While this might be the end of the RunAway overhype, Haksal was clearly a top Genji in his games and it was his (and the team's) lack of versatility and adaptability that let them down. He is still one of the best Genjis in Korea and the world from what we've seen so far, just trying to use it against counter comps and getting slammed.

For now (perhaps longer, unknown as yet) - Kryw benched, COOLLER coming in as Lucio, Zebbosai moved to flex dps. Team has reportedly been trying some interesting comps. Interesting to see how far they go or how good they look.

Another thing I didn't mention is that they could fix this situation by saying a week beforehand "we are planning for the PTR to go live next Tuesday". Teams could spend time scrimming in PTR, or strategising for it at least, and they would know exactly which games would be on which patches to plan for their opponents.

99% of the playerbase is also not playing Blizzard-sanctioned cups for $178,000. And it's not like they were even clamouring for Sombra to go live yet, the majority of feedback I saw was about tweaking Pharah/Soldier76, nobody was asking for Sombra to be in ranked immediately. There's no tangible negative to delaying Sombra going live for a fortnight.

As for scheduling around longer tournaments, if they had been aiming to release in the beginning half of this 2 month tournament then I would agree, but they only have to wait another 2 weeks for it to be completely over and the PTR has massive changes that've only been live for one week. Even one more day to avoid the regular season and then have a different meta for playoffs - which would be barely better but it would indicate some sort of respect/coordination with the tournament. I don't think it's reasonable to shove meta-changing patches, which this certainly is, in the middle of such major tournaments. Either they don't care about 3rd party events or they'll continue doing this for OWL etc. which is a terrible policy both ways.

Unbelievably stupid not to schedule around $100k+ tournaments. There is a hugely important - and very close - match happening tomorrow between RunAway and KongDoo Panthera and it will just be a guessing game between the two. They won't have been practising extensively in PTR, they haven't had anywhere near enough time and were told the changes would not go live in that form.

Then there's the playoffs, and there's no guarantee whatsoever that the teams who were good in the previous patch will be as good in this one. Look at NiP, the difference between the two patches was gigantic - in one they are a tier 2/3 team in Europe and then suddenly in the next they're one of the best teams in the world. There's very little legitimacy to the teams who made it to APEX playoffs now, they'll have to scramble to adapt as a lot of their preparation, practice, and comps are thrown to square one.

The PTR has not been tested enough and they have done only one iteration of it; the PTR was even advertised as major changes that shouldn't be expected to all go live. It blows my mind that they've just shoved it live and fucked an enormous tournament. It makes me so frustrated to see these basic mistakes. All they had to do was hold off for just over two weeks, making some small tweaks to the PTR based on feedback in the meantime, and there'd be a far better reception and they wouldn't have fucked the biggest global tournament so far in Overwatch.

Has anyone ever told you that you may have a problem

Ah for shame, this was Admirable's idea he was just busy this week. I can't take credit.

Impressive result on the payload maps, especially with all of C9 currently in a team house and FaZe spread across nearly 5,000 miles. When FaZe get into their house that could be the start of a new tier 1 team in NA.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cs4QUyDWAAAnNjR.jpg

you only win if he doesn't chock and they sign him

LG got whacked, that was a stomp.

At least nV have one US player!

Blending Aus top talent in with tier two NA teams to try and improve Tempo Storm. Will be an interesting experiment.

Now you have to divulge why the capitalisation is important, there must be a reason.

OK I was off by a long way, some fears discarded and new ones developing about the OWL.

haHAA you mean region locked into a Riot-esque league so we can never run these again except before the annual international tournament?

Just a note that Korea are currently 5 match wins to 8 match losses against Western competition - and that's top Western invited teams against the top 12 of the Korean scene. It would be comparable to four of the top Korean teams coming over to play against teams as low as... Team Vitality for example in Europe, or Kingdom Esports in North America.

It was your wording that made the least sense because you said offline should not be counted, it flung the whole post into nonsense. I agree that in the future online will be counted less, but for now I don't think it's reasonable to ignore the online games when there are a lot of them and many of the top teams have not got the same invites to the offline tournaments.

I definitely don't mind the criticism and I appreciate that it was well thought out (minus the wording errors). I didn't assume it was an attack, just thought it'd be a good thing to debate as there certainly are many ways NiP's online performance can be counted or discounted. I personally do not believe that they are "LAN chokers" or could be branded as underperformers based on one result, and as such I believe that their offline performances would have been similar to their online ones had they had more opportunities.

I'm afraid you're simply incorrect Barroi, as stated in the article we are taking both online and offline games into account. You are the one making speculations about the cause of the discrepancy between NiP's single offline result and their consistent online results, we weighted both their incredible online performance and results against the single loss at the Overwatch Open to come to a fair rank. Frankly, one lost close game to the eventual winners of the tournament is also not "all of their results falling apart".

No, not by far. They're not in the top 5 from the look of it.

Without the roster moves I'd expect this to be a 3-2 win in favour of NRG. Now? I have no idea. Likely going to be a rough transition for them without any practise.

You've completely missed the point of my post. Let's take it slowly.

Your premise is that they are lacking calls, as their only caller is on tank where he is unable to call well.
They decide they need a calling Lucio, so they need to cut someone to pick one up.

Rather than just cut art1er and move roles around, or indeed cut anyone else on the roster (leading to an overall increase in comms) they chose to cut their former caller. They could have kept a caller on tank AND lucio if the comms were the only problem.

Why remove the tank, who was calling, rather than any other quiet player to make room? If comms were the only reason to make the move, as you say, then this premise makes no sense and would be detrimental. There were clearly reasons outside of "not enough calling from seb" to make the switch.

Even ignoring this entire problem, your argument so far is that his calling was hampered by his position on tank - so why would it be a bad move to pick him up as a caller on Lucio?

...And time will tell whether picking a calling Reinhardt is good or bad.

He's not gonna be calling from Reinhardt! If you think his calls were bad that's another thing entirely, but so far you've said nothing worthwhile about the actual acquisition because your entire premise is based on him playing tank and lacking quantity rather than quality of calls.

You'll have to explain more because at the moment the reasoning makes no sense. Why would they cut their caller from tank because he wasn't calling well enough from tank? That leaves them with no caller, and even less communication as whoever they bring in will be calling less. Even if you want to cut someone so that you get a calling Lucio, there has to be a reason beyond communication why you'd remove the tank over the Lucio or indeed any other role.

I'm actually really looking forward to seeing Fnatic vs NiP on LAN, pity iddqd isn't there but these teams are both bridesmaids that need this win to prove themselves on the world scene.

Should be a good one for sure, and whoever loses is taking on Sweden right?

There was 2:52 left when Finland attacked the first time, for reference.

Handwarmers.

Everything so far seems to indicate that Finland, and in particular Taimou, gives no fucks about this competition. Just wandering around doing solo stuff for fun. Not that I can blame them, nothing to play for, but I was hoping for more out of Finland.

On paper this looks like the most unbalanced game but it's probably gonna be the closest of the day if their scrim record is anything to go by and Finland let off the gas.

If they don't have pieces in between games, incorporating the streamers into some "fun" bits then the whole voting procedure has just fucked the competition of the tournament even more. If we're not gonna see the best teams from each region or allstar teams from each country in any sense then there has to be a plan to make the personalities shine right?

OK this is another hilarious mis-match. Australia getting wrecked all over by a sick Korean team that looks like it could go all the way.

Germany were destined to be mediocre if we're being honest. They don't have a star player on their roster and they don't have a good distribution of talent on each role either. I am surprised Russia looked so cohesive though, they could beat USA and force a USA/Sweden first round game looking like this.

This should be a really good game actually, Aus are the most interesting team of the tournament for me since it's the region that people have ignored the most despite sick talent.

South Korea team looks pretty good tbh

This is a clear case where the player should be commenting in my opinion, as his history of being removed from Rogue and the statement here seem to subtly indicate that he isn't a good teammate in high pressure situations. iddqd would benefit from speaking out as to the actual reasons if this isn't true, before a reputation develops based on speculation. Helps his perception with fans and potential new teams, and if the split was amicable then there's no need to keep it secret out of respect.

Wow, that's seriously crazy

Nope, they were not streamed. Afaik the BYOC qualifier will also not be streamed, DreamHack has exclusive streaming rights I believe. The main event obviously will, but I don't know who the casting talent will be.

No he was just rubbing his fingers thinking of all the fat money he's winning.

At some point you gotta get diminishing returns with this stuff right?

This is going to be unbelievably gruelling - I don't know if Rogue have it in them mentally to go for that long. They actually appear to be pretty emotional, they feed off Reinforce a lot. Huge pressure on him to stay positive all game.

The Finns used to dominate TF2 in the early days as well, quite a lot of overlap with the players too. Finland have always been a naturally strong gaming country and I would argue that if national service was not in place they'd be infiltrating CS:GO as well. Scandis man.

They were widely considered a top 3 Korean (and therefore Asian) team from what I understand, yes. However, both Lunatic-Hai and RunAway have appeared stronger from recent showings in APAC and OGN, which is ofc all I've seen.

This commentary is really lacking, but at least the vod is smooth. Thanks!

Couldn't watch anything after AF.Blue's attack on Hollywood. I really hope they fix that horrible lag and upload the vods somewhere.

Yeah it's great. Hope everyone else steps up their level to this.

Could have been Rogue vs NRG in quarters, what an anticlimax that would have been.

Unlike the chinese team that seems to be because there are many talented players and teams, who have not yet had the chance to make their presence in the scene known.

APEX runs for months, you couldn't avoid releasing patches mid-season with the rate they're pushing them. They could have released the balance changes before APAC I guess but it's not a huge change and I think Blizzard just expects teams to adapt.

Oh sick, I forgot that people pirate content shamelessly on youtube. Come in handy for once.

That's the final match of the group you posted, here's the first bo3 that I found searching on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XSTX8Wa2_E

The Twitch VOD on bananaculture has been corrupted and is mostly missing, I'd really like an unbroken version of both of their games in the groups. Anyone familiar with PandaTV and can grab one from there? The site is a chinese mystery to me. Will pay in top tier analysis.

As far as I'm aware, nobody has a way to play on a previous patch even if they wanted to. The APAC rules also say that the games will be played on the current patch, so yes. I don't think it will have much impact though, you often hold the Nano for a while anyway as it built super fast. Ana should still be as strong.