Image from CS:GO Austin Dreamhack site. It’s an interesting balance this weekend, as Blizzard’s biggest esports ramp up for some high-level competition while Valve’s largest games both have qualifiers for huge tournaments in May. Hearthstone and Starcraft II have international tournaments held in Europe in the form of the second Truesilver Championship and the Gold Series...
Photo credit: ESL/Steffie Wunderl. Three Lane Highway A column documenting Chris’ complex ongoing relationship with Dota 2. To read more Three Lane Highway, click here. It’s been a dramatic week. The arrival of this year’s Spring Cleaning update has been roundly overshadowed by the professional scene’s most recent rosterpocalypse. If you were trying to figure out...
Photography credit: Riot Games via Flickr The regular season has finally ended after nine weeks of play, and the Renegades’ victory over Team Impulse marks the last-ever match under the NA LCS’s old best-of-one format. The top six teams are now settling plans for a glamorous trip to Las Vegas to decide the North American...
Blizzard has announced some big changes coming to Heroes of the Storm in the next patch. Draft lobbies are being given an “epic visual overhaul” in the next patch, including new background art, animated hero models and portraits, and updated selection animations, and hero bans in ranked play and custom games are finally on the...
This week, things ramp back up for Dota 2 with Pit League Season 4, Hearthstone’s Winter Championship crosses the ocean, the LCS marches onward like an unstoppable army, and Heroes of the Storm sees its biggest tournament since the Spring Championship. There’s a whole bunch of great tournaments happening this weekend, and here’s how you can...
A new Gosu Gamers report paints a rather bleak picture of the pro Hearthstone scene in China, which it says is wracked by cheating, primarily in the form of win-trading and pay-to-legend. The problem isn’t unique to China—the report makes note of a couple of high-profile incidents involving Western players—but it’s particularly endemic in China because...
Blizzard is adding a new map to Heroes of the Storm called Lost Cavern, and it’s a little bit different than what we’ve seen before. It’s a single-lane map with no Map Objectives, Hearthstones, or Starting Area heals, designed to keep players “laser-focused on one constant, single-lane teamfight.” “We’ve seen that players have been creating...
Disclosure: At the time of publishing, Patrick Miller is an employee of Radiant Entertainment. Back in the late ’90s, a lot of people believed that video games turned children into mass murderers, and so the Holy Grail for the game industry was a game that we could confidently point to and say, “Look! It’s productive.”...
There’s been a lot of disgruntled murmurs about the current state of professional League of Legends. The laneswaps, the tower pushes, the decided lack of fighting… it all adds up to a fairly dismal viewing experience for the long-term fan. Esports’ selling points are, after all, intrinsically tied to action: ace players styling on others,...
The Shanghai Major is behind us, and as the whirlwind of emotion finally settles it’s time to look back at what made it such a great tournament. Among all the production drama, an incredibly competitive event unfolded that showed just how dynamic competitive Dota has become. While many games were decided by early aggressive action,...
