fuck, i missed it. I hope Rapha/Id/Dahang can become the american coutnerpart to winz's team, they have sick potential.

Does anybody know what mistrels gaming-background is? I know that AZK was sick at Reflex and mesr is a TF2 player

Minstrel's gaming background comes from playing with Team Hubris in Firefall and Nosgoth (The same Hubris that used to play ETQW with Ras and Chump).

AZK is a former csgo pro that got banned from all valve sponsored events after getting caught throwing league games with his team iBUYPOWER, which was top1 team in NA at the time.

He was quite good in Reflex, and hes a damn sick McCree, so I dont care about him cheating in CSGO, which is a shit game anyway

Just to be clear he didn't cheat as in use hacks. And I said my comment only to highlight that he was one of the top players in north america in a very competetive scene. Maybe you should get the hurt out of your butt because it's making you look silly.

that didnt make much sense

you said cheat when he threw that's what finnish anonwas referring to

Yea, I got that part. I meant the part where he accuses me of being butthurt after I praised AZKs skill in reflex and OW, thats where finish anon doesnt make sense.

he cheated in other games tho when younger

Rapha, ID_, and Dahang all did quite well for themselves during the few matches i watched today. AZK and Rapha in particular came through with some great clutch moments, too. However it seems like MESR, the TF2 player amongst them, really threw many good pushes in the later rounds (maybe choking?). I would say they need to look at replacement of MESR (or at the very least shake up the roles a bit) if they want to have future consistency.

The random control-point decider for ties in overtime is a bullshit format that really fucked TL, as well. I feel at this event, they did much better than expected considering they had the most stacked group against the de facto "best" carries in Seagull and TailSpin (NRG and ENVY.US, respectively). RIP

I hope ANOX, Cypher/Cooller and the rest, show these casual "pros" what's up in next few days! They may not be playing Quake anymore, but I'll root for these international treasures anywhere they play <3

IMHO, they should have kept Whaz and dropped one of the non Quake pros. Having Whaz on your team is like having a Winz or id on the team. And I agree about Mesr... in the second match, at least when he was on camera he was not coming out on top.

AZK, is talented but not sure if he'd be as solid as Whaz would be in the long run for tourneys. His aim can be kind of shaky compared to watching like buds or surefour etc. But maybe he's still improving at OW as well. Rapha definitely has some oops moments, but when you watch him his aim/play is mostly rock steady, and you know he is only going to improve as he gains experience and turn those few oops moments into kills. Dahang and id are pretty solid individually at this point I think. The only time Dahang looks shaky is when he takes a sip of Monster energy lol.

If they went with Whaz though they probably might have not had as good of chance in this tourney.

Oh yeah, and id should practice with farah a little more because I don't think he was up to par with Talespins farah on Envy, which was amazing. But I'd have to believe id could be just as good or better.

I did notice DaHang was shaking considerably during downtimes. I never thought of him as a hard choker, but he probably needs to get that looked at for his own sake.

I guess the question is: how easy is it to find great dedicated tank players in this Nano-boost Meta? MESR certainly wasn't terrible, and many of those late rounds may just have been communication breakdown. I think many of rapha's mistakes were in a similar vein. That being said, if you swapped for Whaz, would he be the tank, or would he swap roles with someone like Rapha, etc.?

AZK, at times, seemed to swap off heroes he was doing great on and then fell off a cliff in terms of impact. ID_ didn't play much Pharah that I saw, but yea TailSpin is currently in another class on her. Maybe just trouble adapting from QL rockets to OW's style? ( plus a couple of LUL-derp-flying-right-over-into-enemy-DPS moments ) I would like to see more quake pros show up with dem air rockets, too.

All-in-all, not a bad showing for their first real tourney against some of the top teams. Fuck that tie-break format tho.

added link of rapha talking about having dahang as a teammate, especially after being long time quake rivals

Is Overwatch as an esport already dead? Looking at the forum comment numbers on the Overwatch sites it looks like there is no interest at all in this tournament.

Anyone know what Blizzard has done with their other esport title Heroes of the Storm? I think that game died already as well.

You are badly informed

The competitive overwatch community uses different mediums than the official Blizzard forums to discuss competitive play. Discord/Reddit etc. There is most definitely interest in Overwatch as an eSport title at this current moment. However I personally believe that it will drop off slightly within the new year.

Wrong.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/overwatch/Portal:Tournaments

The official forums aren't used at any game for tournament talk, therefore they aren't a good way to gauge the state of the competitive side of anything. It is what it is.

Plus be aware many of the minor tournaments aren't listed on the said website, due to how troublesome it is to add them. I say this because Blizzard supports premium, major and minor events as well, to the point I played (and won ofc) two local LAN events in August that were sponsored by the company, and none are in the website (could add them but cba).

However, to maintain the current playerbase (over 10 million) Overwatch will have to have a free to play version. That's how it works.

I have closely been following Overwatch's numbers on Twitch and other popular forums. The competitive interest in Overwatch is already on the downswing.

Rapha, Dahang, Azk (#1 CS:GO player) just took 16th place in the $300k Overwatch Open. They will each take home $1000 for their troubles.

If you watch the VOD linked in this thread, Rapha was already warned about Blizzard/Activision's practices in the last 10 minutes of stream chat. Very illuminating given the results. I will be interested to see how Cooller/Cypher fare.

Liquid vs NRG was a great series yesterday, I'mm slightly salty that NRG made it through in the end but I have high hopes for Rogue (winz's team) tomorrow.

Also honestly this game gets a lot of hate here simply for not being Quake, sure it's a much more casual experience but it's pretty fun.

Tried watching it and it's just a pure zzz fest :(

There were ppl saying over watch would overtake csgo in viewership soon. But it looks like the viewership for competitive isn't as big as people were making it out to be. Still blows quake out the water tho.

That's because most of the players are busy playing the game themselves :). It really is much funnier to play than watch and I'm afraid this can stuck this game in casual category. However LoL seems to be the same but somehow people watch it.

Maybe it's a matter of time or scene has to build its community around some website that promotes events and streams. I can't even point single dedicated website that serves this kind of coverage for OW.

"I can't even point single dedicated website that serves this kind of coverage for OW. "

gosugamers.com ...

gosugamers sux

it was one of the best e-sport website for starcraft broodwar and warcraft 3 back in the days, but now it just sux.

the site is boring to read/browse. And almost nobody comments the news.

"some website that promotes events and streams. I can't even point single dedicated website that serves this kind of coverage for OW. "


if u want discussion, go reddit/discord/twitch chat

Gosu gamers is kinda messy and I wouldn't call it dedicated. And like Heartless said no one even leave a single comment there. I treat gosu as tournament platform not a community site.

"Maybe it's a matter of time or scene has to build its community around some website that promotes events and streams. I can't even point single dedicated website that serves this kind of coverage for OW. "

You were asking for a tournament platform, retard :D

If you want community interaction, go to reddit/discord/twitch chat

I guess world just changes. Soon we will have gaming communities gathered on facebook groups.

facebook is so 2012

I haven't read anyone here saying that. Obviously wasn't going to happen, because it is not a F2P game and costs like 10 times more than CSGO.

Higher price may be considered advantage. I started to play some CS:GO recently and before I only played Quake multiplayer. I have impression that CS:GO is so much more toxic than OW. There's no people blyating 24/7 or licking their mics. Of course salty players show up from time to time, but I only get disgusted only once where in CS:GO it happens every day..

I think higher price filters out a lot of morons going from one game to another trolling and insulting people. Also cheating seems much more risky, because if you get caught it's loss of 40 EUR not 4 EUR where you can instantly get another account.

overwatch viewers peak @ stream is about 40.000

LoL can still reach 150.000 easily

CS:GO viewers peak was like 350.000/400.000

and people said OW is gonna be the next big e-sport title. lol.

That amount puts OW only below 3 or 4 other games.

And when you factor in how expensive OW is, compared to the games that have more viewers than it, then that amount becomes really impressive.

That amount puts OW only below 3 or 4 other games.

more like 6-7 if you count CoD, Dota2, Hearthstone etc

wasn't it supposed to surpass everything ?

Name 7 games that have had more than 40,000 viewers on a LAN group stage.

It wasn't (not F2P).

And why the sudden OW hate from you anyway. You said you were loving it in previous weeks.

And why the sudden OW hate from you anyway. You said you were loving it in previous weeks.

?

nope.

quakers batling it today, luckily its uppers bracket so the loser can still advance

winz/akm team vs cooller/cypher team

For people who haven't watched, if you're a fan of Rapha, Dahang and id you should definitely check out the vods in the OP. The OW announcers give a lot of respect to the Quake players, esp Rapha and they really enjoyed the games Liquid played. They seem to understand winning a quake duel is a big undertaking and they seem genuinely excited to have quake pros playing OW. Liquid def showed up and played well even thoug they fell a little short.

Overall it's a good thing for the Quake franchise if QC is any good. The Quake players are well respected and they are performing well so far and improving. Putting on a show for the most part and getting their names out there along with Quake mentions. Plus I think things will get interesting if we see Cypher/rapha/dahang/winz/id/cooller playing asian gamers in the future. That's what I'm really looking forward to seeing because I think FPS games are kind of new to asians and they are great gamers and it seems they are getting into OW.
Also like the post above me said, Cypher and cooller are playing tomorrow, and they are up against Winz and his brother's team.

overwatchopen.com I think is the schedule

rapha still rocking the WMO!

Well can't say Quake community wasn't warned. Cooller/Cypher just lost again so they are out tied for last place along with Rapha/Dahang's team. $1000 each for promoting Blizzard/Activision's "esport" and a lot of damage to their reputation in the Twitch chat to go along with it.

Play of the game was a guy pressing 1 button and killing the whole team. Comments like "RIP quake" and "cypher is so bad" "cooller is bad" in the chat. The host even called them kids.

Worst thing is there are only 24k viewers so the game is not even that popular. Blizzard/Activision now have the leverage they wanted over Quake's elite players at minimal cost to them. Any time Quake is brought up as a challenger to a Blizzard/Activision property now they can just point to this event and say look at the results.

Well they each made top 8 European and top 8 American teams respectively. They lost, but they lost to teams that float around the top 4, so can't say that's too bad in my opinion, that's certainly not "last place" when it's a tournament that was open every team.

And if we look at players coming from other games, I think only the top players coming from Quake placed consistently in top teams. If both Cypher and Rapha had finished in like the 50th ranked team overall, I would have said "yeah, that's a fail", but with all 4 big duelers making it to the final stage in a game where it's 6vs6 and you can't really influence that much by yourself, I say it's a success. Not up to their ambition of course, but still a success in my eyes.

That said, I have to agree with you that it is annoying that so many of these rounds are decided on a moment where "one click" wipes out 80% of a team. Still a fun game to play with friends though in my opinion, but maybe not ideal as an e-sport title.

Lastly, I really don't think that anybody cares about what people from a big Twitch chat can say, each trying to exist in the spotlight for 0.5 second...

It's not as bad as all that, Liquid performed very well and will surely get better. And Rogue def has a chance to win the tourney.

Anox has some problems to solve. Not sure exactly what they are. Cooller practices a lot on stream and should probably be a flex player or something, I don't think he wants to be support from what I heard. Cypher said they were not able to practice together for some reason a week before the tourney. Also they weren't using ana as much as the other teams for some reason. Most teams have moved on to ana because she's good right now.

Hopefully they can figure something out. I believe there are a lot of tourneys coming up so it's not like there's only one a year.

Also I think Fazz and stermy are looking for teams so hopefully they will get involved.

Agree, anox has a lot of potential but too many flaws. Kensi is great as mccree and tracer, cypher has very high highs and then some inconsistent play inbetween, but hes still too good to lose. Anak is the biggest weak point, he likes to panic. Cooller should probably play a tank like Zarya. Sharyk is decent as rhein but his Zarya is very average. Rubikon seems to have problems with Ana.

referring to anon's comment

it's really sad but quake's over inflated reputation was long overdue for quite some time now

it is what it is

I don't really see how you can say that.

Overwatch has very little to do with Quake duel, except maybe for aiming but that's about it. Placing top 8 of your continent when coming from an arguably different game, I would say is even better than what could have been expected.

And if you're talking about Quake team modes, well you've got the big winner of the 2015 QuakeCon CTF and TDM in Winz, and I wouldn't say he's doing too bad now, is he ?

And that's as far as the reputation of Quake players being good is.

For me the real reputation of Quake is for the game having a very high skillcap, and hence being very hard to master, and to me that is still untarnished. I can't envision an Overwatch or a CS:GO player starting from scratch in Quake and climbing even near the top in under a year, the way all 4 of Rapha Cooller Dahang and Cypher did in Overwatch.

Guys this! This guys!

quake is to overwatch, what pc is to consoles :)

That's a bad comparison, because in Quake old school players have decades of advantage and in OW all players started at the same time.

About team modes, Cooller was a TDM world champion. Rapha was the lolCA world champion. Dahang was a CTF world champion. Only Cypher wasn't the very best in the world at a Quake team based gametype.

In the end the results show once again that players that only play one thing (Quake) can only excel at that one game. Those four players have tried other games in the past, and in all they failed. On the other hand, the players that do play more games have excelled at different ones, such as Winz.

What I mean is that the underperformance of those four players is not related to their Quake background, but to that they only play one game.

I know, but even then, that doesn't diminish what they did, making it to the top when there are all these dozens of thousands of people playing, I think is still respectable.

For Quake I could have said it without making a comparison, but you get my point.


"In the end the results show once again that players that only play one thing (Quake) can only excel at that one game."

What do you mean "once again" ? The past has shown otherwise with players like Fatal1ty, Winz, Strenx, or Stermy. And to me with the quakers reaching the final stage here, it only continues to show that.

I don't really understand what you mean by "only play one game". I mean, how long do you have to play a game to be considered "only playing one game". All the people I mentioned played Quake for years, so...

To me there is definitely not an underperformance, they couldn't dominate but they played at the top. Now if your opinion is that the level they reached is bad because they played too much Quake... well I disagree, but I respect it, and that is that.

Those players you listed do play and have played other games, for fun and competitively. Those are like Winz in that sense, who has more skills than just what Quake teaches. Those represent the point i'm making.

Instead, rapha, cooller, cypher and dahang are pretty much Quake only players. Only with Quake duel, Quake TDM and Quake CTF experience they won't excel at other games, whereas people with a broader (yet not as focused) experience have the potential of excelling at more things.

Quake is not the problem, neither is playing too much Quake. Only playing Quake is.

Take cooller for example. He is the most experienced player in Quake, but is total noob when it comes to 6v6, to MOBAs and to dealing with other people that don't have his same Quake background. That explains why he was relegated to playing support, instead of him speaking up to play the role he should be playing, off-tank. He wouldn't have made that mistake if he had experience in other games, or in life even. Those four players got to the extreme point of specializing themselves at something (Quake and now OW) that none of them have a real job and hadn't have one in several years, so no wonder they lack 6v6 coordination.

Rapha has played Leagues of Legend, I've seen Cypher streaming a lot of CS:GO... I mean, of course these players aren't playing Quake only.

What I observe is that when Quake players do play these other games competitively, more often than not, they do well, and they did well here as well.

Now of course someone that only plays one game will have a disadvantage compared to someone that is more diverse when approaching a new game, I don't deny that, but as for Quake players go, I'd say even the one that have only played Quake duels for most of their life are still doing really good and probably better than people who have only played [insert another game] for all their life.

Rapha and the rest have at best 5% the experience of Winz, Stermy, fat, etc. at playing other games. They are more well rounded.

All good points tho. Was nice having a chat with you.

Likewise.

DID noone read my guys this this guys comment! Case Closed guys!!!

" Placing top 8 of your continent when coming from an arguably different game,"

??

In Overwastch, everyone comes from a different game, it's a new game, they all started from scratch.

If anything, that's a huge advantage fro qauke players. Cypher tried csgo, Rapha tried Lol, they both got steamrolled hard for months. ùyou You just can't make up years of practice.

Yes, I stand on that position, I think it's very difficult to rise to the top when it's a new game and there are so many people playing, you have to rise by yourself, you can't count on watching pro-level games and learn from them. It's even more so difficult if the game your were playing previously is very different, like in the case of Quake duels.

Now if your opinion is that they got steamrolled for months, well I won't be able to convince you of anything, so that's that.

It's not my opinion. Cypher and Rapha amounted to absolutely nothing in CS and lol. And i mean, they have no excuses. Cs is only point and click according to the majority here, no? Well Cypher can't point and click then. Lol is only memorizing hero powers and strats and applying with the right timing, no? Then Rapha can't memorize and time for shit, apparently.

And its also not my opinion that having a fair start is not penalizing. How can it be? All players approached Overwatch from scratch. And Overwatch is more similar to quake than to cs. Not that they are similar, but cs players don't have to deal with timing stuff in combat, projectile and melee weapons, and whatnot.

I didn't say it was penalizing for them more than others, I said it was penalizing for everyone.

If there is a brand new game, and it's complex to figure out the best way to win at first, and you're only one person of a 6 members team, it will be very hard for any individual to be able to say with confidence that he will make it to the top.


As for CS:GO and LoL, just because they didn't make it to the top means that they seriously tried to make it there, but even had they tried, well just because a game is simple doesn't mean that if you master a complex game you will be good at a simple game. To me, when you say "Cypher can't point and click", it's like you're saying "Lionel Messi can't compete in the 100m", that just doesn't amount to much meaning.

Cypher did actively try to go pro at CSGO, for about a year or so in...2014? or something

Well I saw him do a lot of streams around that time (or beginning 2015 maybe), but even though he was playing well I didn't really get the impression that these were really serious matches, so I can't tell for sure how hard he really tried or for how long if he did.