What is even the difference between cutting and benching lol?

It would make more sense to have something like on-role, off-role, cut IMO and just have same role players.

I think their prospects are higher than last year, but they're probably not going to.

giants (at least during lockin, i dont remember if they kept them)

Sorry, but please don't deadname burger king gaming

Holy shit. They got the 13-year-old who observed the NA Challengers matches to make their announcement videos.

I put T1 over ZETA personally

麦当劳员工 Lol

Yeah. Korean T2 is so odd. All the best prospects seem to play in other regions. I guess the pay is just not good there.

Hmm, possible. I think Lumo and Only1 did well in their first matches, but it's hard to tell from just those games. Both FENNEL and SCARZ played teams that aren't good. I think FENNEL's performance last year sets them as the favorites.

SCARZ was good last year, but I fear losing Jemkin, Kr1stal, and Toraneco might've been too much.

Stew's gonna be a household name by the end of this season

Me :)

Don't think winning is EG's number one priority rn

Now that Xdll is back, is this roster winning acension? They had a close map against fnatic (without their full roster), better than a lot of T1 teams did against them. Syouta is one of the most promising duelists to come out of Japan. Xdll is a great flex player and should've gone to Zeta had he not had his scandal, and his sova is better than his Skye, so he should benefit from the nerf. Derialy has international lan experience, with Northeption at Copenhagen. GON and CLZ are both arguable for best in role in Japan outside of Zeta players.

I don't know much about the T2 scene in other Pacific reasons, but who do we think are going to challenge them?

That's true. I think qck is more recently in my mind with playing senti since dgzin normally played Jett on Furia.

I have faith in Saadhak. Even if qck and Tuyz underperform. Cauanzin and Less + Saadhak is already terrifying.

Yeah. Personally, I really hoped Astralis or Heroic would enter, but I don't see them ever starting a Val team

In the off chance that Heroic ever does join Val, I really hope they have their social media manager that shits on Val post about the Val team. That would be hilarious.

Americas: Flyquest, Optic, DSG

EMEA: SK, Astralis & Heroic (never gonna happen)

Pacific: Damwon, Crazy Racoon, Fennel

China: NIP, Rare Atom, LNG, Weibo

Yeah. Tbf I don't know if I would say looking at Twitch for scrimbux takes dedication, I think even James attested to this. It was just kinda funny seeing santos get so pressed because people were praising James.

Noot Noot was a GC team who had a player that was accused of cheating, and subsequently banned from GC*. They went on a small run in the tournament, where they possibly caused a few teams notably DSG to lose. https://youtu.be/rTyFDhamkvw

James FF, the scrims leaker on VLR, had drama with ds santos, a vlr "journalist" who I believe used to go by Eutalyx. Ds santos claimed that James wasn't a "real journalist" and a "basement dweller who looks at Twitch all day." As opposed to santos who does real journalism, which is waiting for official announcements and writing a recap of it :O (Clearly needs a lot of professionalism and skills for that). Lots of people on VLR got upset at ds santos as they saw the situation as overly rude and a "pot calling the kettle black" ordeal.

"*" It's worth noting that the player, Malibu, was never explicitly found guilty of cheating, but in the report that banned her from competing in val events, they stated ban evading, but never addressed the cheating allegations.

Yay vs DSG, KeenC, noot noot, lock-in crowd drama

not related to pro, but James FF/ds santos + the Leorge falloff

Some pretty good drama this year.

Yeah, I get the Football player example cause what team they're on will play a significant role. I just think that CCs barely do anything with their teams outside of being in videos every now and then, so I was just curious.

Ehh, it won't be as easy as it should've been, but BCJ and nitro are good. Both were really good prefranchising.

Xdll back in the Fennel lineup. ascension contenders

I like it. Double controller was only so viable b/c of skye, and it's nice to see people have to actually change their agent pool instead of just always playing Skye as initiator. Unfortunate for pros since the change happened so late, but I like it as a casual player.

Content creators might bring more money into the org. You get a bigger audience for ads, and you get more content that you can advertise on.

I'm not trying to be mean, but I am seriously curious as to why.

Even when I had content creators I liked, I never really cared about what org they were apart of, so I'm curious as to what would make some care.

You're almost a shoe-in for ascension next year. You get the chance to play alongside some pretty large names, you get paid by M80, you can play alongside your team if you win.

Could be valid reasons not to take offers, assuming he got them.

Hmmm... I don't remember the specific video I watched, I think it was TMV, and he mentioned that Tuyz was gonna be on Duelist and qck would be playing sentinel. I just kinda assumed it was the case, could be wrong.

I think the real question is, was promoting Tuyz to duelist instead of picking up an upcoming duelist from T2? I'll be honest, I didn't watch too much of Tuyz on TBK, but I think Askia on Union looked good outside of their last game. Again, I didn't watch any of TBK, so I would defer to a Brazilian fan's opinion on this.

I would argue that FPX didn't have a star duelist, and was more Suygetsu and Shao than Ardiis.

Pretty sure that's a wall at EG's office.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football

I know what you meant, I just was making a joke about this. Football to most of the world means soccer, not American football

I feel like this might be a really stupid suggestion but I'm not seeing the issue.

League seasons go from January to November (LCS, LEC, LCK, and LPL start in late January, Worlds is in the end of November). That's 11 months of the year, obv with some gaps in between. Could valorant not do the same but do like December to October? Would be a little bit of a weird starting point, but would avoid any conflict with worlds.

LEC and EMEA use the same stadium as well, I think it's the same for Americas, not sure about Pacific. So it would be impossible for the games to happen at the same time, so I don't think that would be an issue.

who the fuck plays football outside of the US

oh no....

I agree with everything else tho

I was gonna write something along the lines of him not considering any of those sports real sports unlike the actual real sports (i.e. the ones that are popular in his country), but he did it for me.

Bro, it was a joke, not that deep

Fair enough

top 11*

Possibly, but The cypher cam into both mains is just too stronk I think. Plus demon1 rifling is too good, don't need chamber for that.

Cypher just too good on Sunset tho

Run the SEN comp on Sunset, easily the best.

Fade - Crashies
Breach - Ethan
Raze - Victor
Cypher - Demon1
Omen -Marved

Does Tenz have a tower named after him in the country he's from? Didn't think so.

Only people who don't know who Faker is think Tenz is more popular than Faker.

To add to this, I also like that VAL isn't just the one-region show. Every region in the world is competitive and has a legitimate shot at winning titles.

Not many other maps where double smokes is necessary. Maybe split, and in that case you could do this comp, and just have victor solo raze, wouldn't be the worst.

first tweet says due to time constrictions they couldn't have full RRs per split

replier says they could add more time to the schedule

"We're happy with the baseline"

The true position is that they don't want to have a full RR per split. This isn't popular with the community, so he says that they couldn't make it full RRs per split, when in reality, they didn't want to.

You said it perfectly, they would have to have two games on at the same time to make it work (similar to CS). They could just say we don't want double viewing, and that would be fine with me, but he didn't say that. Instead, he said that they couldn't make it work.

Personally, I don't know. Maybe I would prefer no communication instead of this shit where we have to dig 3 levels deep to see what he's really saying.

Val. Just don't like CS. Don't care all too much about the number of games.

Because he's the commissioner of the VCT... He should have a large impact on the decisions the VCT makes.

Plus this is more of a personal dislike, but he has a tendency for his first reply to any criticism to be a "PR response" where it doesn't make sense, he'll get called out for it, then have a second response which is more honest, but is normally a bad take.

If you want some examples of what I mean, you can look here. (https://twitter.com/LoganBartley25/status/1747666705382597048) where initially he says they couldn't do it, then the second reply where he says they were "happy" with the number of games. I don't have the tweets, but there was something similar in the TGRD/G2 situation.

I would think demon1 on normal smokes and Marved on viper would make more sense, considering that demon1 played brim and Astra on EG

I don't think Champs 21 was a Mickey Mouse. Acend fluked a win, but the format wasn't any different than Berlin

Calling any international LAN a Mickey Mouse is cope, but I do disagree with the idea that all international LANs are equal. Champs, in my opinion, is way more difficult and important than either masters of a given year. More teams, more time to figure out meta, and play styles that were exploited earlier in the year have been figured out.

I don't watch him, but I tried to watch him when SEN first signed him. He had a pinned msg at the top of the chat saying, "Please keep the chat in only Portuguese" and then something along the lines of him not being confident in streaming in English, and outside of talking to teammates he only spoke in Portuguese. Like I said, this could've changed.