If riot made up their own covid restrictions then its even more messed up man , i thought these were like EU or Iceland restrictions .... If players are vaccinated and follow proper national rules , its absolutely ridiculous that they have to follow a quarantine routine just for a company...

Are you sure about this info though?

Im not sure if its hiko ,but it was a valorant pro in shroud's stream , maybe it was asuna

There's a video of hiko explaining why he personally didn't like half time breaks as they break the mental streak they're on

True i did not know all this... wtf this is actually messed up man

Says a lot of things considering this essay is about production issues

Subroza has watch party rights! Sorry for the mistake!

Same NA team went toe to toe with gambit on berlin finals and clapped every top team

This masters is one of the worst produced esports event that i have ever witnessed , Riot is adamant to continue doing every single production related task in house like league but it's working horrribly bad for them , some of the major problems that i have noticed are

1) Buggy player cams , which are shown for some rounds, and not for others

2)Buggy player audio , sometimes you wont hear the audio of players cheering , first i thought it was intentional to prevent offensive stuff to be aired , but riot later added some of the same clips with audio in THEIR OWN HIGHLIGHTS.
PS : Im not sure about riots take on this so take this criticism with a grain of salt as riot might have chose to not add player audio live due to other restrictions and not due to the limitations of the server...i dont know specifically but i wish they had player audio , the banter makes the game so much more hype

3) HUD : Ohh boy do where do i even start? I'll just say this , Ninjas in Pyjamas vs Zeta division Icebox map

4) Horrible game timings : Matches of APAC/SEA/JP regions are scheduled sooo late !!? Why? Reykjavik 2021 got me into valorant esports because it was late but like not extremely late... Now i have to stay up till 3 am to watch a match?!

5)Watch Parties (English) : there's literally only two watch Parties Rn that most people love , Tenz and tarik , like i can understand sinatraa not getting one but... Sorry NRG som? Subroza? Shanks? Asuna? Hiko?shroud? , Like i understand shroud , he doesn't really play valorant much but still atleast give it to other pros that have consistently streamed during VCT north america

5) Analyst desks (hot take) : Riot needs specialist analysts like Lothar and seangares( :( well miss you sean)! You
cannot expect casters to do part time analysis and produce the same result , sideshow , bren , mitch they try their best but at the end of the day , what a specialist analyst brings to the table you cant get with a caster.

6) Stage : Well this one is a bit subjective but i dont like this extremely dark and gloomy stage , like i can understand that riot wanted to add screens and all in the background and it probably looks cooler in real life than on screen but as a viewer its soo badd man , i literally have to to turn up the brightness sometimes to see the faces of players , the walkouts are a red nightmare , everything looks red

7)Half-Time breaks : I can understand these if riot was running ads running or something , but they don't and the half time breaks are by choice , and Riot themselves don't have half time breaks in EMEA Vct , it just breaks the pace man , like give the teams an extra 30 seconds in spawn , but dont just switch to analysts and all , its hard even for the analysts to find like good points to talk about with such low time on hand and they just talk jargon most of the time and it ruins the experience

8) Locations : Pick better locations with less strict covid protocols than berlin and iceland , sweden might be a good pick , or asian countries , if we're gonna keep it without a crowd , you can probably experiment new countries

Conclusion ; I dont wanna trashtalk riot employees and production , but I know riot listens to feedback and they have made changes in the past , i want the game to succeed and have a massive global viewerbase , that is why i wanted to make some issues visible

You probably haven't watched CSGO blast events , man that production blows all valorant production of out the water , lets assume you dont have a crowd , your focus should be on player cams and audio , but the valorant LAN client is soooo buggy they'll have facecams for 5 rounds then turn off ..... Then on again , its sooo inconsistent , like man take another week of prep work but do it properly or like outsource it to some company which specialises in it , riot doesn't have to do everything by themselves

Its not NA its just optic tbh , optic usually mess up first matches , like they lost to rise in group stages

Optic haters where?

OPTIC HOPIUMMMMMMM !!! YAAAY

i was looking at the graphs of optic and guard .... and optic have ridiculous point deductions for losses to even good teams even though they were close matches

Optic has beaten a lot of internaional competiton in rejkyavik and a loss to team like xerxia is like overcompensated in vlr rankings even though xerxia almost beat team liquid too...Even after their win against guard twice(once in NA Challengers and one in rejkyavik) they are still not the no.1 team in NA , its almost like the system overrates heavily when the wins might even be really close and marginal and underrates teams heavily when the losses are close and marginal ... the vlr team should look into this

to be fair every single big t1 team except c9 v1 and optic are in shambles rn

Optix 2-0 hopiummmm

Ever heard of the guard? Find one tier1 player on that team , except sayaplayer who was benched for like an eternity

Yea let's just thrash a team before even watching them play a single round of valorant

tbh they really got lucky on atleast 3 rounds on split , one was the raze ulti one which didnt hit , if zeta edged out pistols on either maps it would have been a different story... ggs anyway gonna look forward to more zeta games.. they look like a good team thats willing to improve and learn

They're bad statistically on both breeze and bind , its better to play optic on breeze than on bind that was my point

This match depends a lot on the map pool
If xerxia pick bind they're done , optic is the only team in the world that has gone toe to toe with gambit and acend on bind , they're fucking gods on it

Chaos is the ally of xerxia as they have the ability to adapt quickly in chaotic rounds so maps like breeze fracture and icebox should be their preferences , spilt would probably be an equal showdown and i cant predict that.

Xerxia will have to win on ascent no matter what because if they dont it becomes difficult to win both bind/icebox/fracture as optic are a type of team which will do their homework and look out for all the cheeky plays xerxia might have made in APAC.

My predictions are
Optic 2-1/2-0 ( if bind gets picked)
Xerxia 2-1(if breeze and icebox are in the pool)

This was my attempt to bring some logical perspective in this borderline toxic comment section...

Im gonna sleep mann , start the fucking matchessss on timeeee

Brazil NA all supporting the same team? Idk if that will ever happen again

bruh this match ended so quick wtf

people really be underplaying victors covid ... i got covid recently and man you cant even think straight let alone play an international match

https://www.vlr.gg/event/pickem/926/valorant-champions-tour-stage-1-masters-reykjav-k

Im interested in learning why?

I've been following valorant esports ever since masters Reykjavik 2021 and for all this time there's not been a single NA team that has been discredited more than Optic ... probably version1 too but they have gotten their fair share of respect and attention in recent times, optic still remains the team which eehh might be good but no one really wants to support them like people do for the guard or sentinels , is this because their content team is bad or any other reasons ? i personally thought except yay they didn't really have someone who had an amazing personal story which sometimes makes people wanna support a team , like look at guard , they have an amazing underdog story! What do you guys think?

Not really unlucky ig , last year too wippie was rejected visa because he was russian , mostly likely this year braveaf from fnatic will be rejected a visa to iceland too , orgs should know that russians dont get iceland visas while signing an org

Yea but you dont even represent 90% of the population emea should represent , emea is basically Europe russia and turkey , dont even act like you even bother about the African or middle eastern teams

No

GGs to Guard but the GreenWall Stands Strong

quite the opposite optic is the only teams that has consistently reached NA challengers semifinals every time they played it, if optic qualifies for iceland after beating guard , they will have played more matches on international LANs than any other NA team .

But its also quite obvious why they arent as popular as sentinels or Guard or 100T...They make dogshit content

optic went toe to toe with gambit on bind and demolished V1 and cloud9 on ascent , their icebox dogshit though

welcome to the greenwall where we pray everyday to our gods hoping for a FNS stream

lmao

Damm people do be sleeping on OpTic.... Kinda expected considered they make like 2 content pieces a month for their fans so not a lot of people care about optic