According to a report from Jarek Dekay Lewis Chinese organization, FunPlus Phoenix are poised to sign Alex “ALEX” McMeekin who until now has been a free agent to reconstruct their CS:GO division.
This does highlight yet another move in FunPlus Phoenix’s social affair in Counter-Strike given they’ve as of late dealt with two team-ups during their short period of time in the same. During the FLASHPOINT 1 season, FPX walked out of the negotiation table with Heroic as Patrick “es3tag” Hansen was shortlisted by Astralis. The next subsequent program was impermanent and comprised of players from the roster of Bad News Bears, a team based in North America.
During ALEX’s tenure with Vitality, the team won three international titles, cs_summit 4, ECS Season 7 Finals along with EPICENTER 2019. Filling in as the in-game pioneer all through 2019 and into the initial barely any long periods of 2020, ALEX helped control the larger part French arrangement to a few top completions. Things had gone, in any case, with the gathering dropping through the rankings inciting his departure. ALEX referred to burnout as the clarification for his decision. At their apex, Vitality was the 2nd best team from between July till August in 2019 according to HLTV.Org’s world ranking.
Concerning now there’s no progress between FunPlus Phoenix and Team Vitality. According to sources, at this point the administration assessed the player’s exchange market rate at $600,000.
Right around twenty years in the wake of being made, Counter-Strike has gotten a fix update for its 1.6 version. It appears to be odd to bring a fix update to such an old game, particularly with CSGO being the leader for the establishment, however a plethora of players still effectively play this game. The game has gotten inconsistent updates since the arrival of CSGO. It is reviving to see that Valve is as yet hammering out updates to improve the ongoing interaction of the community with Counter Strike 1.6.
Here are some patch notes that were found on the alliedmods forum discussing the recent 1.6 update:
Fixes and Updates
Fixed view demo command crashing for certain demo files
Fixed ammo boxes visibly spawning when purchasing ammo
Security fix to client disconnect handling
Security fixes to console command handling
Security fix to client/server communications
Security fix to model loading
Security fixes to BSP and WAD loading
Setting _cl_autowepswitch to 2 will now enable auto weapon switching on pickup of a better weapon except when holding Primary or Secondary attack.
It is reviving to see that Valve is as yet hammering out updates to improve the ongoing interaction for Counter Strike 1.6.
Skyesports have announced the return of their highly successful Skyesports championship featuring an even bigger prize pool and a vast range of esports competitive titles.
Skyesports Championship 2.0 will boast a mega prize pool of 1.1 million INR distributed over six esports titles – Pubg mobile, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, Clash of Clans, Brawlstars and World Cricket Championship Rivals.
While the first championship was a LAN event, the second edition will be played out entirely online over the course of 2 months, beginning from August 27, 2020.
Skyesports have also proudly announced partners for the event, with the likes of WD Black, Flipkart, LOCO, HyperX, Monster Energy and ZOINC all joining forces to make the event an even better experience for everyone involved.
With games set to be covered in six languages – English, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada – on LOCO and Skyesports’ YouTube channel, the tournament will be creating history as the first Indian esports event to have such a diverse cast.
There is even more for fans to get excited about, with the event set to dole out 200,000 INR in Flipkart Gift Vouchers to the audience throughout the championship.
Another exciting feature of the event is the Valorant Sky Showdown, wherein fans will see their favourite gamers and streamers battle it out in a showmatch.
Skyesports Championship 2.0 promises to be a blockbuster event, what with the prizepool, audience gift prizes and diverse regional casting all combined with diverse range of esports titles.
Valorant will purportedly receive Indian servers by the end of 2020. A Tech director for Valorant who goes by the Reddit username ZealousApathy, confirmed in a comment on the social platform that Riot games are planning to introduce Valorant servers in the Middle East and India by the end of 2021. The user also stated that while there is no concrete release date yet, they are getting closer to being able to announce the same soon.
The Middle East servers will be located in Bahrain while Indian servers will have Mumbai as the hub.
This will be a huge boost to the Indian Valorant community that has been crying out for a server due to high ping and routing issues on Southeast Asian servers.
The first day of the ESL One Cologne 2020 saw a matchup between two heavyweights Astralis and Fnatic. The new Astralis seems to be a much stronger side between the two and won the series 2-0 (16-5 nuke, 19-17 train).
The map veto began with Astralis banning mirage and Fnatic removing vertigo. Astralis picked nuke as their first pick and Fnatic chose train to be played as the second map and inferno was left over for the third and final map of the series.
The match began with Astralis starting off things pretty well by picking up the pistol round with the help of Peter ‘dupreeh’ Rasmussen and his three glock kills. The first buy round saw Fnatic winning a good retake on the B site and opening the scoreboard for them. The first half saw some great plays from both the team but Astralis winning the half 10-5 in their favor.
The second half of the game was a disaster for Fnatic as Astralis easily won the pistol round and then it was no stopping for them as they did not let Fnatic win a single round in the second half and closed out the map 16-5.
The second map was Train which was Fnatic’s pick and it started off with Astralis on the CT side of the map and yet again they won the pistol round and were determined to close the series 2-0. Although Fnatic did not give away the match so easily and with the help of Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin they won quite a few rounds and the half ended 7-8 in the favour of Astralis.
The second half was quite competitive as both the teams were giving their best to win this map and the rounds were going back and forth and we saw Fnatic playing some amazing counter strike and leading the map 13-9. The youngster Patrick ‘es3tag’ Hansen stepped up for his team and clutched an amazing 1v2 situation and helped his team get back in the game and taking the scoreline 15-15 and heading into overtime. The overtime rounds saw Astralis slighting edging out over Fnatic and winning the map 19-17 and closing out the series 2-0.
The first day of ESL One Cologne 2020 was pretty exciting and there were alot of great matches. Stay tuned for the matches to be held tomorrow and to see who will be crowned as the champions.
A new CSGO update was shipped to the game on August 17th. The update included some miscellaneous quality of life changes and stability improvements.
Release Notes for today are up. End of match scoreboard will now display which players were playing as a party when Skill Groups are revealed and more: https://t.co/hNulcqtJdd
Here are the changes from yesterday’s patch as mentioned in the blog post by Valve.
End of match scoreboard will now display which players were playing as a party when skill groups are revealed.
Average wait times for finding matches on official game servers are now region-specific.
Rcon connection from client will now get established asynchronously.
Rcon address cannot be changed while connected to a dedicated server.
Added a setting “rcon_connected_clients_allow” to disallow clients from connecting to other dedicated servers via rcon.
Several stability improvements.
However, a major exploit which has been haunting players for a few days now seems to have gone completely unnoticed in this patch.
The game-breaking exploit was brought to light by Sparkles through a YouTube video published on August 12th. The impact of the exploit was shocking to the players since it allowed cheaters to bypass sv_pure in official game servers and see through smokes, use wallhacks, change skins and also alter the in-game audio.
A lot of CSGO players, including Sparkles, had hoped that this exploit would be fixed soon after it was brought to the spotlight, but it seems like Valve is having difficulties in patching the exploit as the August 17th patch completely ignored this underlying problem.
What makes the exploit even more deadly is the fact that it can be used to bypass the anti-cheat systems of third-party websites like FACEIT or ESEA.
Although the cause of this exploit is still unclear, all we can do for now is hope that the devs can find a way to patch the exploit out at the earliest.
The 23-year-old fills the vacant spot left in Cloud9’s Valorant roster followed by the team’s previous signings headlined by TenZ, Relyks, shinobi and mitch. Since the global launch of Riot’s Valorant, Vice has represented Cloud9 at a plethora of tournaments like the Faze, Pax and Pulse invitationals before his professionalism towards the game was awarded and transitioned into a full time competitor for the same.
Earlier in 2019, Vice was trialed out by Cloud9 for their CS:GO division and the team along with him had some notable moments highlighting their qualification to the ESL Pro League S9 Finals held in Montpellier. With some dismal showings, Cloud9 revamped their roster with 4 new players which resulted in Vice getting released by the same. This was followed by Daniel opting to pursue his higher education before he stepped back in to represent C9 for its Valorant team.
Vice plays the Operator Cyher as his “Main” whereas he enjoys to field Breach along with Omen on occasional basis.
With this addition, Cloud9 now has :
Tyson “TenZ” Ngo Mitch “mitch” Semago Josh “shinobi” Abastado Skyler “Relyks” Weaver Daniel “vice” Kim
In 2018, a developer from the CS:GO team kept before the community the algorithm about the game’s Overwatch methodology and functioning. All you got to do is to refer the 2018 version of the Game Developers Conference for exploring some insights regarding the same
Over the years, CS:GO has witnessed an expnential rise in the sea of cheaters and since then been going through a rough patch until they are ultimately caught and proven guilty, all thanks to the game’s VACnet. From various in-game dismays ranging from griefers to hackers with their triggering game plays, VACnet has been playing an instrumental role in evaluating players who are reported for their unnatural approach towards the game.
In a presentation, CSGO developer John McDonald anchored the 2018 GDC where he focused on “Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in CSGO.” In the presentation, McDonald revealed to the public about the Developer team who released the “Trust Factor Scenarios” six months prior to its official launch inside the game. He continued,
“What would happen is you would see a thread pop up on the Steam Community Forums where someone would say ‘CSGO is filled with cheaters.” We would go [and find the user’s trust score] and [they’d] be tied to 50 accounts, and 49 of them have bans for cheating.”
This was followed by McDonald explaining about the Trust Factor where the latter won’t stop players from cheating but would instead place them in a “bad sector” which would match-make them among a pool of cheaters. In the due course, this mechanism would bring all the 10 players cheating among each other hence dealing less impact on the legits.
Image Credits : win.gg
VACnet is another, extra framework that figures out to break down a specific player’s in-game conduct, learning the cheat’s pattern which later results in boycotting a player pool based on these “similar dependencies”. His thought process was to utilize Overwatch decisions as a “pool of information” to prepare what got known as VACnet, Valve’s profound learning hostile to swindle. This underlying initiative proved to be a success when VACnet was released to pass judgment on cases all alone as CSGO’s designers centered its AI hypothesis around CSGO’s most evident cheats.
McDonald added about these “unpretentious” cheats stay hard to unravel, yet in building VACnet, Valve chose to target aimbots first since they present themselves at explicit, effectively determinable focuses during rounds of CS:GO: when you’re shooting. This permitted Valve to manufacture a framework that caught the adjustments in pitch (Y-axis) and yaw (X-axis)— degree estimations from a player’s point of view.
This expanding about Trusted Mode’s lock down of CSGO, could in the end bring about a cleaner game in general and may represent the wonky matchmaking a few players have found as of late.
Dr. Disrespect, the world-famous streamer and entertainer promised that he will play PUBG on upcoming Friday, 21st August 2020, with PUBG Mobile professional player and streamer from India named Scout.
Dr. Disrespect is one of the biggest streamers on the planet. His recent comeback on YouTube after a mysterious ban from Twitch made him such a peculiar person right now. He signed a long-term contract with twitch and then got banned after a while. He was out of the picture for a while but with a huge comeback, he kept a 24-hour waiting screen which had thousands of views and managed to pull 500,000 concurrent viewers when he came onscreen.
Such a big name is collaborating with yet another man who is reaching similar levels in terms of content and viewership, its none other than one of the biggest gaming YouTuber and PUBG Mobile professional player Tanmay “Sc0utOP” Singh. Sc0ut is a familiar name to many in India and becoming a worldwide name right now.
Dr. Disrespect will team up with Scout this Friday and they will play PUBG together. This is one of the biggest feat for Scout and Indian Gaming community as a while. Scout does not lack numbers as he has a huge fan following in India. He also brought in 358,000 people watching him open some fancy crates for a single gun skin from PUBG Mobile. Such numbers speak for the presence these men have in the streaming world.
India is rising in esports and streaming world, mainly gaming as a whole. Another streamer named Mortal recently got nominated for “best streamer of the year” category of Esports Awards 2020. This award was handed over to Dr. Disrespect in 2019. Dr. Disrespect coming together with Sc0ut will bring in champions club to share their seats with Indian champs to watch this epic collaboration of world-class streamers.
Due to the ongoing Global Pandemic (COVID-19), ESL One Cologne has been transitioned to an Online format where the teams in each group will have to go through a double elimination process in order to qualify for the Playoffs. For the record, 16 teams will feature in this tournament from Europe with 8 teams per group will lock horns for a top four finish. Whereas, the groups from North America, Asia and Oceania will see teams engage in the heat for a top two finish from each.
ESL One Cologne has USD 500K up for grabs split across different regions where EU has bagged the highest share of USD 325k followed by the NA region with USD 135k. The reminder of prize pool has been equally shared among the Asian and the Oceanic regions with USD 20k each.
As this tournament will be held across different regions with different time zones, EU and NA regions will have their matches kicked off on 18th of August followed by Asia and Oceania kicking off with their matchups a week later on 25th.
The groups which have been revealed by ESL are:
Region : Europe (Prize Pool : 325,000 USD)
Group A
BIG
Complexity
Natus Vincere
NiP
OG
mousesports
MAD Lions
Sprout
Group B
MIBR
Heretics
Vitality
G2
FaZe
Fnatic
Astralis
Heroic
Match ups on the opening day, 18th August 2020:
18:30 PM IST : BIG vs. Sprout
18:30 PM IST : OG vs. NiP
22:00 PM IST : Vitality vs. Heretics
22:00 PM IST : Fnatic vs. Astralis
Fixtures for teams who will play their debut the next day:
18:30 PM IST: Natus Vincere vs. mousesports
18:30 PM IST: Complexity vs. MAD Lions
22:00 PM IST: FaZe vs. Heroic
22:00 PM IST: MIBR vs. G2
Region : North America (Prize pool : 135,000 USD)
Group A
FURIA
Gen.G
100 Thieves
Chaos
Group B
Evil Geniuses
Liquid
Cloud9
Triumph
Match ups on the opening day, 18th August 2020:
01:30 PM IST : FURIA vs. Chaos
01:30 PM IST : 100 Thieves vs. Gen.G
Fixtures for teams who will play their debut the next day :
01:30 PM IST : Evil Geniuses vs. Triumph
01:30 PM IST : Cloud9 vs. Liquid
Region : Asia and Oceania (Prize pool : 20,000 USD each)
Asia
TYLOO
ViCi
Invictus
Beyond
Oceania
Renegades
ORDER
AVANT
Chiefs
Match ups on the opening day, 18th August 2020:
11:30 PM IST : Renegades vs. Chiefs
15:00 PM IST : TYLOO vs. Beyond
Fixtures for teams who will play their debut the next day:
11:30 PM IST : ORDER vs. AVANT
15:00 PM IST : ViCi vs. Invictus
More details about the ESL One Cologne can be found here. Stay tuned with us for detailed match analysis from ESL One Cologne, until then stay safe.
