for Astra, I’d just make her smokes recharge like omen. still only four stars but if you don’t want to use a stun or suck then you could have an extra smoke for later in the round

Bind and Fracture have been strong maps for FPX, but if they don’t win 3-0 then I don’t think they can close it out in the last two maps. My guess is either a 3-0 for FPX (but very unlikely) or a 3-1/3-2 for PRX

Gambit going from 1st in Berlin to 2nd in Champions is not “falling off”. Neither is OpTic going from 1st to 3rd. Acend is the only one that really fell off, cause I wouldn’t even say that Sentinels did that poorly in their second tournament. People need to stop expecting so much and accept that the skill gap between most teams isn’t so huge that it can’t be overcome in a few months

i think they just get to go first in map ban/pick

A week ago I might have agreed, but OpTic has gotten destroyed on Fracture recently (4-13 against DRX and 5-13 against PRX) while FPX has done really well on it (13-5 against DRX and 13-5 against FNATIC) so I think OpTic will be a little scared of letting that through

OpTic ban Fracture, FPX ban Breeze, OpTic pick Split, FPX pick Ascent, OpTic pick Haven, FPX pick Bind, Icebox remains. OpTic win 3-1, losing Ascent. This will also probably be the last Split game on LAN since PRX is likely to ban it for the Grand Final.

and this is after they finally removed sinatraa from being “inactive”

it is a little over 1k rn but yeah the finals is at around 2200 now

it’s because they keep raising/lowering the audience volume when they feel it’s appropriate, they should just keep it at a steady volume so things feel more natural

you legit have more points than 42.7% of people

I’m pretty sure that Riot’s API currently only lets vlr pull the match data once the match ends

why does doug sound like he’s whispering half of the time

They played a match in MEL with a replacement for Zellsis (Immi) who got 21 kills in a 64-round match and they still won

That’s how many tickets have been sold for tomorrow. If you don’t think that many people can generate some hype and a cool atmosphere for the matches, then I don’t know what to tell you. It would be nice if it was sold out, but it’s definitely not at the point where it’ll be sad to look at.

I’m sure if 100T/NRG/EG/FaZe thought it was worth their time and would increase their chances of winning, they’d do it as well. I trust that they’re not all so confident in their top six performance during Stage 2 that they won’t maximize their efforts on what they think is most effective

They played in an NSG qualifier two weeks ago

V1 didn’t qualify for LCQ, so C9 and The Guard are the only teams in LCQ/Champs that are playing in a non-VCT tournament. At that point, it makes more sense to ask why they are doing it than to ask why everyone else isn’t

they should just give everyone who shows up a special player card, like what Mojang did with capes for people who attended Minecon. guaranteed sold out in under a minute easy

I don’t think TenZ is physically capable of growing a full goatee so shroud wins by default

it can’t have been against TSM cause Subroza was the one streaming so literally any other team

https://status.riotgames.com/valorant?region=na&locale=en_US

I got it as well, Riot is aware of the problem as of 58 minutes ago, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon

I don’t see a world where 100T doesn’t make it. The only thing hurting them is the lack of an academy/gamechangers team, otherwise i’d easily put them over everyone due to their massive growth over the past few years and consistently being one of the top teams in LoL and Valorant

The more I think about it, the more I realize we must be missing something really important because having only 30 franchised teams would make qualifications for future Champions events super uninteresting

The only thing I don’t get about the Valorant partnership program is how few teams it has (from the information we’ve been given). At least in LoL there are 12 leagues with 8-10 teams each, aside from China which has 17. That’s a total of 117 teams, so why is Valorant’s franchise so much smaller?

The existence of a partnership program doesn’t mean that Valorant won’t have lower-level leagues. They already announced their NA college competition and will likely announce more stuff close to Champions considering how little we even know about the franchised league

really interesting that the same group of seats (left and right side balcony seats in rows D-H) were recently sold for the first and second day. there must be some large group that coordinated that cause it’d be way too coincidental otherwise

yeah let me just spend $1000+ to fly to/from Copenhagen on a work day for a few hours of valorant

If they decide to run a double duelist comp on any maps (maybe taking ideas from Northeption or Paper Rex) then we’d probably see dapr on chamber and tenz/zellsis on the duelists but otherwise yeah

why is Germany the only one capitalized

At the time that I’m writing this, I count 919 seats sold for the first day, so probably a little under a thousand for Upper Final/Lower Round 3 and then closer to two thousand for the Grand Final (didn’t count that one though).

Edit: Grand Final is actually pretty straightforward to add up cause a lot of the rows are full, so I believe it’s currently at 2078 tickets

For some of these, I don’t think it’s fair to consider all of the time to be wasted. A good example is the most recent matches, FNC v LEV and DRX v FPX. Yes, DRX v FPX did start at 3:30 when it was scheduled for 2:00, but that does not mean that nothing happened during those 90 minutes since the FNC v LEV match was still going until 2:45.

Does TL’s team in Brazil contribute at all to their chances of getting a spot in EMEA? Team Liquid Brazil is immensely successful but idk if it helps them at all relative to G2 Gozen

yay’s 1v4 on Haven against Gambit. They didn’t win the map, but I think he hit 3 marshal headshots in a row and killed the last guy with a classic right click before defusing the spike

When I was on the west coast earlier this year I went from 15ms to ~30-35 one day and never went back. I’m on the east coast now and things have been stable, but I assume it has to just be Riot having to do some stuff on the server side that had unexpected effects on ping for people in certain regions

well asuna and s0m are streaming rn and vanity was streaming an hour ago but no one cares about C9/100T/NRG as much as they care about shahzam

https://twitter.com/Sentinels/status/1549119120968491011?s=20&t=NRSIAmMUUvfe6avHaA8ffQ. They said bootcamp starts today, and they just arrived yesterday (i’m not even sure if shroud was there yet and TenZ arrived halfway through ShahZam’s stream) and ShahZaM wanted to play and stream when they clearly hadn’t begun practicing so idk what the problem is

I don’t think it’s a problem, but LoL Worlds still only plays one match at a time in its play-in stage so it seems unlikely. I guess it’s fine for them to not overlap if most of the matches are going to be bo1 anyway, so they’d probably keep their scheduling how it is now

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this would be 50 total matches, right? The most any Masters/Champions event has had so far was 28, so this would pretty much force Riot to play two matches simultaneously during the swiss stages

When will Riot add a 5th sentinel so sentinels can all play as sentinels and finally dominate

for me it all depends on how comfortable shroud can get with the maps and his utility usage over the next 2.5 weeks. if he learns how to play well from a lot of positions, then his aim could make him pretty scary in clutch scenarios

I’d prefer skuba/bang/aproto over AYRIN/supamen, but otherwise pretty good

The first ticket is for both the Upper Final and Lower Round 3, since they are only bo3

They used this comp for the KR Challengers group stage, and switched to the killjoy for playoffs, so it’s not that old

does TSM get more viewers than 100T? that sounds unlikely

idk what the age distribution of people who play Valorant is, but i’d imagine that the average age of people who are more invested in VCT is considerably higher (early 20s or something idk), so it’s possible that the 5pm Friday start time for the first match might discourage anyone who has a job or summer program from attending, especially when you account for travel. at least the grand final is looking pretty good rn, hopefully they can sell the rest in the next 5 days

They didn’t have a mental problem at 2021 M3 though, they lost the first map to Gambit 2-13 and bounced back to a 13-7 win on map 2 before losing on Icebox. That wasn’t really a choke, Gambit was just better.

Probably just practice putting themselves in weird situations and improvising their way out of it. Also maybe change some of their agents cause I don’t think the killjoy on Ascent/Haven is getting as much value as it used to. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make any roster changes right now. I mean they lost 13-15 on map 3 to OpTic at Reykjavik and 11-13 on map 3 this time, so it’s not like they’re bad. If a couple rounds go differently, they’d be in the top 3 and I don’t think anyone would be doubting them.

DRX need a chance to prove they can beat SUYGETSU and shut up ANGE1 after he said they got lucky and weren’t that good.

Rb plays Raze on Bind though, so there’s much less of a chance that he chokes on map 3

on Friday