A RiotGames employee took to Twitter to call out an up and coming VALORANT player who said he was “taking a break” from the game when it turns out he and his friend were both cheating and caught instead. Amateur VALORANT players Phox and W3ak have been banned by Riot Games’ anti-cheat, Vanguard, barring them from competing in the game indefinitely.
VALORANT is no strangers to cheater, even with its controversial Vanguard anti-cheat system.
Phox announced yesterday that he’d be taking a break from competing professionally in the game. In his statement, he cited personal issues conflicting with his dedication to the game, along with his waning personal enjoyment of the title.
But Matt Paoletti, an senior anti-cheating analyst for @RiotGames, responded by saying, “If you come back, please don’t cheat next time.”
W3ak also stated that “None of our teammates knew we were cheating. I got a message from Phox this morning saying he got banned, so I checked if I was too. I have now logged in to being banned, thought I could play it off.”
Phox and W3ak had been playing together on one of the best amateur VALORANT teams in North America Echo 8.
Even though Valorant esports are still in their infancy, it’s clear the game will have to deal with the same issues that have plagued others like CS:GO.
Brazilian CSGO outfit BOOM have added 13-year-old pugstar Joao ‘Snowzin’ Vinicius to their roster. The youngster has been added merely as a backup and just for the upcoming Gamers Club Masters as it stands. The tournament though is set to feature prestigious regional teams like Isurus, Pain, Red Canids, W7M and more.
Snowzin was scouted by current BOOM players after they were left impressed with what they saw him doing in PUGs, which he often streams.
The 13-year-old might not get to play under BOOM at Gamers Club Masters V, given the fact that he is a backup. But, the spotlight will be on him and the experience he will gather will lend a great deal to his learning curve in CSGO.
Snowzin said, as quoted by HLTV,” I feel very happy to join BOOM Esports even if it is for one tournament. It really is a dream come true and I believe this is a result of my dedication. I’m ready to show my skills for the team.”
Indeed, joining BOOM, albeit temporarily, will do a whole lot of good for him considering the fact that the Brazilian organisation is currently leading the RMR points ranking in the region.
At a time when the CSGO competitive userbase has been enticed by the introduction of Valorant, it is great to see teams continue to scout and pickup young talents.
For quite some time, players of Riot’s tactical shooter VALORANT had been demanding Raze to be nerfed and were frequently seen complaining about the Brazilian agent being overpowered. It appears like Riot has listened to its fans, as the latest VALORANT patch 1.04 has delivered a nerf to Raze’s ultimate while simultaneously implementing many other changes to the game to balance things out.
Patch Notes 1.04 is here with some changes. Four Agents get some polish, a bug fix for the Classic gave us an opportunity to go in and tune the weapon’s behaviour, and more. Read the rest here: https://t.co/PQxAaF80eCpic.twitter.com/94h24BFjyk
The most notable change, however, is the amount of love Viper received in this patch. Not only were her abilities massively buffed, but she received no nerfs whatsoever. Her ultimate, Viper’s pit, will now be significantly more effective to hold down important choke points or bombsites. Here are the new changes to Viper’s pit as mentioned in the official blog post by Riot. Her Decay from all sources has also been increased from 10 to 15 hp per second – a considerable increase of 50%. Furthermore, after the enemies exit Viper’s smoke, the decay will continue to persist for 2.5 seconds before starting to fade.
Another important change that Viper received is that having both Poison Cloud and Toxic Screen active will consume the same fuel as having either one up.
On Raze, the Riot devs said in the blog, “Raze’s ultimate is one of the most impactful in the game and useful in almost any situation. As a result, it is being used a bit too often.” Consequently, the cost of her ultimate has been increased from 6 to 7 – the same as Sage or Sova, for example.
Like Raze, the cost of Brimstone’s ult Orbital Strike has also been increased from 6 to 7 points. However, his Stim Beacon has received significant buffs. Not only will it not provide buffs for enemies from now on, but its effect radius will also be invisible to enemies to conceal Brimstone’s positioning.
“The Stim beacon is meant to be a pretty situational ability but we felt that revealing Brimstone’s location and having the potential to accidentally buff enemies was making this ability significantly weaker than we’d like,” Riot devs said.
The Classic pistol received some minor fixes which included adjustments to its jumping and running inaccuracies. Also, a 10% bonus accuracy has been added if the weapon is used while crouching or standing still.
Besides all these, the update also included some bug fixes, quality of life changes, and performance updates which can be read in-depth on VALORANT’s official website here.
PMWL League Play will resume its seeding stage today. This stage will resume for next two days the scoreboards will reset today. Twenty teams will reshuffle and again fight for their spot in Super Weekend of week two.
Match One – Erangel:
We start the second week on the homeground of Erangel. The action we saw in the last week league play resumed in this week as teams clashed early on. RRQ Athena marked their presence as they eliminate BOX Gaming very early.
NOVA-GodLike and Yodoo Gank clashed while rotating and NOVA took two early casualties and an unfortunate exit later while they were again rotating. They have to improve on this and perform better. Orange Rock took a calculated fight with No Chance Team and wiped them easily.
Through the middle phases, the map picked up its pace. TSM-Entity regained their form today as they clash with Bigetron head on and wipe them out. They subsequently finished in top five and have a consistent start.
Orange Rock was stacking up kills while simultaneously responding to zone shifts. They had a very good run but unfortunately lost their numbers in the process and finally a single man was left standing against Free Style. Free Style utilized their man and zone advantage and won this first match.
FreeStyle won this map with 8 kills and 28 points. Orange rock came second with 12 kills and 26 points. Reject Scarlett were third with 6 kills and 16 points.
Match Two – Sanhok:
Sanhok is always the map full of surprises. Three teams dropped into bootcamp but none of them engaged in any way, except of exchanging some bullets. A odd fight took place when T1 left bootcamp and caught GodLike rotating yet again.
T1 got some easy knocks on NOVA-GodLike and finally eliminated them on 16th spot. A stalemate situation was seen into bootcamp, there were four teams but none of them pushed onto other. Some engagements happened on other side of the map and KoG took an early exit.
The zone heavily shifted to rocky mountains in the Northwest of this map. Orange Rock was in a favourable position to rotate in but couldn’t make it and got wiped out. A prolonged fight between Yodoo Gank, Celtz and U Level UP was happening out of the zone and only U Level UP survived it.
A noteworthy play was seen by Microboy from BTR. He pulled a perfect grenade and wiped T1 and killed three players of No Chance Team in a clutch moment. Unfortunately they were out of the zone and couldn’t get any benefits further.
Valdus Esports won the match with 10 kills and 30 points. Bigetron was second with 10 kills and 6 points. U Level UP was third with 1 kill and 15 points.
Match Three – Erangel:
TSM and Reject Scarlett start this match in an exciting run for a vehicle. Both sides trade one player and move on into their loot drop. They again face each other and TSM get revenge on their lost player. They kill three players of Reject Scarlett in the process.
Another fight was happening on the other side, one player of T1 was pushed by Box Gaming but a good backup and third party saved T1 and it was an upset for BOX Gaming. TSM-Entity rotated early into the circle and got a compound to hold till the last circles.
Beer11 of RRQ Athena pulled a huge outplay. He somehow crawled to the edge of circle and behind Valdus Esports. He spots three players but did not shoot at them, he cooks up a grenade, knocks two players by Valdus Esports and then finished off the last one. This was one of the best outplay in the history of competitive PUBG Mobile.
The playmaker, Beer11 somehow again got into the last circle and it was a 1 vs 2 situation against T1. He again almost clutched this situation by flanking one player and giving a tough fight to other but couldn’t steal the victory.
T1 won this map with 7 kills and 27 points. Bigetron came second with 10 kills and 20 points. RRQ was third with 5 kills and 19 points.
Match Four – Sanhok:
Sanhok yet again doesn’t fail to surprise us. The map was sanhok but entire game meta was followed like the map of Vikendi. It was a very slow start and no one clashed each other. The circle took a heavy shift into water bodies which is what we usually see in Vikendi.
Yodoo Gank pulled up a very harsh play onto BOX Gaming. They just hold on to their positions till players of BOX get closer and then just instantly wiped them out. It must be very surprising for BOX Gaming.
The fights were a mix of third-party plays and zone gate-keeping. T1 wiped Celtz with the use of hand-grenades. Team Secret and Bigetron struggled to get in and were wiped in the process. The zone massively favoured TSM-Entity. They fragged heavily into this game but couldn’t find the higher rank position.
The fight was between U Level UP and Reject Scarlett. Reject Scarlett perhaps made some bad decisions and just rushed onto players of U Level UP. With the TPP advantage and their gun skills, U Level UP won this match.
U Level UP won this match with 6 kills and 26 points. Reject Scarlett ranked second with 7 kills and 21 points. TSM-Entity was third with 9 kills and 16 points.
Match Five – Erangel:
Last match of the day gets a heated start as teams clash early on. No team got eliminated in this but few of them lost players early on. U Level UP, the winners of last match couldn’t show any impactful gameplay in this match and get eliminated quickly.
NOVA-GodLike continues to land in rough spot yet again, they just couldn’t do anything and get eliminated early on. TSM-Entity also performed inconsistent in this last match and took an early exit.
The zone heavily shifted towards southern part of main island and there was a lot of mountainous terrain to work around. Teams flushed out each other pretty fast and the killfeed never stopped running. Team Secret had a good run in this match as they stacked up kills in all of this.
Orange Rock benefitted from their early rotation and hold into a single shack which granted them a fairly easy third spot. Team Secret continued their dominance and won this match.
Team Secret won the match with 15 kills and 35 points. Megastars came second with 7 kills and 21 points. Team IND was third with 7 kills and 15 points.
Overall Standings:
Synopsis:
Valdus Esports and U Level UP have made it to the top three of these leaderboards. U Level UP was one of teams which could not play last week’s Super Weekend but they look strong entering into the League Play of second week.
We have Bigetron in the top three but since the start of PMWL, they have been that much consistent that it’s a regular thing for them to maintain.
This has been a great start for TSM-Entity as they managed to perform to the level their fans from them. They have to continue this form into the Super Weekend as well to actually make an impact entering into grand finals.
T1 is also living upto its name now, ending in the top five. They have improved and adapted to this fierce competition and should continue this till the end.
Teams like MORPH and Free Style are in the top 16 at the end of day one and need to remain in that list to be able to play in the Super Weekend.
NOVA-GodLike is yet again underperforming and are having a very bad run. If they could not get into super weekend of week two, their chance of dropping out before grand finals rise drastically. They must rise again at any costs and perform to qualify for finals.
BOX Gaming, Team IND and KOG Club also sit in the bottom four. They have performed before in the last weekend and we expect the same for tomorrow.
In VALORANT, players spawn with a pistol and a knife by default at the start of each round. The knife, like in most other competitive shooters, increases the movement speed of the players while wielding it and can also be used as a melee weapon on opponents in close-quarters combat. In VALORANT, one stab in the back with the knife is usually enough to finish a player off. However, Riot’s tactical shooter has been receiving numerous complaints that the knife wasn’t working as intended.
A VALORANT player has uploaded a clip of his gameplay on Twitter showcasing just how bugged the knife mechanics in VALORANT currently are. The video shows the player, who was playing Omen, trying to knife an enemy Sage who was just in front of him. Even after the Omen seemingly knifed the Sage multiple times from the back, yet she wouldn’t die. After the sage finally turned back and started shooting, the Omen had to take his pistol out to get the kill.
Riot appears to have taken note of the issue as a Riot dev replied to the post, acknowledging the problem with the current knife in VALORANT. Ryan “Morello” Scott – Character design lead for VALORANT – said, “Knife is basically really shitty right now.” He further stated that the VALORANT team is looking to fix the issue.
Knife is basically really shitty right now. Something we definitely want to fix
It’s important to notice that the damage output of the knife in VALORANT isn’t much different to other shooters like CSGO, for example. A stab in the front of an enemy does 50 damage with a left click and 75 with a right click in VALORANT. While a left click in the back does 100 damage and a right click does 150 damage, enough to kill an enemy with heavy armor and full HP.
Also, contrary to the beliefs of many, buying a knife skin doesn’t impact the damage output at all. Sure, you can buy a skin to change your small knife into a cool golden sword, but you’ll still deal the same amount of damage as the default one.
The damage output of the VALORANT knife may not be the problem here at all, and while it’s still blurry on what exactly will Riot do to fix the issues with the knife, it’s pretty apparent that a change to the knife will come soon.
If you’re familiar with the streaming platform Twitch, chances are that you’re familiar with Pokimane. Imane “Pokimane” Anys is a renowned internet personality and a full-time streamer who is currently ranked the 7th most popular channel on Twitch with over 5 million followers.
Recently, the streamer has resorted to Twitter so speak up her mind regarding the varying mindsets of people on male and female streamers and the prevalent gender “biases” in the industry.
The initial tweet of Pokimane aimed to show her views on how men and women are treated differently in the streaming industry. Her tweet said, “In this industry, a girl fucks up: what a fake bitch, such a worthless piece of shit, also go die in a hole. A guy fucks up: omg king don’t worry, everyone makes mistakes, we know you have a good heart and will be here for you forever.”
She explained in a follow-up tweet that the reason behind these biases might lie in the fact that the industry is primarily male dominated. “It sucks because I can understand why,” she said. “Guys have an easier time relating to guys, and girls to girls, so if a community is male-dominated, there’s bound to be biased. But I hope that in this day and age, we can learn to be both fair and empathetic with others regardless of this.”
Replying to a comment on the tweet, Pokimane further said, “it’s obviously a generalization of what usually happens in majority male industries. not tryna be like ‘eff all men’, i’m just stating what i’ve generally observed being in this scene for 7 years.”
While replying to another one of the comments, Pokimane mentioned that the scene is currently at a much better place than what it was ten years ago and acknowledged that not everyone in the scene has the same mindset.
Although it’s still unclear if her posts were targeted towards anyone in particular, the tweet, which stands at over 30k likes at the time of writing, is surely making people think about the current condition of the streaming scene.
Na’vi’s current roster is set to play a showmatch against the 2010 legendary lineup which includes big names like:- Yegor “markeloff” Markelov, Ioann “Edward” Sukharieve, Danylo “Zeus” Teslenko etc.
The showmatch is scheduled to take place on 1st August at 18:30 and will be broadcast in both Russian and English by Maincast. The 2010 Na’vi lineup were one of the most dominant teams in the counter strike history and won numerous titles including :- ESWC, WCG and DreamHack Winter.
Although Na’vi’s current lineup also won the IEM Katowice 2020, the last big event on LAN before the coronavirus pandemic. The team has since spent ten weeks at No.1 in the world rankings.
The match will be played in a mixture of 1.6 and CS:GO maps and it will be quite interesting to see the battle between the legends and the young guns.
Ex-CSGO Streamer Mohamad ‘mOE’ Assad in a video did reveal his plans where he along with Mike “Shroud” Grzesiek and Justin “just9n” Ortiz might form a Valorant roster in amidst of the current Esports situation where a plethora of CS:GO players are making a switch to Riot’s famous tactical first-person shooter.
On his recent “Moe Reacts: OLD RANK-S NOSTALGIA!!!” video on Youtube where mOE is seen rekindling his old RANK-S days with his friends from North America and across the globe, he brings it down before his subscribers and viewers about his future plans of entering Valorant’s competitive scene with the iconic duo comprising of Shroud and just9n who were then known as the spearheads of CS:GO’s Esports scene in and across various regions.
Since the launch of Valorant, we have seen a flurry of professional CS:GO athletes reconsidering their options when it comes to representing an organization for Valorant. The last time we witnessed Shroud was when he represented North America’s prestigious organization Cloud9 at the PGL Krakow Major in 2017 where the team made an exit from the Group stage after being shown the door by Virtus Pro led by Jarosław “pashaBiceps” Jarząbkowski and his troops. The aftermath of Cloud9’s exit resulted in Jordan “nOthing” Gilbert and Shroud been moved to the bench. Since then Shroud moved on to culminate his career as a full-time streamer on Twitch followed by his retirement in April 2019 from the game and Cloud9 as well.
Now that the things would likely transition to the formation of a Valorant roster as told by mOE, we might soon be witnessing the mentioned trio featuring in the competitive scene of the same.
Grand Theft Auto Online is an online action multiplayer game published by Rockstar Games. After a long term success with successive variants of this game, this game was launched as an online component of Grand Theft Auto V.
GTA Online allows upto 30 players to roam into San Andreas which includes fictional city of Los Santos and other open countryside areas. You enter this game as a silent protagonist who is quickly led into the underground world of gangs and corruption and he strives to make a name for himself as a mafioso.
The story is not central in the multiplayer, though it serves as a prequel to the single-player story, where characters from the single-player are woven in.
GTA Online has a huge arsenal of weapons that can be used to complete the missions or just cause havoc and kill your fellow players. The weapons have a limited amount of ammunition and you have to stock it regularly or you will run out of it during important missions.
To save you the trouble of visiting Ammu-Nation and buy the magazines at a high cost, a reddit user found out a simple trick that allows you to buy ammo without visiting the shop and that also in cheaper rates.
You could by the ammunition remotely by starting a contact mission or job from your cellphone. You have to start the job and then you will get an option to purchase complete stock of ammo.
You can follow the steps to claim ammunition in cheap rates:
Start a contact job
You will be dropped into pre-job menu
Purchase complete ammo stock option will be present there.
If you have a lot of weapon arsenal, it will come at a big price but if you calculate it correctly, you can save upto 40% of the cost than buying it from action and inventory menu.
This will save your time and a visit to Ammu-Nation. If you think that the contact job will take a lot of time, it just takes few minutes to complete and you get a good discount on the ammo. This discount will benefit players who prefer to use weapons which have high ammo cost.
PMWL Super Weekend Week One ended with RRQ Athena ranking top, followed by Bigetron RA and GXR Celtz. It was a rollercoaster ride for many teams and a consistent path for others. The scores are settled for now as we will continue with the scoreboards next weekend.
Match One – Erangel:
The first map starts very slowly. The teams avoided any possible early engagements and took a safe pathway. Even T1 took a safe exit and dropped away from their usual drop location to a relatively safe area.
Orange Rock started an early fight with Valdus Esports and eliminated them with a loss of one player on their side. Other than this, it was a silent circle till phase four kicked in. RRQ Athena put pressure onto teams like No Chance and Team Secret and they also took an early exit.
Team IND and SynerGE were fighting along the edges of the zone, SynerGE got Team IND but overextended their stay and playzone killed them. RRQ Athena was running strong in this match with good number of kills.
The last circle saw four teams standing with Megastars still fully alive. RRQ Athena had a good run but Pimayy sneakily eliminated them and Reject Scarlett and got his team to second spot. Team Megastars won this match pretty easily with a big man advantage on their side.
Megastars win the map with 10 kills and 30 points. RRQ Athena came second with 14 kills and 24 points. BOX Gaming ranked third with 6 kills and 20 points.
Match Two – Vikendi:
Usually there are no early fights in vikendi but today, teams faced each other relatively early than other times. TSM-Entity was fighting out of the blue zone and took the first elimination of this map.
A long stretched fight happened between Bigetron RA and Megastars. Bigetron slowly got the kills and finally pushed them when one man was remaining, and knocked them out.
There was a little bit of hold for some time but quickly it ended. Celtz and No Chance faced off and Celtz overpowered them and they got eliminated. The fights became messy as match moved into its final phases.
A noteworthy play comes from BTR Ryzen. He single-handedly holded RRQ Athena outside of playzone and Luxxy finished the last man. Ryzen got three kills out of this fight. Last fight was between SynerGE and BOX Gaming where BOX wipe them and win this match.
BOX Gaming won the match with 15 kills and 35 points. SynerGE came second with 6 kills and 20 points. KOG Club was third with 7 kills and 17 points.
Match Three – Miramar:
Miramar had a slow start in this map. Loot and rotate strategy was seen by each and every team. No early engagements took place.
Team Secret started a fight with Reject Scarlett and Uhigh got three kills for his team. The last player quickly ran off and got a good position later in this game. TSM-Entity and KOG Club were the first teams to get eliminated. TSM had a bad run in second consecutive match.
Team Secret was dominating in this map. They pushed into BOX Gaming and killed three of their players before leaving for the zone. The last player of BOX successfully ran away but couldn’t make much out of it as he got eliminated early.
RRQ Athena and T1 were fighting for a high ridge advantage as RRQ swept T1 out of this fight. Team Secret were unstoppable, they clashed with Valdus Esports two times and UHigh eliminated them racking 9 kills for himself.
Orange Rock had a favourable zone position but did not get much out of it as they take an exit in top 8. RRQ Athena managed to get into the zone and then killed one player each of Team Secret and Celtz and grab the win.
RRQ Athena won the match with 16 kills and 36 points. Team Secret was second with 13 kills and 27 points. Celtz was third with 5 kills and 19 points.
Match Four – Sanhok:
Sanhok despite being the smallest map in the game, no teams faced each other till the clock ticked the 10 minute mark.
First fight was seen between SynerGE and KOG Club. KOG had good communication and pincered SynerGE drom two directions. SynerGE could not hold out the two sided attack and got eliminated at first place. Team IND and Reject Scarlett started a fight and a single player got two good frags and killed IND.
Teams clustered into paradise resort area had to move as zone shifted away from them, many teams dropped out instantly. T1 and TSM-Entity fought while trying to enter but both of them got killed.
The last circle favoured Bigetron RA, Orange Rock climbed downhill but were instantly eliminated. One player from BOX Gaming was doing heal battle from a long time and got his team the second spot.
Bigetron RA won with 8 kills and 28 points. KOG Club was second with 8 kills and 22 points. RRQ Athena came third with 6 kills and 16 points.
Match Five – Erangel:
The start of the last map of week one was extremely high paced. The old rivalry of T1 and Valdus Esports near Rozhok area was finally observed in this last map. T1 yet again struggled with their indecisive hold and were taken down easily.
The zone shifted massively into the bottom half of the map. It consisted mostly of southern island and hence fast rotations started. Team Bigetron entered successfully and were gate-keeping teams RRQ Athena fought with them and Bigetron RA took first exit in this match.
A good bridge camp setup was seen, many teams tried entering through but did so with the loss in manpower. There was free entry later on for some teams but the zone damage was too much and teams dropped instantly.
The last zone was intense. It was a triangle of fight between Megastars, Celtz and Reject Scarlett. The last fight was a 1vs 1 and Celtz stomped over Megastars to secure this victory.
Celtz won the last match with 14 kills and 34 points. Reject Scarlett were second with 9 kills and 19 points. Megastars came third with 5 kills and 19 points.
Overall Standings:
Week One Kill Leaders:
Synopsis:
RRQ Athena ranks at the top of leaderboards with the end of first week. They had their best run in the last two days and a very consistent performance brought them up to the first spot. A brilliant team with past experiences and skills now leads the board till week two starts.
Bigetron RA, the former champions did not lack in their performance. They had their own share of bad games but that’s just the part of this competition. They were still pretty consistent and now are ranked second. We expect a similar performance from both of these teams in the next week as well.
Galaxy Racers Celtz, the South Asian champions finally showcase their domination on the global platform. They had one hard journey from being underdogs in the scenario to ranking number three in the world. They gave a good performance and never really had any flashy games but ended the week with a win.
Teams like BOX, Megastars, OR and IND had their own fair share of rough patches but they performed really well being consistent with their ranks in the last couple of days. Yodoo Gank despite having a huge lead on day one, could not capitalise on it and it was a weak performance from their side.
TSM, NC and RCS will have to perform better in the next week’s league play weekdays, they have to set the pace right or it would be too late after that.
