V1 will actually have a “LOWER BRACKET RUN STARTING TOMORROW BBY 😤😈”

for sure they do, my dad is old and slow these days

i’d rather him take out his anger on us than his sister or mom.

TSM beat LG and 100T 2-1, and only lost in OT map 3 to Knights. I’ve been saying that they could have competed this season. Especially considering that Knights and LG had close series vs C9 and V1. All these NA teams are closer than you think, and any of these flukes can happen to them.

TSM choked way too much and didn’t deserve it this season though, zero excuses!

nice bait now actually listen up
SEN beats Guard today, more experience when it matters.
And that's coming from a TSM fan who likes Guard.

It's awesome to me that d3ffo the duelist is (at most) the 3rd best player on that team. And that's nothing against d3ffo, the talent is just insane on Gambit.

whatever team u support has a 3/6 chance to make masters
any NA team we support has a 2/8 chance to make masters
don't complain about "fairness"

GL TL means good luck Team Liquid btw

ravish looking like drake with that cut, but a better voice than drake 😤

they did an unofficial drunk cast of TSM vs Soniqs last year (it was a secondary stream with no cast), super fun lol

i hesitate to say this because of potential misogyny allegations, but…
i don’t personally care for mimi’s voice. yinsu, pansy, kaquka are all fine for what it’s worth, and mimi’s skill could be fantastic, but i don’t care for her voice enough to listen.
lothar is also incredibly annoying.

M3C can’t go due to travel issues/bans I assume?
That’s actually sad, they’re clearly a top team in the world. Missing out on chances to win more LANs in their prime…

it’s funny to see thread after thread about “Liquid confirmed qualified” get shut down. GL TL though

damn that makes tsm top 9

ban and bdog both stood out to me when i was making my NA Op tier list article. young and improving rapidly, wonder if bdog will show up too.

honestly more LANs in general would be incredible. they don’t even need to be flashy. for example, all the regional playoffs (after the group stages) for Masters 1 should be LANs. unless COVID or war makes it impossible.

there are only two masters this year, riot allowed time for a third party tournament at the end of the year when scheduling VCT. hopefully it’s a success.

i’m 1000% in agreement that there need to be more events. stuff with 100k USD+ prize pools, so large teams will actually compete and not troll. the ESL pro league showed me that valorant’s five-game challenger’s season is not nearly enough. hopefully they get on that soon

Has the val community ever gotten together and official decided what counts as a major? CSGO had 2-3 majors per year until COVID. Unless the third party tournament at the end of the year has a massive prize pool, it doesn’t seem right to only have ONE “major” per year.

The playoff stage of this tournament should have been organized on LAN. Nothing super flashy, but something simple like ESL Pro League Groups.

Hey devs/mods,
Any chance we can get an HLTV-esque achievements tab on the player pages? On HLTV, it shows LANs and Majors won/participated, along with the results for each event.
The Total Winnings / Event Placement list for each player is good, just think this would be better. Especially since the long VCT event names tend to get cut off.
Maybe the Valorant achievement tab could be sorted by some combination of A-tier, LAN, Masters, and Champions.
Thanks for considering!

been a fan of heat since m3/champs, haven’t had a chance to watch him in a while. he looked great vs yay/envy.

great suggestion, will look into that if i do a playoff article. at the very least i’ll do op kills per map instead of just kills. i didn’t get too specific since each team played five matches in groups.

i appreciate u, but it wasn’t tooooo much work. just had some spare time and crunched the numbers.

“Best Operators from the Knights Monthly Gauntlet” don’t worry it’s a must read 😤😤

had to include mitch somehow

wardell yay and shahz are the only ones who can even be considered in international competition, i’m with you there. even then, there aren’t many awpers that stand out at all in the global scene yet either. except a select few, like cNed.

you can’t point at players and be like “oh, that’s Valorant’s device, s1mple, kennyS, zywoo, Jame (maybe Wardell xd), etc”

Although slower and more easily countered than the CSGO awp, the Operator can be a suffocating tool when properly supported. Even thought the most Op-dependent team was eliminated in the Open Qualifiers (TSM with Wardell), there were still plenty of talented users that showcased their skill in the first Group Stage. The list below compiles Operator kills and Chamber ultimate kills to rank the best snipers in the Group Stage.

The Undisputed Best
OpTic yay (Group B): 82 op kills, 26 ult kills, 108 total

The Rising Star Runner Up
XSET Cryo (Group A): 60 op kills, 11 ult kills, 71 total

The A-tier Best of the Rest
Guard Sayaplayer (Group A): 40 op kills, N/A ult kills, 40 total
LG bdog (Group A): 39 op kills, 6 ult kills, 45 total
Knights ban (Group B): 39 op kills, N/A ult kills, 39 total
SEN TenZ (Group B): 37 op kills, N/A ult kills, 37 total
NRG s0m (Group B): 34 op kills, 7 ult kills, 41 total
V1 penny (Group B): 32 op kills, 13 ult kills, 45 total
Rise Shanks (Group B): 24 op kills, 12 ult kills, 36 total

The B-tier Non-Crutchers
100T Asuna (Group A): 18 op kills, 1 ult kill, 19 total
EG Boostio (Group A): 18 op kills, 1 ult kill, 19 total
C9 leaf (Group A): 13 op kills, 2 ult kills, 15 total
EG jawgemo (Group A): 11 op kills, 13 ult kills, 24 total

Honorable Mentions
C9 Mitch (Group A): 7 op kills, 12 ult kills, 19 total
100T Ethan (Group A): 2 op kills, 19 ult kills, 21 total
Guard neT (Group A): 9 op kills, 3 ult kills, 12 total

Please note that this list is strictly sorted by operator kills and not necessarily by operator skill, and has zero relevance to rifling skill. A few players (such as XSET dephh) secured a few kills but weren't included for conciseness. Feel free to discuss accuracy and offer feedback.

tsm 13-10

i was watching wardell at the time. i’d say his reaction was mixed, more disbelief that jason would say such a thing in public, and less willingness to accept it as a joke.

calling something racist isn’t “soft” ya weirdo. ignoring it and letting it continue in our world is the soft path of least resistance, tbh.

“all these triggered kids these days couldn’t handle a csgo lobby 🤓”

i reverse this fucking, dexter survives

i think you’ll have an opportunity to laugh at them on a much bigger scale soon. doubt they qualify to rep NA at masters, and if they do, no shot they win it.

wardell got detained trying to save his OP into another country, hopefully aleko has enough to buy him one in austin!

nah i’m afraid you have no life just like the rest of us

somehow here before the guys racing to defend sexism and now racism

i’ve been there before too. at least you recognize it, and can work to make it healthy like i have. don’t go flame the players on twitter lmao.
soar is excellent on breeze, if that makes you feel better. they were up 11-3 on TSM during VCT.

but u look at the participating teams enough to notice when a main roster gets switched to an academy roster?

9

since this got revived lol,
tsm move dates got postponed to the 24th, so they totally could have played in the Boom tourney with the benefit of hindsight lol. Obviously the decision to not participate happened before the delays, but just unlucky. They’ll still be in the next monthly, though.

ur my W

um, if you simply want someone who’s consistently at the top of the leaderboard…
it’s obviously wardell.
now, if you think he gets to the top by baiting and op crutching against Tier 2 opponents, you can totally argue that. but that wasn’t part of the question, was it? 😉
he’s consistent without being overly flashy, and the only time he’s performed “poorly” recently was a 46-52-8 series against RNG. Anytime his team gets a chance to play Tier 1 teams like LG/Knights/100T(1.5ish), he performs well.

yeah i coulda been clearer thanks for opportunity to explain

I meant “fluke” in the most respectful way possible when it comes to Acend and Gambit. It was a very close series between the two best teams in the world at the time, so it’s hard to crown a clear number one after it.

I want Valorant to succeed long term, but my main issue right now is name recognition. CSGO has many big names (s1mple, device, etc) and a decent influx of young talent (m0nesy, for example). Also, the dominant CSGO teams manage to stay dominant for long period of time, thus allowing fanbases to grow around both players AND teams.

Now look at Valorant. Our biggest names are ScreaM, TenZ (lol), cNed (unknown prior), nats (unknown prior), and Tarik (who doesn’t even play the game competitively). The game is going to heavily rely on young talent, so we need to see more players like Cryo/zekken/trent. There aren’t enough S-tier tournaments to establish dominant teams. For example, in NA we’ve seen teams like TSM, 100T, and currently SEN dominate for short periods of time before flaming out. EU has similar issues, where it’s hard to judge dominance vs flukes due to lack of tournaments (is Acend really better than Gambit, for example).

i’m out of ideas now so i’ll shut up but hopefully that gets my point across

it is what it is, i’m just super excited for stage 2. really think they have what it takes to make groups and compete against Tier1 competition again. i just don’t know if they’ll make it out of open quals, considering their numerous chokes and poor performances last season.

TLDR i think they’re better against better competition if they could ever make it there smh

if tsm wasn’t traveling then this would be another fucking banger between them and 100t

in fact, without traveling they would have competed in four tournaments over the span of a month (YFP, Knights Feb, BoomTV, Knights Mar).

lucky man

100t starting to look like TSM, all we have are ranked clips to share these days :/

“tsm needs to participate in smaller tourneys to improve or else they only care about streaming”
tsm wins smaller tournament
“hahaha mickey mouse winners”

“tsm needs to bootcamp to work on chemistry or else they only care about streaming”
tsm bootcamps
“omg why are they missing the smaller tourneys!”

and the cycle continues