Yep. Though I do think there is something to be said about the fact that SEN lost 7/10 pistol rounds and multiple buy rounds against G2's bonus. Definitely cost them Haven and probably Pearl as well, the maps where SEN won a pistol they also won the map.

yep, lets see... you're stupid

Rare sentinelmain377 W. Swap FNC and TH prob tho ngl.

you haven't seen tier 2 casting, have you? the horror...

It honestly ruins her credibility though IMO. It's not like the abuse just started according to her, and it's not like they are together right now, they've been apart for a long time as far as I can tell. So why did she wait until just a few days before LEV play for qualification to playoffs--basically potentially her last time to bring this up while they are competing this year? This is extraordinary timing for it to be random, if she genuinely cared about justice she would have posted this much sooner. Sounds to me like it was a toxic relationship and now she's being petty and can't stand to see him have any international success, so she's exaggerating and claiming abuse.

Obviously though, no point in making assumptions so it's all one giant question mark at this time. Hopefully it doesn't impact LEV's performance at Champs again.

SEN ban Icebox
GEN ban Sunset
SEN pick Lotus
GEN pick Ascent
SEN ban Haven
GEN ban Bind
Abyss remains

I mean that's fair, but a large reason is because teams like Trace copied a lot from top teams in other regions. In fact, they copied the most out of pretty much any Chinese team. It is always easier to climb up to the top than to stay at the top and continue improving, and I don't expect Chinese teams to continue improving at the same rate.

Also, a large reason why Korea/China is so dominant in LoL is because the game is not only way more popular there, and has been for such a long time, but Riot also heavily catered to them and basically let the competitive EU/NA scene for LoL rot and die out with terrible T2 and franchising decisions and now there is no money in the scene at all. That's probably not happening with Valorant since the FPS genre is much more prevalent in EU/NA and Valorant's competitive scene seems to be structured much better.

Every region currently has one team qualified. Every region currently has one team in the decider. Every region currently has two teams in the elimination games. What dominance are you talking about?

They wanted the reps on icebox, and they've talked about this before - letting Icebox slide through vetos and practicing the map in order to strengthen their map pool. They were confident enough to win even if they lost icebox, and they did.

No, teams that advance from the same group are on opposite sides of the bracket. For example if LEV win the decider then LEV and TE would be on opposite sides, and LEV would face a #1 seed while TE face a #2 seed.

yes, because an 8th, 6th, and 2nd place finish is somehow better than a 10th, 4th, and 3rd place finish. You can't even pull out one random statistic in which EMEA performed better than Americas this year.

EMEA has made one top four appearance this year compared to Americas four.

Americas is about to have another two teams in the top four of Champs lol.

Yeah but every team besides GENG and FNC isn't good in other regions either, so Americas is still the strongest contenders with G2 + LEV.

Like who else from APAC/EMEA is going to compete? DRX? PRX? VIT? TH? I wouldn't even be comfortable putting some of these teams above SEN, as bad as they are.

Basically Americas has two top teams and other regions only have 1 (and China is better w/ FPX but still no real title contender).

No, they weren't. They didn't choke, SEN had really good prep for the match and played better.

Case in point: SEN had 11/12 first kills on the first half of breeze and ended 6-6. On GENG's best map. They were consistently choking clutches, man advantages, and the pistols. GENG got lucky to win that map, and SEN had insane improvement despite getting stomped earlier.

They literally won against GENG and had the toughest road to win Madrid. 1000+ rounds of valorant on stage in two months. What more did they need to do to prove they were the better team at the time?

I think the major issue is they just had the wrong read on the meta. Viper was still a valuable agent that they abandoned too early and they haven't even used Zekken's Neon despite supposedly wanting to bring out multiple comps to be less readable/throw opponents off guard, which was what I think Kaplan focused a lot on after seeing how hard they got antistrated in Split 1.

Deadlock is actually kinda good imo, but SEN's execution of the agent and comp is so bad. Would have been better for them to look to develop and use it further in the off season rather than champs tbh, when they played normal comps in Stage 2 they were winning.

Also tbf he's had to deal with half his team being ill or going through personal issues during practice and matches toward the end of Split 2.

Ah yes, after one game where APAC's first seed played against NA's fourth seed. Can't wait to see the LEV v TLN game!

Assuming both teams keep their permabans:
GEN ban Abyss, SEN ban Icebox
GEN pick Ascent, SEN pick Sunset
GEN ban Lotus, SEN ban Bind
Haven remains

GEN win Ascent, SEN win Sunset, GEN win Haven.

ofc very possible they don't ban their permabans and switch things up.

agree but they have much better chances than most people think imo, everyone assumes my/sg competition was low but DSG look like they can mechanically diff pretty much any team.

Their biggest issue is having to play double duelist atm, hopefully they can fix it before ascension and have better team play, if they do that I think they can win it all otherwise their chances aren't the best.

The worst part is even if they do win ascension half their roster can't even compete in t1 next year bc of age restrictions.

JohnQT, Valyn, Karon, Wo0t, t3xture

SEN won the entirety of kickoff, an entire masters event, and ended the regular season with a better record than 100T. In what world does 100T deserve the spot over SEN because they won one game when SEN's IGL was in extreme pain and another player was grieving?

SEN should have been guaranteed the spot even if LEV bombed out of playoffs, because they should have 15+ Champs points if the distribution was even slightly balanced.

brother if they do that they won't be coming back to VCT knowing how crazy some SEN fans are.

This is the lineup they need.

Demon1 isn't a duelist, he's a Jett player who flexes onto smokes (on EG, he literally was on smokes for the entirety of some series. He was much more of a cracked smokes player than a duelist on that team). Jawgemo is a proper entry duelist who fills in all the gaps with his Raze and Neon. s0m should play smokes/scan initiator.

With Demon1 and Jawgemo, and with FNS looking better and not straight up feeding, they have a very good amount of firepower.
With potter, who's worked with 3/5 members already, they have a strong stratbook, especially for the defense side where they tend to struggle more.
With FNS, they have an IGL to actually execute that stratbook and make on the fly adjustments as needed.

The only issue I maybe see is the lack of a hype/vibes player which I guess s0m can basically fill.

LEV has h2h against SEN

Same, DSG games are also a blast to watch this year as well.

Honestly, I feel like some of the MY/SG casters do a better job than some of the NA T2 casters (besides like Wyatt/Uber) who just straight up say incorrect things or have poor understanding of Valo in general.

bad coaching/nepotism can definitely be considered another reason why demon1's performance during split 1 wasn't good. Imagine forcing the champs 2023 mvp to play raze when you have a player comfortable with raze on the team. And forcing him to bring it out in less than a week.

I'm sorry, what has any optic player accomplished in the past two years? Besides their star duelist getting his ass handed to him by every tier two team and then every tier one team in pacific and their coach unable to help a superteam reach a single international event this year, or even getting close.

Just say you hate SEN and want to clown on the players and org cuz they're liked and well-known and you're nobody. Literally.
FYI I don't agree with OP, Demon1 was a great player who was likely the victim of nonexistent IGLing.

good list & take like the previous ones.

Not just that, he got eliminated by EG on 100T and now eliminated by 100T on EG.

what's funnier is that neon released around a week before zeri did lol

Yes, it is. You win the knockout round or get a bye past it for one point, and then if you win the upper round you advance to the upper finals, or if you lose and win the lower round you advance to the lower finals. The three teams that participate in the lower and upper finals are the top 3 that qualify to champs. Hence, you can only win 1 game and not make it to the upper or lower finals. Maybe look at the bracket first.

If you win more than one game in playoffs you qualify without points. Hence, a team can only get 1 point max in playoffs and not qualify via placement in playoffs.

Actually good take, every one of these teams feels like it's in a fair and justified position. One of the few instances where VLR brainrot isn't present.

I think the NRG KRU game will really solidify NRG's and KRU's position after the roster change of both teams.

I feel like the casting is fine ngl, its better imo than NA T2 where some of the casters have no clue what's going on and straight up say incorrect things with no analysis of the game. Like, have some of the NA T2 casters even played valorant??? But yeah I see what you mean, better than Stage 1 tho where there weren't any casters until like the Upper Finals of playoffs.

wow fans supporting a team must be a rare occurrence for loud after their performance this year.

fr, team synergy is so underrated, people always try to make "superteams" and they always underperform (NRG Split 1). Having a team that plays together, good IGL calling, decent fragging capability, and a good coach is far more important than a team with the best player at each role imo, though because they don't see those cracked players most people continue underrating G2.

I agree that the advantage of first seed in Champs probably won't be huge, as the format is probably (and should be) 16 team swiss, but it still makes little sense to not try to qualify for Champs through playoffs. EDG's whole thing has been that they dominate China, not that they show up when they need to. They've been losing more and more and playing worse and worse throughout the season, and its probably because of both coaching changes and that the team was single-handedly carried by one player which is finally no longer working as other teams improve.

There will already be an 8-team regional playoff next year.

As per ascension changes:
Top 8 >>> Fight for a spot at ascension
Miss Playoffs >>> Get relegated to Challengers

This implies that playoffs will have 8 teams.

Also don't watch much china, but that's just...not true.
EDG has pretty much never lost in China but lost to FPX twice now if I recall and bombed out of Shanghai looking really bad. It honestly wasn't too surprising that they would perform bad in stage 2, they even made roster changes out of desperation. They fell off and China caught up.

Also, first/second seed grants a bye in playoffs which removes the risk of single elim. Season games are still not a joke for them, if they don't want to enter champs as China's #4 seed.

If you want an emotional response Arcane is pretty good, absolute cinematic masterpiece that is very emotionally driven.

It's good for tier 1 viewers, as it keeps the league more competitive and prevents ascension teams from just being terrible and at the bottom of the league like Bleed and M8s, and also helps teams that perform exceptionally well (G2). But at the same time, it offers basically no security to ascension teams and gives them very little time to improve.

Personally, I think that if Riot want to avoid relegation of franchise teams, to encourage teams to invest more into the scene, then they should have 8 franchise teams and 4 ascension slots, so that there is a much smaller likelihood of two teams "locking" down ascension or being unwilling to invest due to limited security.

fr, I actually think SEN and NRG are going to be the two of the strongest teams heading into playoffs/champs, NRG had some really neat ideas that just lacked polish. It would be a shame if their hectic schedule and the disadvantage they are at due to Stage 1 results causes them to miss playoffs and at least a chance at Champs.

KRU on the other hand looked good in Stage 1, but idk if they will be able to keep that consistency in Stage 2, as group alpha is far more difficult; not to discredit their Stage 1, but they can't just get away with aim diffing their opponents like they could against a dejected Furia, a dysfunctional LOUD, an early EG, and an MIBR that's playing like MIBR. They're still very real contenders though and the match won't be easy for SEN by any means.

It's an open world souls game. The combat is challenging but rewarding and fun, and the game itself pushes you to improve as a player and achieve things you didn't think you were capable of.

If the game feels too difficult, the game gives many tools (e.g. spirit summons, NPC summons, and certain op builds) to make it easier / more accessible. Though keep in mind that the enjoyment of a souls game comes from defeating enemies that once defeated you.

It doesn't require any grinding or insane time commitments. The most "grinding" thing I can think of is just practicing a boss to learn their moveset and improve, but that's not really grinding imo. Many people have long playthroughs because they enjoy exploring, but you aren't forced into that if you don't want.

All in all, great game with universal praise; it's not for everyone, but I found that people who found it looks somewhat interesting and give it a solid chance tend to enjoy it.

You can watch the full streams for up to 60 days on Twitch. That being said, idk why they would private streams on YouTube ngl.

They should absolutely give SEA multiple slots in ascension now if they are merging these many regions together, no? Like VCL NA has 2 ascension slots because it's a massive region.

I have an rtx 3060 and haven't gotten any frame drops at 60fps while playing on the highest settings, so I don't know why you would be having performance issues ngl. Just said things from my perspective.

As for difficulty: in that case, you've clearly just rushed the DLC. You're complaining about not beating the final boss of a DLC that some are comparing to the size of the base game just 2-3 days after it released. That might have been feasible in other Souls games, but Elden Ring is too large and expansive to do so. Scadutree fragments make a big difference, and if you're getting one shot by the boss at 60 vigor you clearly don't have enough.

And it isn't really fair to complain about the difficulty of a boss when you've barely had time to actually fight it. It's FromSoft DLC, the bosses are going to be difficult and expect to take a long time to master the boss moveset. I'm surprised that after playing so many souls you haven't learned that. The final boss isn't unfair in any capacity, imo, his attacks are clearly telegraphed, he has clear punish windows (idk about slow weapons that strength builds often use, but that's an issue prevalent with many bosses), and he is fairly susceptible to staggers. Yeah he has some annoying AoE and long attack chains but that's true of many bosses.

The DLC is perfectly fine, challenging but fair, if you didn't rely on crutches through the base game you would've learned how to actually dodge. When your go-to is Mimic+10 no wonder you're struggling when a boss doesn't play nice with summons. Also, you rushed to the final boss, and then started complaining that you're too weak and started blaming the game.

If your game is lagging, you could lower settings you know. Performance was never an issue for me even at high settings besides maybe occasional lag during cutscenes.

Oxygen and DSG

it didn't lol

yeah but Riot could have easily scheduled the games at 6pm and 9pm Shanghai time instead of 3pm and 6pm, way more people can watch it in Shanghai since it's in the evening and not the middle of the day and matches go from starting at like 2-3am and 5-6am in the West to 5-6am and 8-9am which is much more watchable. Also better for EMEA, only thing is that if there's like 2 3-map matches or a long tech pause the matches might end at like 1:00AM for some APAC viewers but that isn't even bad.

fr, though you haven't seen the atrocity that is tier 2 casters.