eSports Update – 10 Things You May Have Missed!
The aftermath of The Shanghai Major continues this week with 40-50 items of kit being lost from the training rooms. Can it get any worse for the event? The eSport community’s drive to address gender imbalance within the sector was highlighted with the all-women Counter Strike: Global Offensive competition at Katowice. Players’ health has come into question due to them frequently downing sugary energy drinks at events. Plus Sky announced that highlights from the Intel Extreme Masters will be aired on Sky 2 (channel 129) at 10pm on Monday.
Read more on these stories and get updates on Malmo, DingIt.tv and SK Telecom’s performance at Katowice below.
Why eSports professionals need to take care of their health
In the last few months I’ve been following the eSports area for a bit. Mostly out of interest, because when I was in middle school, I used to play Counter Strike (back in the 1.2 and 1.4 days!) and belonging to a gamer clan was every gamer’s dream.
So I’ve watched eSports and the entire streaming industry mature and grow.
What still baffles me though, is that although gamers have become professionals at what they do, their habits don’t always represent that. I’m talking mostly about food and movement.
Go to any professional eSports event and you will see sugary (or non-sugary, but still bad) energy drinks, maybe fast food and long hours.
While I appreciate the long and deliberate practice sessions, that are needed to put you on the top of your game (no pun intended) I think we have to become serious about our health, too.
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DREAMHACK MALMO: TEAM OVERVIEW
Dreamhack Malmo sits on the horizon for the top CS:GO teams, with the event starting on 16th April. And with a prize pool of $250,000 – and $100,000 available to the winning team – you can be sure it will be a fiercely contested competition.
The tournament begins with a group stage consisting of four groups of four teams, followed by a playoff stage of quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals. Currently there are 11 teams confirmed (eight through invite, three through qualification) with five more to qualify. Let’s take a look at each of the teams who have qualified to date.
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The Intel Extreme Masters is coming to Sky
The world’s best gamers will battle for the most prestigious titles in the Intel Extreme Masters – and you can enjoy highlights on Sky 2 (channel 129) at 10pm on Monday.
For a third straight year, the top gamers on the planet will compete for big cash prizes in the international eSports tournament at the Spodek Arena in Katowice.
A total of 12 teams from all over the world will go head-to-head in games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends, with a total prize fund of $500,000 at stake.
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Shanghai Major problems continue even after tournament finishes
After delays, fired hosts, and production team overhauls, Dota’s Shanghai Major finally got it together as Team Secret lifted the title on Sunday. But if you thought the final meant the drama was over, you were sorely mistaken.
As teams woke up this morning, they discovered that the practice rooms put together by organizers Perfect World had already been torn down—with no warning to the players or notice that they should remove their personal property from the rooms.
As a result, around 40 to 50 devices or pieces of equipment belonging to teams were lost, including laptops, mice, keyboards and one player’s car keys. Some equipment was found, having been packed away with cables belonging to the organisers.
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Thorin’s Thoughts – IEM and the Case of the Missing Crowd (CS:GO)
Greatest eSports Team House Tours
With the news that the FaZe Clan organisation will be moving to a huge house in LA, it got me thinking about showcasing some of the coolest eSport gaming houses available to view on the internet!
Of course because eSports now comes with the added pressure of being Youtube celebrities, there is actually quite a few gaming house videos online, and your emotions will no doubt range from jealousy all the way to awkward.
Some of these are old and some of these are new, so apologies if you spot a player or even an entire line up that is no longer associated with that organisation. It’s also just in a random order, so don’t get offended if your favorite video isn’t number 1!
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This isn’t even their final form – SK Telecom and IEM
Katowice has come to an end, and the greatest player in League of Legends history has added another accolade to his legacy. Entering the tournament, the storyline was one of disarray. The only region sending their regular season’s top two teams, China, was coming off catastrophic results at the Riot World Championships and preseason Intel Extreme Masters events. The reigning Summoner’s Cup holders, SK Telecom T1, boarded their plane to Poland with a myriad of issues plaguing them in their domestic league.
But as the staff and crew tear down the grand finals stage at the Spodek Arena, there was no confusion about who the best team in the tournament was — the world champions were simply a class (or two) above the rest of the field. Even with their roster changes and early-game difficulties in South Korea’s League of Legends Champions Korea, the current sixth-ranked team in the competition showed little trouble dispatching their opponents in Katowice.
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Impressing the CS:GO Community and “Redefining” Game Streaming
DingIt.tv had a busy first year. Reportedly garnering 20 million unique monthly visitors, the streaming site also claimed in its end of year statement that it had notched up over 80 million views, and that users had watched over 743 years worth of video content. Those are undeniably impressive numbers for a relatively new start-up in a market that has practically been monopolized by its biggest player, Twitch.
But as with any new company, DingIt’s debut year hasn’t been without its problems. Competing with Twitch, a streaming platform that not even Google could overcome with its YouTube Gaming service, a cursory online search of the site also suggests a host of issues including functionality problems and malware troubles. Suffice to say that DingIt has something of an image problem as a result, so we spoke to the company’s Director of Content Adam Simmons about its successes, its teething issues and how it hopes to become more appealing to new users in 2016.
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Gender Games
In Conversation with eSports Shoutcaster Lauren Scott
It’s easy to look at eSports as another male-dominated section of the gaming industry, and by extension the tech sector. And it’s true that the biggest winners of the most spectacular tournaments are typically young males. But there are signs that change is happening.
Nothing about competitive gaming is geared towards it being a discipline where men have a natural advantage – if you have fingers and thumbs, a great relationship with your teammates, the commitment to get ahead in high-pressure environments, and that small quality of being good at the game in question, there’s no reason why anyone, of any gender, can’t be a contender. At the recent Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, all-women Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams battled for a not-inconsiderable prize pot of $30,000, with the mixed-nationalities WRTP (We Run This Place) defeating CLG Red (Counter Logic Gaming) to take first place.
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