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...
With a new card from Hearthstone’s Whispers of the Old Gods expansion being revealed almost every day, and over 100 still to go, I decided to hold off analysis until seeing more of the set. But it’s worth making an exception for each of the Old Gods themselves, as they already seem like the most...
The release of the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion in late May/early April will see 134 new cards added to the Hearthstone card pool, while at the same time previous expansions will rotate out of the new “Standard” format (but remain playable in “Wild”). Format rotation is one answer to the thorny problem Blizzard has...
Me, not IRL. This weekend the World of Warcraft servers were overrun by enthusiastic idiots. I know this, because I was one of them. My fellow scrubs and I had been lured to Azeroth by Lady Liadren, a female blood elf. More specifically, by an offer from Blizzard’s marketing team that if we levelled any...
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 Hearthstone expansion is always cause for celebration, because new cards mean an instant refresh of the metagame, which otherwise tends to go stale after a few months. The next expansion, Whispers of the Old Gods, will see 134 new cards injected into the game, many of which are focused around threats from ancient multi-tentacled evil superpowers living...
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...
So it seems pretty clear that the new hotness in the next Hearthstone card set, Whispers of the Old Gods, is going to be a Legendary card called C’Thun. This Lovecraftian monstrosity, which all players will get for free at release, gets buffed whenever you play one of 16 possible “cultist” cards, including the Beckoner of Evil which Blizzard is also...
