Throwback to one of the most legendary forum posts in VLR history.

Shoutout to the person who added this to the wikipedia VLR disambiguation page on Oct 18, 2023:

"Vlr is a website where there is a valorant forum where people can see stats and what happening in valorant"

(It has since been updated with something more professional)

I assume it was one of the forum users here because of the broken english in some of their wikipedia updates and the fact that their latest update is adding "hi I am so cool and giga chad" in the middle of a random sentence for a random basketball player (reverted literally 4 minutes later for vandalism lol). Classic internet forum user behavior right there.

This reply to a reply that will be updated with a full day recap about an article that will be updated with a full day recap will not be updated at all

Thanks man

Maybe 👀

https://clips.twitch.tv/AlertPowerfulMochaFreakinStinkin-aGpdlZxS8Pqsoioi

I was shocked by how good the released Sora videos are. The previous state of the art latent diffusion technologies are so far behind Sora in so many ways. I've never been able to make a photorealistic character that is consistent between frames without flicker, and they got that plus camera panning, multiple angles, and halfway realistic movement/physics all at quality that I struggle to reach with still frames. Very impressive stuff.

They didn't exactly reveal the format other than EG get the top seed and everyone else is put in pools and then randomly drawn.
Before the reveal, I predicted that the remaining 10 teams would be in 2 pools of 5 based on the LCQ/Champs performance, and it looks like that was the case for all three regions (idk what China will do). NRG, C9, LOUD, LEV and KRU got the high seeds while FUR, MIBR, SEN, 100T, and G2 got the low seeds. High seeds face low seeds but matchups are random.
This reasoning works in EMEA and the Pacific. The only question mark is Vitality getting a high seed despite not playing at the LCQ.

My tweet was also made in 5 minutes, so if I did a deep dive into the analysis, I'm sure some players would move around the list.

Demon1 didn't play in the first half of the year, and he was good but not great for the second half of the Americas League and Masters Tokyo. He was only elite at Champs (which is a huge deal that boosts him into the top 20), and his importance in the transformation of EG gives him a top 10 spot, but I think recency bias is really making people forget that for the majority of the year, he wasn't a top 20 player. Sayf absolutely dominated the EMEA league, and I give him a lot of credit for carrying a TL roster that I thought was pretty bad overall.
f0rsaken is nowhere near this list for his 2023 performance although he could definitely get back onto it next year. Jinggg was a top honorable mention, but his playstyle didn't translate to good performances against top teams even though PRX were winning.

Massively needed improvements to the Challengers structure and League roster flexibility.

Dang, I haven't built a scraper in a while. This looks cool.

I like pleets, but the fact that he is a complete liability in terms of firepower may be a holdup.

Nosirskiiii

Common 🐔joe W

oof

Pai

I don't know why people are getting confused by the twitter/vlr forum debate. Both are not the professional sites I'm talking about. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be allowed to post anywhere. I would find it incredibly disturbing if he was barred from posting in any public forum/twitter/etc. But, there is a market for trustworthy news, and the places with money pay to protect that trust. I am not saying he should be discouraged from posting, or from trying to climb, but to paraphrase an analogy I made earlier in this thread, people invested in making/selling/consuming complete diets can and will criticize the pure carb diet.

The analogy is, its a 100% carb diet that gets quick energy but will struggle to be healthy long term. There is a market for consuming that kind of content, but that doesn't mean people can't speak out against the glucose in favor of the complete diet.

In terms of a good starting point... its rough. It mainly comes down to networking which I would not enjoy doing myself. DMing journalists/talent/org staff/players/etc out of the blue will lead to a big strikeout rate, but getting some connections with people who do the kind of work you want to do in order to learn their techniques/collaborate/network is the most straightforward path. I don't have experience with investigative journalism, so I am not the best source for getting started, but thats how I would go. What I do know is: Patience is key.

Nope
twitter = public forums like VLR

twitter = public forums like VLR
you missed the point

Yeah, I am a graduate student currently. My summer internship was in a fenced off location with armed guards (although the kind of work they let interns do is not the kind that requires that stuff).

Just adding my two cents.

I quite enjoy the kind of "leaks" put out by people like james_ff and others. However, there is a clear difference between that kind of content and professional content produced by paid writers at sites like Blix, Dexerto, etc. Those sites would not publish that kind of work because the sources cannot be vetted or trusted. The problem a lot of "mainstream" journalists have with this kind of amateur content is the community reaction discrediting the long and difficult process it takes to produce actually trustworthy content and the confusion between the two. Its a similar battle they've had with the kind of "twitter journalism" produced by the likes of the Jake Luckys of the world. Trust takes months if not years to build and a single incident to destroy which is why professional investigative journalists spend days or weeks making sure they have multiple primary sources and working with editors that not only improve the writing but also guide the decision making process of whether something is publishable. The best investigative journalists have folders of unpublished reports (some that happened and some that didn't) that could have gotten them clicks, but were too risky to stake their reputation to. I think the amateur leaks have a place (VLR forums are a pretty good place for that), and I would actually encourage discussions like it (although hoping for civil discussions on public forums might be a tad ambitious of me). However, I would warn people trying to make it beyond that point, that it can and will become a detriment to have an untrustworthy reputation around anyone willing to pay real money for journalism.

Whether or not amateur leaks should be counted as "journalism" is a semantics game that I don't really care that much about. I'm a nuclear engineer, I just write for fun.

Will this change many people's minds? Probably not. Was writing this a waste of my time? Not to me. I got my start talking to anyone about esports on these forums, and I care far more about the ten sane people than the million rabid dogs. Voicing my opinions into the chaotic void is more about the principle than the outcome.

click heads. get rating

VLR and RIB have so much going on in terms of every fight being weighted by a ton of other factors (player differential, economy, trading, etc), and that is what drives the disparity. All three ratings play with damage differently, but it isn't a massive factor in any of them.

Since VLR, RIB, and THESPIKE all have ratings, but they are all really complicated (I know VLR's is because I designed it, and RIB's is open source), I made a "reverse engineered" approximation using only kills, deaths, assists, first kills, and first deaths.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ValorantCompetitive/comments/14v4s7q/approximating_valorant_ratings_vlrribthespike/

Some TLDR notes:
I can get under 2% relative error for THESPIKE while VLR and RIB are too complex to approximate with my methodology.
THESPIKE values kills ~10 times more than deaths
The value of an assist relative to the average kill/death is 0.77 for THESPIKE, 0.43 for VLR and 0.32 for RIB
RIB heavily favors opening duels (particularly deaths), but this might be somewhat affected by the poor approximation for VLR/RIB.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/valorantesports/

has all the official photos

I don't know the link to the official rulebook, but I heard similar things from people who did read it. Here is what their public announcement said.

Those four teams will then be randomly placed into the double elimination bracket, where the top seeded teams have been waiting. Teams from the same group will be placed on opposite sides of the bracket to prevent a repeat match early in the winners bracket.

I do not believe that is guaranteed. From my interpretation of the stated rules, each group stage qualified team will randomly draw for an opponent out of the four already in the playoffs. Teams from the same group will be on opposite sides of the bracket.
FNC has a lower seed than Liquid, but that only impacts map veto priority I believe. There are four "veto pools". Within each pool, map veto priority is determined by a coin flip, but group 1 gets prio over group 2 etc.
Group 1: LOUD/TL/PRX, Group 2: FNC, Group 3: EG/NRG, Group 4: lower bracket group qualified teams.

RIP

If you have been following his twitter for the past months, he was absolutely backing more than just Uganda's "nonconformity" (which isn't all that nonconformist for that area of the world). Carlos has openly endorsed old school religious concepts of the specific roles for men and women in society along with anti-LGBT statements. I'm not saying he can't say these things, but you seem to think that he wasn't backing the sentiment behind that law which... he very much was.

Gens 4 and 5 were amazing.

He writes the scripts that Riot use for Valorant tournaments.

I already did one when LOUD won Champs. I also did one with AI generated images of my face when they made the playoffs of LOCK//IN. A twitter advanced search of my account and the word "promised" should get you both of them.

Some twitch clips have a specific character in the string identifier that breaks the display on articles. I had to go find a different one since mine broke. Anyways its there now.

Me? The person that picked LOUD to win at every single international event last year?

All jokes aside, my clip broke, so I just published, and searched for a different version of the clip afterwards lol.

Wow, what a massive roster move. That announcement video is so hype.

Some advanced stats:
6 of alfajer's kills were immediately traded by the enemy vs 0 for boaster
2 of boasters deaths were traded by his teammates vs 0 for alfajer
8 of alfajer's kills were with a large player differential (2+) vs 3 for boaster
10 fewer assists is a significant difference for a single map
The adjusted ADR actually favors boaster who did more non-killing damage.

The effects of boaster surviving 3 extra rounds, and the first kill/death differential aren't very important here. The major difference was the fight weighting from trades/when deaths occurred/assists.

https://www.vlr.gg/event/pickem/1190/champions-tour-2023-emea-league

VCT EMEA Playoff Pickems are now live!

KAST is widely considered to be little more than a gimmick stat.
The rating doesn't use the KAST number whatsoever. Things that affect KAST also affect the rating but in different ways. For instance, trading only affects the weights of the fights taken in order to determine how important that fight was to winning/losing the round.

I actually looked at correlation between rating and other stats, and the rating is most closely correlated to the kill and death +- (per round as all things are), and not as much K/D ratio, KAST, ACS, or other stats. The correlation to KAST is actually pretty flimsy (other stats have a stronger correlation with KAST). VLR's rating has a stronger correlation to kills and deaths than ACS or thespike's rating.

Thats not to say that there aren't significant upgrades that could be made to the VLR rating in future updates. It is currently balanced on stats from roughly 2021 to 2022, but patch 5.12 made the assist numbers of KAY/O and the controllers (who were already significantly on top of the assist charts) jump into the stratosphere. It didn't impact that specific OXY vs M80 map too much, but assist scaling has gotten a little wonky in 2023.

Here are some advanced stats:
reduxx had 6 of his kills immediately traded compared to zero from skuba
reduxx had 10 deaths with even player differentials (most important fights) while skuba had 4
reduxx also took slightly more fights against eco rounds, and a higher percentage of skuba's deaths happened when there was a large player differential and had less impact on the round. Also 4 more assists for skuba

essentially, both players did really well, but a higher percentage of skuba's fights had a significant positive impact on their chances of winning the round.

ONCEUponATime W

I would say I gave him the script, but thats a lie. He wrote the script.

CSGO: Kills finished by a headshot divided by total kills
Valorant: bullets that hit heads divided by total bullets hit

Hudsen is the biggest W

In my opinion, MIBR would beat all of the BR tier-2 teams. From what I've seen, the talent is spread out in BR too much for any one team to really challenge the partnered teams. MIBR's issue is their struggles trying to play a cohesive tactical game not talent, and I don't think any IGLs in BR (except maybe pleets, but keyd don't have the firepower) can really outplay MIBR as well as the partnered teams are doing. Some combination of 00, UNI, and Keyd might be able to have some punch, but with their current rosters, I'm a bit worried about their chances against some of the NA teams in Ascension.

Some more detailed stats:
a) 3 more kills and 2 fewer deaths for Mazino
b) Mazino took a lot of impactful fights: He had 11 kills with even player differentials including 5 kills in 3v3s.
c) kiNgg had very few kills in the late rounds aside from that 1v3. (Mazino got 16 kills with less than 6 players total remaining vs just 5 from kiNgg, and none of them were with huge player differentials).

Both players had eco and trading stats that look roughly similar after a quick skim. In general, both players had above average stats overall, and this scoreline shouldn't really be all that surprising. Thespike actually has Mazino rated significantly above kiNgg, and it is some of the advanced stats that help close the gap in the VLR rating.

I'll edit this post with some more details, but I will say: 3 more kills AND 2 fewer deaths is not a small amount.

Pickems now open for all weeks

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