Kieran Moore is a 31-year-old student in Lismore who works casually at a servo to pay his way through school.

At night, Safko and Moore anchor Australia's best World of Tanks squad: Team Efficiency. Safko, or Saffe, is the team's specialist, jokingly described by his team as "a professional at tank rolling down cliffs". Moore (known to his team as Skell) favours light tanks, and is also Team Efficiency's captain.

The two aren't exactly what come to mind when you think of eSports stars. They aren't young mechanical savants with the twitch reflexes of Manuel Neuer. But they are representative of World of Tanks' player base: older gamers, often defence workers, who prefer a slower, more tactical and cerebral game. And Dolph Lundgren, apparently.

"Whoever's got the most tanks in one spot normally wins," laughs Safko. "And then it's just rotations, placement. It's almost like a board game, where you have to place the right pieces in the right spots before pushing for the win."

Team Efficiency enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top of the Asia-Pacific region this season due to a few improvements in their training regime, to the point where they toppled Chinese juggernaut EL Gaming (the only fully professional team in the league) in the regular season. All this from a team with a crudely drawn red panda for their logo ("It's not a fox!" insists Moore).

"We have two new players this season," says Safko when I ask him how Team Efficiency went from a middle-of-the-pack team to one of the region's big hitters. "Previously when we trained, it was a lot of dicking around, not taking it too seriously. Compared to last season, we don't have any weak links in the team. There's always someone to make up for someone else's mistakes."

Team Efficiency are currently in the midst of preparing for the Wargaming League APAC Season II Finals, where they'll face the best teams in the Asia-Pacific region for a spot at the global Grand Finals, and a slice of $100,000. The team has faced international competition before, but only in Sydney. This time, the APAC Finals will be held in Taipei's EcoARK stadium, featuring teams from China, Japan and South Korea.

"We have to aim for first. We don't have a choice," explains Moore. EL Gaming have already qualified for the Grand Finals in Moscow, and due to the way seeding works, anything other than a gold medal will likely see the Aussies watching from home instead of the sidelines.

And if they make it to Moscow?

"If we get there, then I would say most of us would be happy to be there, take whatever experience we can from that tournament and bring it with us into next season," says Safko.

The team holds no delusions when it comes to appraising their chances at the global stage. They know they're the underdogs — big fish in a little pond swimming out into the ocean.

In many ways, they're just like their League of Legends compatriots. But if Riot Games' Oceanic Pro League is anything to go by, World of Tanks might one day be ripe for an Australian disruption.