Esports

Breath of the Wild Speedrunner Gets Minutes Away From World Record, Watches Game Freeze 

The race to rush through Breath of the Wild has produced blistering speedruns. A run on track for a new world record came to a sudden end yesterday due to a deadly foe: technical issues. The current world record for Breath of the Wild is well under an hour. Currently, Orcastraw hold the top spot…

Little-Known Overwatch Team Is Tearing Up The Apex Tournament With Bizarre Strategies

Before the latest season of the big APEX Overwatch tournament series started, few knew the name Meta Athena. Now people are watching their matches with balled fists and clenched jaws, wondering what sort of diabolical trick they’ll come up with next. Meta Athena is a pro Overwatch team made up mostly of high-school aged Korean…

The League Of Legends Team House That Fell Apart

Team houses have been upheld as the ideal model for professional gamers and professional teams to maintain the optimal practice environment. But over the last 24 hours, a raft of allegations have come out about the living conditions for Tainted Minds, one of Australia’s top eight League of Legends teams. Tainted Minds (TM) has been…

Meet The Student And Teacher Writing The Course For Dota 101

“I wanted a game that hated me.” That was how Sean Plott, also known as “Day9” in the professional gaming world, described the allure of Dota 2. Plott had made a name for himself in the days of StarCraft, where he taught players new and old how to better themselves at the strategy game. Now,…

Inside The Unregulated And Scam-Filled World Of Video Game Betting

Gambling on esports matches is, right now, unsafe and unfair for bettors, just as gambling on traditional sports is. As you’d expect, people are still doing it anyway; and as you’d expect, laws and regulations have struggled to keep up. The facts, neutrally stated, are simple: In the United States, esports betting—as with sports betting…

Hotel Noise Complaint Forces Fighting Game Competitors To Cheer Very Quietly

The warning from the hotel was clear: make more noise and you’re getting shut down. As a result, a group of fighting game fans who gathered in a hotel suite this past weekend to battle each other had to figure out how to have a good time in the most hushed tones possible. The result…

Meet the Street Fighter Pro Who Intentionally Picks Underrated Characters

When Xian placed first in Street Fighter V in the Capcom Pro Tour’s Final Round 20 tournament, his fans were happy but confused. Xian had won the tournament by playing as Ibuki the entire time, a shocking departure from his typical pick, F.A.N.G. Xian’s wins as Ibuki, in contrast to the “low-tier” characters he tends…

Smash Bros. Players Are Desperate To Solve The 11-Year Mystery Of Ness’ Super Yo-yo Glitch

The “super yo-yo glitch” is one of the great mysteries of the competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee community, and now, 11 years after its existence was first rumored, someone has put up a bounty for the person who finally proves it is real. The glitch involves Ness, the schoolboy from the Earthbound series, who is…

Player Becomes First Woman To Win International Pokémon Tournament 

Last weekend’s big Pokémon tournament in Australia saw many famous players, including two world champions, duking it out for the top title. Zoe Lou, a player with no previous major finishes, stunned and thrilled the community by rising above competition. In doing so, she has become the first woman to win an international Pokémon event…

Dota 2 Player Gets Put In Cliff Timeout By Enemy Team

Dota 2 uses terrain height in a unique way: depending on the distance, it can cause attacks to miss, provide a vision advantage, or in this case, trap an enemy player on a cliff for a long, long time. In the winner’s finals of the CIS regional qualifiers for the Kiev Major, Virtus.pro and Team…

Street Fighter V Player Delivers Epic Pop-Off After Crushing Rival

Rivalries drive esports, and there’s few places with better beef than the fighting game community, or FGC. Joshua “Wolfkrone” Philpot and Kenneth “KBrad” Bradley’s ongoing feud came to a head last night at Final Round 20 in Atlanta, Georgia, and the resulting conclusion could be called the “pop-off heard ‘round the world.” It’s hard to…

Drifblim Used To Be Terrible, But Now It’s Everywhere In Competitive Pokémon

Drifblim is typically not fast or strong enough to be offensive, and its base defenses are pathetic. Even though that hasn’t changed with the latest games, the the haunted balloon Pokémon’s usage has actually been surging significantly in 2017. Here’s why. Pokémon Sun and Moon introduce items called seeds, and they are consumables tied to…

Singer At French Street Fighter Tournament Screams ‘Hadoken’ Into The Void

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. I think this guy who screamed “Hadoken” over and over again at the Street Fighter V French Cup crowd might have some idea what that feels like. Apparently, a musical group called Neko Light Orchestra was asked to play…

12 Smash Tournament Organizers Quit After Leader Accused Of Multiple Acts Of Sexual Harassment

Several core members of the BEAST crew, an organization that hosts an annual Super Smash Bros. tournament, announced their departure today in the wake of sexual harassment allegations brought against BEAST head organizer Lolex. In a statement posted on the r/smashbros subreddit, the group says they were shocked and upset to learn about Lolex’s behavior,…

The Highs And Lows Of Hearthstone, Embodied In One Turn

Disguised Toast did nothing to disguise is joy and disgust at a particularly torturous turn of luck during last night’s stream Soaking up damage throughout a match against a Priest deck, Toast finally unleashed Twisting Nether to clear the board and relieve some pressure. He also had Atiesh equipped, a weapon that summons a random…

Speedrunner Completes Zelda: Breath of the Wild In Less Than One Hour, A New World Record

One week after release, the speedrun for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has fallen under one hour thanks to a slew of optimizations and new techniques. Yesterday, speedrunner gymnast86 completed the game with a time of 58 minutes and one second. It is a significant time difference from the game’s first completed…

American Dota 2 Team Moves To Southeast Asia For Qualifier, Loses Every Match

The regional qualifiers for the next Dota 2 major have been exciting, with over 100 matches played in the last 48 hours. The Kiev Major boasts a prize pool of $3 million, and so everybody and their grandmother has been competing to earn a spot, including one team that made a desperate move to somewhere…

The Weekend In Esports: The World Cup Of Killer Instinct Returns

This weekend Killer Instinct fighters across the country will descend on the Tobin Center in San Antonio, Texas to rip each other’s digital guts out. But no tea bagging please, that would be disrespectful. But qualifiers for Dota 2‘s Kiev Major, Street Fighter V’s Final Round 20, and the last qualifiers for the next season…

BlazBlue Player Makes 100% Sure He Won Before Celebrating

One competitor at this weekend’s Final Round 20 fighting game tournament was so astonished by his win that he double (and triple) checked that he was moving on before letting his excitement show. After securing his victory against Evo 2014 runner-up Ryo “Dogura” Nozaki in a tense BlazBlue: Central Fiction match, Glyn-Mikl “Doza” Mendoza initially…

Riot Games has laid out a tentative road map for League of Legends updates coming in 2017. In a new “Riot Pls,” lead producer New001 goes over the checklist, including changes to runes and phasing out the old Adobe Air client.