Esports Teams are known to diversify from their traditional field of work to other means for brand exposure. Such steps allow the owners to upscale their brand name while attracting a larger group of audience to experience a new line of work. 4 times Major winning CSGO organization Astralis has engaged in a sponsorship deal with Danish brewing company Royal Unibrow.
Photo via Astralis
The details of this engagement are not disclosed public yet but so far it is clear that the deal involves a sponsorship agreement that follows by the two parties collaborating to launch a new line of soft drink under the Astralis and CULT banner.
“The Astralis brand has been built around performance, personality, and creating great experiences for fans of all kinds. Until now, we have focused our resources upon the development of our digital products and merchandise, and the cooperation with Royal Unibrew around a range of new soft drink products will give us an additional dimension to the business and in our ongoing dialogue with fans,” said Astralis Group COO & Co-Founder Jakob Lund Kristensen.
“The way the Astralis team and the organization have been able to create results while developing and maintaining a clear, positive branding has created a massive engagement in the large and growing fan base and throughout their media universe. In a very short time, they have established a wide reach and a strong communication platform. This is what we also want to achieve with CULT and the agreement with Astralis gives us new possibilities to build upon an already strong brand” – added Royal Unibrew Marketing Manager Lise Tjell.
The agreement includes a sponsorship wing as well as a royalty wing, it is a step towards developing the commercial upside which goes along both engaging party’s business strategy.
Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth was regarded as the “clutch master” of CSGO for a long time. The Danish pro has saved Astralis from several seemingly impossible situations through his insane clutches. For a long time he has reigned as the player with the largest number of clutches pulled in the game, but not anymore. A new “clutch king” appears to have taken his place.
Photo via ESL
Richard “shox” Papillon is now officially the player with most clutches in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive history, according to hltv. The 27-year-old professional CSGO player has an insane number of 645 clutches pulled, narrowly beating Xyp9x who has 643 all-time clutches in the game
Shox is still widely regarded as one of the greatest players to have ever touched the game. His aiming and gamesense – two key elements to pull off a clutch – are both impeccable, making the huge number of clutches pulled by him possible.
The French pro has played for some top teams in the past including Envyus, G2 and Vitality – his current team. He has led his previous team G2 to several title wins and is often compared to other top aimers in the game like ScreaM, who now has the highest headshot percentage in CSGO.
It can’t be denied however, that just having good aim and gamesense isn’t enough to pull off a successful clutch; you need to have a good rig and the right in-game settings to go with it. Here is a list of shox’s in-game settings and peripherals according to his Liquipedia page:
Valorant, the free to play first-person shooter and an esports sensation as well has proved itself to be almost certainly the next big thing in gaming, without any further consideration than its record-breaking debut on Twitch in the past weeks, where nearly a million people were watching streamers play its closed beta in a bid to grab a key for the same.
Since its launch, we can derive the fact that it isn’t just about shooting but it does focus on some tactical plays like covering your angles with more awareness, having your teammates watch your six, and likewise. It has set the right recipe which has attracted many big streamers and even lured players from the professional scene as well.
Upon its launch, it did break Twitch’s record for a most-watched game in a single day with over 34 million hours invested by the viewers. Just like Overwatch, we can say this game has been blessed with some traditional abilities which can be used to either gain an upper hand or sometimes to evade from the daunting opposition.
Since the time when Riot released its trailers for Valorant, many streamers and some of the professional players as well joined the hype train in a bid to participate in its closed beta. Upon the launch of the trailers, the community did start to weigh up the fact that this title might lure away a majority of the player base from Valve’s Counter Strike : Global Offensive before it was determined to be a “CS:GO killer” as the game mechanics bear quite a resemblance with those of the latter.
Some of CSGO’s players like Hunter “SicK” Mims, Braxton “Swag” Pierce, and Austin “crashies” Roberts have already entered the bid to represent the game professionally with the latter duo already been signed by the South Korean – American Organization T1 formerly known as SK Telecom T1.
The launch of Valorant’s closed beta has attracted a plethora of streamers from twitch bearing the likes of SkaDoodle, Shroud, Brax, and many more. Today we will be throwing some light on Skadoodle, a retired professional Counter-Strike player who previously represented Cloud9 for CS:GO and his in-game settings which enables him to play with such ease.
Tyler “Skadoodle” Latham is an American former professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player. Skadoodle kicked off his CS:GO career when he first played under the banner of Hold Mouse One back in 2012. Since then his passion for the game did escalate which resulted in his CS:GO’s career bloom in an upward trajectory.
Today Skadoodle is back in action, playing and streaming Valorant as the one among the bunch of popular streamers on TwitchTv. Below, you can find his in-game settings and the information about his gear and peripherals which he owns.
CSGO is a game of hardcore skills where only the most competent players can reach to the highest levels of competitive play. Like cheating, many users in the past have tried to alter game files to gain a competitive edge over their opponents, but that is no way to compensate for lack of skills as shown again by an incident involving a popular YouTuber.
Many of the players banned were based in Poland.
Mefju23 is a Polish YouTuber who has quite the fame in his country for making CSGO related content. He has well over 280,000 subscribers currently on his YouTube channel. Through a video he had made earlier which is now taken down, he explained in details about audio exploit in CSGO which enables players to alter a game file to hear louder footsteps in-game.
The video showed that by editing the ‘soundmixers.txt’ file in the game directory and tweaking certain parameters, it was possible to hear footsteps more distinctly and loudly compared to the other gunsounds.
In the video, Mefju23 did explain that this method is quite risky since it relies on altering the game files and may get users banned, but his fans went ahead in an attempt to use the exploit anyways; FACEIT however, had other plans for them.
Soon after users began to use the exploit for gaining an unethical competitive advantage, FACEIT started banning them without a hint of mercy. April 25 witnessed FACEIT banning over 400 players from their platform, a lot of whom were from Poland.
Mefju23 soon came ahead and took responsibility for the incident and apologised for it. Through both his YouTube channel and Facebook page, he put forward a detailed apology from his side. While he wasn’t particularly happy about FACEIT handing out bans for such a minor audio exploit, he still apologised to all his fans who got banned as a result of the YouTube video. The video was later taken down by him to minimise further damage.
Hundreds of players being banned from FACEIT for a minor audio tweak is sure to serve as an example in future for players who think tweaking game files are okay in a competitive game such as Counter-Strike. It’s a reminder that players should be relying on their skills and skills alone in order to get better at the game.
La Liga’s North American venture with Relevent Sports has made a partnership with Uninterrupted to launch an exclusive FIFA esports tournament for athletes only. The charity tournament will look forward to raising funds for the fight against COVID-19. All the funds raised during the event will go to support the operations of Feeding America food bank charity. The live stream of the tournament will be available on Twitch and other social media channels. A total of 16 teams from the NBA, NFL, La Liga, and NWSL will be featured in the tournament which will take place between 25th and 26th April.
Prominent athletes taking part in this tournament include DeAndre Hopkins and Damarious Randall from the NFL, Willy Hernangómez, Clint Capela and John Collins Will from the NBA. Allie Long and Lisa Zimouche will also take part in the event as female soccer talents. On top of that, La Liga stars like Jose Luis Gayà, Álvaro Morata, Pau Torres, Munir Hadaddi, Allan Nyom, Borja Iglesias, Alexander Isak, and the legendary Fernando Morientes will also take active part in this charity tournament.
Maverick Carter, co-owner of Uninterrupted said, “This moment we are living has proven just how connected we all are, and our love of sports, transcends leagues and teams and countries. This tournament is a unique opportunity for the NBA and NFL athletes we work so closely with to connect with players and fans from across the world, while also doing good here at home, and for our audience to see the biggest names in Spanish football in a whole new light.”
After defeating DragonX 3-1 on April 22, T1 managed to successfully clean sweep Gen.G 3-0 in the finals and were crowned as the winners of LCK 2020. Moon “Cuzz” Woo-chan who played Graves, Olaf and Sylas in the three games was declared as the MVP of the series. Cuzz pulled off several key plays in each game to ultimately lead his team to the deserved series victory.
Game 1 started off with good competition between the two finalists, the match went back and forth but Gen.G fell short in the end and gave in to T1 after 45 minutes of action. Games 2 and 3 were, however, a one-sided showdown. T1 out drafted their opponents and converted their early advantages into quick victories as Gen.G struggled to find their pace, resulting in a 3-0 clean sweep by the former.
Faker leads T1 to ninth LCK title win / Photo: Riot Games
The matchup between T1 and Gen.G was something the entire League fanbase looked forward to, especially after the drama revolving around Faker and ex-T1 member Kim “Clid” Tae-min. The LCK 2020 finals saw the viewership rise to over 1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch. The match peaked at 1,074,561 viewers, a significant improvement over the LCS Spring finals which peaked at around 379k viewers.
Since the MSI 2020 got cancelled earlier through an announcement by Riot, T1 will have to wait till the Summer split to aim for another title win. If they continue to be on their current form, they’ll certainly be the fan-favorites for the next split.
Fortnite’s recent astronomical concert by Travis Scott brought unprecedented attention to the game. Through a tweet, Epic Games had proudly announced that the live in-game concert saw the game’s player count rise to 12.3 million concurrent gamers.
Over 12.3 million concurrent players participated live in Travis Scott's Astronomical, an all-time record!
Other than players who hopped in-game, over 2 million players caught the concert live on streaming platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Mixer. Travis Scott himself seemed to enjoy the company of his millions of fans as much, tweeting out his excitement afterwards.
HONESTLY TODAY WAS ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING DAYS. LOVE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF U GUYS. AND I KNOW TIMES ARE WEIRD FOR US. BUT FOR ONE MOMENT TO BE ABLE TO HAVE THE RAGERS TO RAGE WHERE EVER YOU ARE IS AMAZING. LOVE U GUYS WITH ALL MY BODY. !!!!! GANG 🌵
An event held at a scale this big on such a widely popular game was bound to give a positive bump to the fanbase of the American rapper. According to a recent Rolling Stone report made after the gigantic concert, “On Monday and Tuesday, Scott streams increased by 26%, with some hits (like “Stagazing”) jumping over 50% ahead of the Fortnite show.”
The concert included a premiere to Travis Scott’s latest single, “The Scotts” featuring Kid Cudi which took the place of Spotify’s biggest streaming debut of 2020 from Billie Eilish’s “No Time to Die”.
Travis Scott (@trvisXX) and @KidCudi’s "THE SCOTTS" earns the biggest global Spotify streaming debut of the year, passing Billie Eilish's "No Time to Die".
This kind of increase in attention to the rapper was undeniably the effect of his ground-breaking live performance on Fortnite. Previously, we had also seen Marshmello lighting up the Fortnite stage to bring a record 10 million players into the game, which was broken by Travis Scott’s concert.
Seeing the recent history of Fortnite it’s highly likely that the battle royale will bring even more stars to the game for future events, and based on how enjoyable the events have turned out to be, we’re sure that the entire world will be looking forward to see what Epic Games will bring to the table next to outperform themselves.
The day started with one of the hottest match of the evening where Fnatic, the current ESL Pro League champions faced Astralis who have been in a good form recently. The last time both the teams faced each other was not very long back where Fnatic won 2-0 in the best of 3 series and later winning on the whole tournament. It was going to be a pretty interesting matchup as both the teams are in their top form and Astralis looked for revenge from the current ESL champions. The series ended with Fnatic winning the series 2-1 (16-9 on train, 16-19 on inferno and 16-12 on overpass).
The first map of the game was train and was picked up by Astralis with them starting on T side of the map and securing the first round with everyone contributing equally. However Fnatic replied back with their aggressive play from the youngster Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin and won consecutive rounds after that and ended the half 10-5 in favor of them. Although the second half started with Fnatic planting the bomb in a 5 on 5 situation but Astralis coming out stronger and securing the round. The rounds went back and fourth after that but with the brilliance from Maikil ‘Golden’ Selim and his total frags of 24 in the first map helped fnatic close out the map 16-9.
The second map was inferno that was picked up by Fnatic and was one of their strongest map picks from the entire map pool and had a streak of 5 wins on the map. The game started with Fnatic easily picking up the pistol round with 3 kills coming from ‘JW’ and starting things well for Fnatic they later on went on winning the gun round and leading the map 5-1. Although, Astralis cameback with some amazing rounds from Emil ‘Magisk’ Reif and actually won the half 9-6. The second half started with an amazing ace from ‘Golden’ from the USP who was actually struggling to get kills in the first half. The first gun round saw something that was quite unexpected from Astralis as they went on to win the duels on the B site and then actually forgot the C4 in the T base that actually cost them the round and later on Fnatic went on to win that round.
Fnatic were on the map point but Nicolai ‘device’ Reedtz had some other plans and pulled out some amazing kills and leading them to 15-15 and going into overtime. The overtime was quite one sided where Astralis won the first half 17-16 and then closed out the map 19-16 taking the series to the third and final map Overpass.
The third map overpass started quickly with Astralis winning the first round with the help of ‘Magisk’ and ‘Xyp9x’ but Fnatic later on replying with a gun round win and taking the scoreline to 8-2. With the brilliance of Robin ‘flusha’ Rönnquist and Ludvig ‘Brollan’ Brolin taking a total of 16 and 14 kills just in the first half they won the half 11-4. The second half started with Astralis giving a top notch pistol round with device taking three quick kills from his glock and winning the round. Astralis went on to win 5 rounds in a row and taking the scoreline to 11-9 and then Fnatic finally realized that it is time to wake up and close the game and with the partnership of ‘flusha’ and ‘JW’ both getting 24 and 22 frags in total they finally secured the map 16-12 closing out the series 2-1.
Fnatic winning the series and giving Freddy ‘Krimz’ Johansson a good birthday present. Fnatic will now be facing Dignitas on Tuesday and also Astralis will be facing Vitality on the same day. The upcoming matches of this tournament will be quite interesting to see and we’ll see how the teams perform and if they make to the major.
Team Fnatic is on a roll today on the 2nd day of PMPL Scrims Season 3 where teams from Group A are going against the teams from Group C. Let’s uncover everything that team Fnatic pulled off in today’s matches.
Photo via PUBGM
Starting from Game 1 in Erangle, in a fight against team GodLike, 3 players from team Fnatic were knocked down and Sc0utOp was the only player remaining. Sc0ut pulled off a 1v3 clutch and was able to revive all his teammates. Team Fnatic took a total of 9 kills in that game. Game 2 in Sanhok didn’t go well for team Fnatic as they got wiped out with 0 kills and were not able to secure a good position.
However, things got spicy from Game 3 in Miramar where team Fnatic was able to secure a “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner” for themselves with 15 kills thanks to fragging skills of Sc0ut & Owais and god-level sniping from FNC_Franky. (Yes, god level, specially that flickshot with AWM in 4v4 against team Synergy). In the Game 4 in Vikendi, team Fnatic swapped in FNC_Ash for FNC_Frank; they lost their igl(in-game leader) Owais early on. But it was Ronak, Ash and Sc0ut that took the team to the very end. Combined team effort and synergised performance was on display from team Fnatic, and that helped them secure another WWCD with a total 12kills.
In Game 4, team Fnatic was able to secure 6th position with kills. We could clearly see Sc0ut in full aggression, connecting all his sprays and putting his excellent fragging skills on display. Sc0utOP was using an AKM with a 4 times scope which is not seen often in competitive PUBG Mobile tournament matches. Team Fnatic ended their day 1 in PMPL Scrims Season 3 with a total of 90 points including 40 kills, Sc0utOp being the leading fragger with 15 kills. Will we see the same performance from them tomorrow? Can’t wait to see them in action again when teams from Group B go up against teams of Group C. Bigetron RA (BTS) stands at the top currently with 155 points from all their 10 games, however, Fnatic is yet to play their other 5 games.
If you’ve played a multiplayer game for more than 5 minutes, chances are you’re already familiar with a variety of insults ranging from racial to sexual and have come across people who claim to know more about your family tree than you do. Online gaming is not a stranger to verbal harassment; Certain people think it’s funny to throw slurs in-game towards other people to vent their anger and they believe they can’t be penalized for that. While this problem is prevalent across most multiplayer games, it’s especially transparent in competitive titles like Valorant – where it’s easy to get frustrated in the heat of battle.
It’s true that most people encounter some form of harassment at a point while playing, but females have always been the prime victims of sexist insults online, and Friday’s incident proved that again.
Riot Greenily is an UX Designer for League of Legends, Riot Games’ flagship MOBA. She was livestreaming VALORANT on her Twitch channel when she was targeted by an online harasser who she claims made repeated sexist remarks to her in-game. She also mentions the tragic fact that she has to experience this sort of behavior “MOST of the time on solo queue voice comms REGARDLESS of the game I’m playing.” She also included a clip from the livestream to show how low can some people stoop when they’re playing an online game.
Today's🍵: It's like this MOST of the time on solo queue voice comms REGARDLESS of the game I'm playing. I usually don't give in to this like in the video; I'm silent in an attempt to not incite more. Inevitably you get to a point where you have to mute them. More perspective: pic.twitter.com/7ruWcI78tL
Her demand is simple – “I want to live in a world where this guy doesn’t go and ruin other peoples’ games. Where people feel safe to speak up.” This demand won’t be met till the devs manage to change people’s mindsets. The company behind the game – Riot in this case, has to take strict countermeasures if they want to put an end to this sort of sexist cyber-bullying.
Please don't be this dude who shouted "OH MY GOD IT'S A GIRL" the moment I talked; who called me his "babe"/ acted like I was his girlfriend throughout the whole game. I had to heal this guy because I'm trying to win the game and that SUCKED.
Thankfully, to her (and possibly millions of other female gamers’) relief, Anna Donlon – VALORANT Executive Producer – has reassured Greenily, “I’m so sorry. We’re absolutely looking into long-term solutions for making it safe to play VALORANT – even solo queue!”
Gross, this is creepy as hell. This is why I can't solo. I'm so sorry. We're absolutely looking into long-term solutions for making it safe to play VALORANT – even solo queue!
This can potentially imply that Riot will take considerable steps to combat harassment. They already have a system in League to dish out temporary bans to people who abuse in the game chat and are reported afterward, while it’s not a permanent solution to the problem, that moment of epiphany by getting banned can certainly go a long way in changing toxic mindsets. Although that method alone wouldn’t be as effective for voice comms due to the possibility of triggering false positives. We can only wait to see Riot’s next move regarding the issue, and the community will keep their fingers crossed to hope that the devs come up with an effective way to battle this age-long problem.
