No one really cares about T2, just an unfortunate truth. DSG, TGRD, and M80 were probably solo-carrying NA viewership last year. Now there's only 1 left, and it's probably the team with the least fans of the 3.

Individual performance from quite a few players has dropped of a cliff. In the past, rounds they were down in Alfajer Leo or chronicle would get miracle kills and they would win. Doesn't happen nearly as much.

They've failed to innovate any of their strategies, and are getting beaten by teams with better team play and coordination.

https://www.vlr.gg/team/11479/apeks

Not bad, but not great.

I like him personally, but I can understand why other people don't.

I think Paperthin is good in Pacific as well, his commentary and Achillios' shout casting make a good duo imo.

That's fair, but then I/she knows is a perfectly valid response. Guy just has a fragile ego or some shit then.

Let me ask you this. What would be the benefit of this comm?

There's only a few things I could think of.

• They don't know how Clove kit works?
• He wants her to plant and play ult instead of faking the plant and looking for a kill.

If it's the first, then saying "she knows" is perfectly valid. If it's the second, they're back seating.

He's not saying the she has ult. He's saying that in order to ult if she dies, she needs to plant bomb. One is providing potentially useful information, one is telling someone how to play. If they say they know, that should be the end of it. Who gives a fuck.

There's not many things more infuriating in ranked than people telling you how to play your agents in clutches. If I say I know, I just don't want this person micromanaging how I'm playing my clutch. Kinda a huge overreaction from the guy imo. I think if he just calmly said that he was trying to provide helpful information instead of going rant mode instantly, he probably would've gotten a way different response.

Everyone doubting c0m for a bad first game of the season.

Where have I seen this before?

Yeah, if they can keep up this level at the bare minimum they should qualify for Shanghai. I hope losing their opening game against the best team in the region doesn't hurt their mental.

Bit of both. JDG should've won, so many thrown rounds on split that they could've won with more discipline.

Flaws in EDG's team are becoming more obvious. Haodong calling is not good, and they don't use enough supporting util if they rest so much of their chance of winning on KangKang. It's why we see them performing worse overall.

Looking better with YhChen

Horrible individual decision making + nobody single handedly winning ~3 rounds made them lose Split.

Viva made some really questionable calls in the second half, which I think cost them some important rounds. At least one of Yihao and Mart1n needs to be more consistent, they consistently make huge plays and the end of maps after having silent openings.

"Nah I'd win" meme but with Boasters face

I think the one thing that people don't consider is that CS is only able to do this schedule by delineating the work of hosting events to other companies like ESL, PGL, etc. The only way that a lot of these companies are able to run these tournaments is because of the lucrative gambling sponsors. Riot has made it pretty clear they don't want to take gambling sponsors, so that leaves them with really only one option. Decrease the production quality so much that the cost is made up by only ticket and merch sales. Which, I have a feeling isn't what most people want.

People are insecure that other people might not like the thing they like so they project that insecurity into talking shit about the other game.

It happens in the exact opposite direction during Masters/Champs.

CS major beat Masters Madrid by 200k viewers and it's the first cs2 major. This has been the closet the gap has ever been between the two sports.

I like CS as well, but it's very possible that Val overtakes CS soon in viewership. It could even happen at champs this year.

The game gets bigger every year as new teams from different regions get into the game and become successful, ZETA Division getting top 3 in Reykjavik in 2022 created an insanely big fanbase for the game in JP, a region with no history in FPS. Just think what could happen if a KR team or a CN team wins a LAN.

Current EDG lineup isn't that good. Their play style of focusing all their support on KangKang kinda falls flat when you have players like Nobody who don't use supportive util that often.

If SyouTa wakes up for this series I think Fennel win.

The last two times the teams played, Reject did a good job of shutting down SyouTa, Fennel either need SyouTa to do well, or have Derialy or another step up, but Xdll can't solo carry two bo5s.

DRX are presumably running Foxy9 on sentinel, something we've seen to mixed results.

Meanwhile Jinboong is in Japanese T2 dropping a something like performance on Cypher and Killjoy https://www.vlr.gg/297835/fennel-vs-sengoku-gaming-challengers-league-2024-japan-split-1-lf

Seems like it would be a good upgrade on paper.

No one reads off topic, it relates to gambling in Valorant, there's like 80 million threads about agent genders and anime that are in general discussion at least this relates to gambling sponsors in Valorant.

I know I just complained about the amount of CSjoe threads, but this was pretty interesting.

A group of "fans" being paid by a skin gambling site apparently stormed the stage in response to one of the teams, G2, having a sponsorship with a different gambling site.

https://www.hltv.org/news/38654/audience-members-storm-major-stage-during-g2-mouz-match

Plus there's talks about how PGL has been circumventing the Danish laws to promote gambling site 1xBet.

https://twitter.com/Bo_Hoogland/status/1772584954448212476

I'm not going to pretend like the two events are connected in anyway, but it's stuff like this that makes me glad that Valorant hasn't taken on any gambling sponsorships and (I think) actively prevents teams from taking on gambling sponsorships.

Thoughts?

He tried to rebrand to avoid the stigma that was associated with him, but it was just changing his twitter handle.

Not many fans have a lot of personal respect for him, and I'm guessing the allegations against him for being a sex-pest as well as his critiques on Potter probably cost him connections in industry. It seemed like he was the only successful journalist in Val, and then for him to retire felt more like he lost connections rather then just not wanting to continue in the industry. Could be wrong tho.

There's only so many Clove, CSjoe, tierlist, ___ believers threads a man can take.

Too low on C9. This team despite being very not good could beat half of the teams in the tier above them.

I only started watching CS this year, but I thought the crowd was being a little rude to the Spirit players.

I also think the CS TOs are more relaxed with what you can bring into the stadium. I see whole ass drumlines in the VIT game, but I imagine Riot probably doesn't want people bring instruments and megaphones into the arenas.

Am I crazy for thinking that Heretics look like a better team then KC? Like sure they lost in the GF, but KC had a lot of momentum then. TH looked better at Madrid to me. Especially if wo0t ends up doing well.

A lot of languages don't have this, which is why I get the confusion that some people have.

But the amount of people that just don't understand this function of English and have an incredibly strong opinion on it is really funny to me.

The first player to win both a Masters and a champs event

Surprised this hasn't been talked about more.

SEN are the only team. That's what they're getting at.

Surprised how many people don't think this team is interesting. Lakia comeback story after losing to SEN in Reykjavik. Munchkin a long time player who's shittalking other teams constantly. t3xture and meteor consistently popping off. Karon making it to a masters grand final on his first appearance. Plus every time the camera pans to one of them, there's something funny going on.

I do hate how every time something is broadcasted, we have to pretend the audience is always just 5yr old kids that can't handle shit.

Let people swear, trash-talk, etc. Who gives a shit

They figured out the way to beat SEN split, play disruptive on the retakes. First time someone really tried and was able to do that, and SEN didn't have any answer.

I can't remember why, but I'm pretty sure I heard once that his parents were divorced, could be wrong tho.

It's a kilt, he's Scottish.

most pros say phantom feels a lot better on LAN with the low latency

It it's normal on Stream it's because stretched looks terrible on streams. You also have to render less pixels per frame, so you speed up your fps quite a bit more than any other method.

He's just so unlucky man. like 80+% of his bad deaths on Icebox were just due to bad timings that he couldn't control.

I still like Achilios-Paperthin the most. Achilios shoutcasting really good and Paperthin has good analysis.

I can only hope we see them at Shanghai and Seoul

Skrossi is a sleeper agent sent from EMEA to make sure T3xture never played duelist.

I don't think we can say they would be better than any of the teams in the top 4. They might've beaten FPX, KC, TH, and EDG, but i can't see them beating any of the current top 4 teams.

F0rsaken is going to be the s1mple of valorant. Mechanically gifted player who won't win a major for a long time. He gets close to winning but chokes games they should win.

Therefore, f0rsaken will be the goat. He plays nearly every agent in the game at a high level, and has some of the best mechanics in the game. He also helps igl in the team.

I thought Will made a whole post about how he quit gaming and now he's back dropping -16 against QoR?

The Japan T2 scene is not that bad. Fennel, Reject, and last year's scarz are/were pretty good. The issue is that the igl and coaching isn't good. They constantly run stupid comps and don't have any game plans for when things go wrong.

The talent is there, but doesn't have the structure to properly develop and execute on said talent.

It also doesn't help that DFM is too focused on getting popular players on their rosters instead of the best in Japan. ZETA at least tries.

Sen are doing so well right now because they have coherent gameplans for every map. Just having a fragging igl who can't call brings them back to the Marved iteration. Not nearly as good.

Sonofcar clears

Clove is a controller right?

Having jett smoke seems kinda terrible ngl.

People need something to get upset about

It might also be worth noting that it functions in a very similar way as "you."

Both can refer to either a singular or a plural subject, but it depends on the context of the sentence.

I understand, my family comes from Norway, so I learned Norwegian alongside English growing up and the idea of gender and pronouns is so different between the two languages.

I have my own issues with the whole pronoun discourse that happens online all the time, but the whole They/Them being exclusively plural issue particularly annoys me since it's just not how English works.