TviQ
Taimou
Mickie
Miro
Ryujehong
Zebbosai

Come at me. Would also consider Nevix, hulk for positions.

I heard somebody say that LW Red is reforming around him, not sure of that myself and no idea what form that LW Red roster will take. Nor am I sure why he wasn't included in the LW Blue roster, when I spoke to the players before IEM Gyeonggi they indicated that was the plan.

That was his name in the past when he played TF2. According to some very rough translations of the LW twitter, he seems to think it's more pretty? It's stylised as Fl0w3r.

smh - definitely prefer Nanohana personally

I think that may have been true at one point, but of the team still residing in Europe I'm not sure whether anyone below the top four (Misfits/Rogue/NiP/REUNITED) is better than the top ten of NA. They have reaped the benefits of a solid circuit and the NA tier two seems much deeper than the EU equivalent currently. It's also hard to tell because we haven't seen the EU teams compete in two months but this lack of opportunity has only served to separate the gap between tier 1 and 2 in Europe. I'm excited to watch even French casts of the G4G XTRA Cup because we can finally see something from Europe.

It's also worrying that TOs are finding it not worth their while to run regular small (5-10k) tournaments in Europe. The viewership figures and budgets are a feedback loop that only serves to send the scene downwards, perhaps exacerbated by the decisions to run all tournaments at NA hours early in the game's life. This is a prime opportunity to get more bang for your buck as the only tournament happening in EU right now, even if you believe the viewership will be lower.

End of the day though, this is a very reversible issue. If 2017 continues like this with incredibly few opportunities for EU I'd be amazed.

To be fair people love him for it, because he's a character and fans relate to his style of stumbling through things and laughing about it. Good public opinion of nV is worth far more than the $750 fine or whatever it ends up being.

we have reached the infamous page 2 on this new patch of overgg :o

I think that would fit better in another series but I am open to creating that. I know there are so many games that lots of people cannot watch them all, so I agree it would be a useful tool. Only issue is that a lot of the time vods are slow to upload; by the time some of them are up, the game is not as relevant. Perhaps a combination of YouTube/Twitch would work.

I think the announcement will have a little more than "hi riders is a thing now". I imagine they'll go into who the veterans are behind it and talk about their future and structure etc.

EDIT: The announcement of the new organisation Riders has been pushed back to January 15th.

It was interesting to hear that the thoughts could be broadly split between those who favour large infrequent patches that set a meta for a few months, and those who would prefer they make frequent minor adjustments towards a "utopia patch" in which most heroes are balanced nicely.

PTR policy change pls

Reportedly scheduled to begin later this month.

Barring strange OGN rules, I'm pretty sure we'll see that LW superteam branded as LW Blue. I really wanted to see Pine in it as well though.

Will nomy get a visa this time if they qualify though...

NGE Winter Premiere is ongoing and will be a fairly decent NA tournament. APEX Season 2 will begin in January and should be sick once again. As for the rest, as far as I'm aware there's nothing else announced.

Be good stay safe.

theScore are actually one of the best news sites around for esports though, this isn't some clickbait garbage site. They don't have many people for OW but for the big esports they pump out good content.

Even the reasoning is ridiculous, the whole list reads like it was written by someone who doesn't follow the game. Huge names missing and terrible reasons given even for the understandable picks. Not theScores best work.

custa is in the midst of spitting straight truths when this photo was taken, he's a zen OG

Apparently Uncia were struggling with terrible latency issues last week in the cup. Not sure how accurate that is but appears to fit the timeline.

username: sideshow#1337
password: hunter2

tfw ur pc is dead so no lootboxes ((

going for some amazing thumbnails as pure clickbait, gotta watch to see exactly what Seagull is so pumped about rofl

I don't know why he's always left out of the talks about best Roadhog players, but Taimou is quite clearly the best hog player in the world right now and has been for months. He has insane clutch and hard carry potential on that hero.

happy birthday to Vonethil

and permzilla

Control tiebreakers are the devil

Just testing to see who read it all. Ty.

go casino

The roles also have knoxxx and unkoe on dps, I don't think they're correct.

Seeding has created some mad shit in this qualifier

For a lot of these NA teams it seems like they just wanna ride out this patch and hope for less tanks in the future.

All six teams at IEM Gyeonggi have changed in some way since their last tournament, from Lunatic-Hai's role restructuring through to Misfits and Rogue swapping players.

To be fair this LG team should be legit if they work it out.

I'm very unsure about this new Misfits roster, it doesn't look like a world-beating team on paper but the pieces are just about there and they could come out really strong. Pity it's single elimination because both of these teams could be incredible.

Overwatch is not as map-focused as CS:GO, one could reasonably be competent and have pocket picks in a map pool of a fairly large size. The low TTK and focus on angles makes CS super map-oriented, whereas OW comps, strats, and teamwork can be applied sometimes wholesale to maps you've practised less on. Even then it's unreasonable to have a map pool larger than 11, preferably 9.

The issue you're talking about with repetitive map pools comes from having a poor drafting process or repetitive maps themselves. The later in the drafting process you leave picks, the less choice you have to select something new. A process that sees you ban all the way til your final maps is very poor for map diversity and strategy, and means that teams will settle on the "common maps" between them which do tend to be the same ones over and over like Hollywood/King's Row.

Introducing picks into the drafting process on the 2nd turn, immediately after a ban, means that you can eliminate your opponent's best or your weakest, but there is still huge potential for a pocket pick to come out from a team (which tend to be on lesser played maps like Rogue's Hanamura).

The DreamHack Winter tournament was a prime example of this - we saw solid map diversity BECAUSE of the map drafting process, not in spite of it. It also made for some extremely strategic and exciting choices between the teams, and made the fringe maps (like Fnatic vs NiP's Anubis and Volskaya) very notable. If you just force them into the pool, you divorce them from the storylines that would otherwise be woven through them and they become 'just another map'.

The rankings use the evidence from the last two months, they do not represent an average of tournament placings during that time; we also count lineups as the same if they keep the same core style or majority of players as this has proven to be representative of future performance in Overwatch.

One problem with regional rankings is that the 10th best team in Europe currently, for example, is pretty terrible and I don't watch them religiously or want to watch their VODs to study them. I do already collect all the data on the top 20 teams in the world though in case one goes up or down into the top 10, so this would only be a problem for the really lower end teams.

To give you an idea, the 10th best KR team is probably around Flash Lux/AF.Red level, NA is about Liquid/Rise Nation level, EU is about Fragsters/T.ROX. EU is the really bad one once you get down because there aren't regular deep tournaments that sift the wheat from the chaff and the skill level doesn't appear to be as good either.

Another issue is that it's hard to tell where a team is from. For example EnVyUs are an NA team, with most players from Europe, playing for the last 2 months in Korea. This makes it very arbitrary how you label a team. Additionally if I make NRG an NA team, they've been playing mostly against KR teams so I have little data to tell how they would compare to the other NA sides.

I could certainly produce regional sets and it would probably be useful for fans but it would be extra work, highly subjective, and would flood the site with 4 power rankings every month. Perhaps a personal video series would be better suited for regional rankings.

Yep, rosters that have been ranked are listed under the photos. This also applies to Panthera with r2der rather than Luffy.

Definitely some potential on this roster but they lacked a system or the fundamental teamwork necessary at DHW.

I should mention that this was like 5 minutes after they lost, it was my only opportunity to grab someone from Fnatic. He's not awkward personally, he just had his mind on the loss I think.

Just as I posted this, the casters told me that Blizzard said they found the issue and it's fixed. Theyre confident.

Maybe we need a tournament realm HMMM :THINKING:

pootis

UPDATE: Misfits released a follow-up statement about the status of Kryw, saying:

"[Kryw] is a free agent, we've mutually agreed to part ways. I don't want to encumber him by requiring another team to have to negotiate a buyout."

It is a very strange choice. People are gonna be wtfing all day.

Their sub is already practising with them in Korea, arrived recently. I assume Rogue wanted to practice themselves to avoid an upset based purely on unfamiliarity with the new patch.

I don't think they chose nV on anything other than the weak roster. They've rolled AF Blue the last two times they played them, but if they pick AF Blue then nV have a decent chance of making it to the final on the opposite side of the bracket and have time to practice and get good with the replacement. They may also not want to play against BK Stars without having a read on them.

DHW is going to be weird, but also very interesting. NiP and Misfits play completely opposite styles atm and are likely to change a lot in the next week, and god knows what Fnatic/coL are up to.

Better the injured, crippled, beast with half a leg hanging off you know.

Seems so, yes.