I see Sage picked way too much. It's definitely a lower-elo favourite since she has heals and a revive. Literally the best pocket support... except a lot of these low-elo players only use these util for their duo/trio or do not know how to use it at all somehow.

Unfortunately this is just the ranked experience. People wanna play agents that enable them to take fights and have some sort of get out of jail card (for Clove, it's the heal and the revive ult). Plus, agents like Astra, Viper and Omen require a bit more coordination. Astra especially since she has a high skill ceiling and is more able to play far positions. This makes Astra harder to play in ranked though because not many players are gonna maximise the coordination. It's why Breach and KAYO are difficult initiators to play in ranked.

The hate is just wild. I remember when t3xture was playing in Shanghai and he was getting trolled in ranked for being just a GENG player. Though the ranked player went on to clarify that they do not hate t3xture, just his org. Still crazy to hate the org for one statement made a while ago that was corrected. Death threats are vile though. A game is not worth a life. Whilst the vast majority of these keyboard warriors won't do anything, there is that itching concern that there could be someone who is crazy enough.

Clip of Patitek laughing at his friend humming/singing an Indian tune surfaced and the Twitter idiots are claiming Indians take offense to this.

Honestly good on you for standing on business. I am definitely not a fan of people assuming offense for an ethnic or cultural group when a joke is made. I think it's better to show that a lot of these jokes have insignificant consequence because they've been done to death now. But of course, Twitter impression farms need their income.

This happened a long while ago. Tenten literally served his punishment from Riot Games and is now in T1 Academy - best to let things move on.

WRONG! Play every game like you mean it - winning is the only outcome that matters. All this saving strats and taking a loss is malarkey since you can win the match, have more time to prep, VOD review and develop further strats than play more games and expose more of your gameplan.

PRX's style of play works very well against methodical play, but the issue with PRX is they overextend, don't clear corners or peek one-by-one. EDG has some of the PRX aggression which has shown to be effective against G2, but EDG know when to dial back and keep form so they don't throw a round here and there. I would say methodical Valorant is more sustainable and probably better long-term than pure W-gaming.

Absolutely agree with you. EDG really suffered against the thrifty-buys especially NA Stinger buys. EDG really should learn how to play against such rounds because those rounds lost made it closer than it needs to be. EDG were absolutely immense on pistol rounds - I can't imagine it continuing the same way, but they definitely got some of the best aimers to go big on pistol.

I feel like Smoggy meant to fake the smoke when they lost that round to Leaf's ninja defuse. It's that or the smoke placement wasn't right if they wanted to confirm where to spam. The plant spot is perfect for spamming still, but there might be too much going on when that round could have been closed more easily. Kangkang making noise to pressure Leaf off of the defuse could have worked too.

It would be quite poetic for Nats to knock out both American teams.

I swear if Nats knocks out G2 after knocking out SEN, Nats will gain a new title.

Difficult to say if G2 leveled up or down since they pushed EDG to 3 maps but got destroyed on Fracture. G2 destroyed SEN on Fracture in-region, but I would say SEN is below their usual par especially for the talent they acquired. In additon, this is the first time G2 played Bind with Jawgemo on the team and it's clear to see that not adapting to the meta has hurt their quality on the map.

G2 vs TL will be very telling of how both teams are looking when everything is on the line to survive.

Zekken underperformed definitely. He had some good moments, but overall was well below what we remembered him for. JohnQT got diffed by free1ng, but he was still quite good given he is an IGL and I would say his best role was still sentinel/lurk-smoker. Zellsis heavily underperformed at Bangkok. You cannot put Sayf here even if you could make the argument that he got carried by Derke and Less since his calls are what keeps Vitality from completely collapsing.

Some players I would potentially add are carpe (he really just switched off after Fracture defence half vs Vitality), FengF, Kai and heybay from TE since they looked like shadows of their Champs performance, kamyk, patitek and kamo since they take turns on who makes a round-changing mistake and potentially JonahP since he is looking the weakest out of the G2 roster. If I had to narrow it down, I would pick Patitek, Kai and Kamyk since Kamyk was the 2nd best player for TL in kick-off, Kai has high potential and Patitek has so far had very middling performances.

A fair point to make. And this is what I credit T1 with if Sylvan plays well against DRX. Sylvan is a midround caller so he alleviates pressure off of stax to make decisions on the exec or defensive plan. Sylvan has got what it takes to rescue T1 and streamline decisions.

Alright, lemme give you the full context. T1 vs Trace is gonna be heavily favourable for T1 since Trace have become a shell of their form after getting bodied by EDG in region. Trace really looked like they forgot all their strategy and depended more on hero plays and aim to win out some rounds. They were very disorganised both against G2 and T1.

Does this discount T1's performance today? I would say just a little bit. Trace is honestly below T1 and the Korean superteam should be looking to scalp better opponents. But they missed out heavily when they lost to Vitality.

G2 lost to the defending champions who have branded themselves with the best synergy of aggressive and disciplined Valorant. G2 got destroyed on Fracture, but let's not pretend like they did not put up a good fight on Pearl. G2's players all can take over a round. I've seen Valyn pop EDG players on Pearl like an Aimlabs exercise.

I'm not even a G2 fan - I quite frankly dislike them. But I will at least honestly say that G2's capacity to punish would outdo T1's capacity to provide hero plays.

I dunno how much money some of these players get, but I know guys who probably make less than the pros do in a month getting fresh trims every 2-4 weeks. Maybe it's just that they wanna save up as much as possible, but getting a fresh fade and ensuring your hair is styled the way it naturally moves makes a world of difference (I can't forget Zekken's messed up combover from last year). Leaf getting a haircut made a world of difference for him. Real ones remember when he went through that long-hair phase when he was starting out. Looked really bad.

Completely unrelated, but Demon1 needs to trim that beard. He's trying to go for that Bjorn Lothbrok look but the beard is to thin under the jaw and looks so weird with the light shining through it.

Make sure to zip it up with your teeth when you're done.

I never said G2 is unbeatable, but I watched that T1 vs Vitality match and T1 made some excruciatingly painful errors against opponents who had the quality to punish it. G2 are extremely good at punishing errors with their style. T1 has always got a chance, but G2 is more probable to punish T1 when they're playing disconnected, Buzz is trying to solo entry with little support and everyone else is off a step in the plan.

Leviatan is currently making the same mistake as NRG with Demon1. They need to realise the system Demon1 played in at EG is the best way to succeed with him unless they want to severely disappoint like NRG from last season. And don't take it personal, lil bro. You're not on the Lev team anyways so you have nothing to be pissed off about except for when your own team disappoints.

T1 would more than likely not making it past G2. T1 made some severe mistakes against Vitality and they lose their head so easily. Sylvan could be the solution so that they can midround better. Overall, be glad that playoffs will have an APAC representation. Would have been nice to have both teams, but G2 is playoffs-bound with their methodical style.

Nerf Nats

Talking about Toronto when you still need to play well in your own region first.

Thinking about this comment, it lowkey reminds me of Zombs back in Sentinels' prime. Zombs wasn't a shooter as much, but what he lacked in firepower, he made up for in great util and not making many mistakes for his team.

Sylvan does not have as much firepower compared to carpe, but he must be a good midround caller which alleviates pressure on stax to call.

Trace literally got out of their group in Champs with a rising Vitality and a Leviatan superteam with Aspas. I feel like Trace's mental and tactics coming into Bangkok were shortsighted especially after EDG absolutely bummed them in the rematch.

Derke has been crazy good for over a year. Solid duelist and I guess the fumbles in FNC's 2024 season were beyond his capacity to redeem. However, he has remained a top duelist for a while and you can even see it in his Champs numbers (1.22 VLR rating over 293 rounds, 257 ACS, 1.33 K/D). He really is that guy no matter the circumstances.

free1ng was playing well on Sova in the pre-season and he played decently on sentinel as well as Clove. Definitely not a 1-trick, but he has explicitly said in the interview that he finds Tejo to be broken so he is using him constantly to continually gain that niche advantage in agent knowledge.

Today I noticed that there is an agent select bug where if you hover the first agent, you can't select another agent and you can't lock in either. Anybody else suffering this issue? It feels like there's always some QoL bug

Are we just gonna forget EDG won VCT Champs 2024 and Trace beat Vitality and a Leviatan team with Aspas? Cool, that's a couple months ago, but to make this sort of claim is just stale bait for the sake of punching down on Chinese Valorant.

Trace got dismantled by a G2 team touted to be the favourites of this whole tournament and season. Does that represent the disparity between Chinese Valorant and other regions? Not really. No one is saying this when TL lost to EDG that EMEA is cooked. So why does it always crop up when China is losing on the big stage?

Also, I think you missed the sarcastic joke in LeCat's comment - EDG literally won Champions in VCT CN's first real year of competition. You're tunnel-visioned on hating the region. Simple as.

Naturally these 1st seed teams are gonna be really strong. I will say that Isara is a little jittery on some of his announcements, but it's probably just debut excitement to present/host. I like his energy and his passion to represent Thailand. Walkouts are interesting to have both teams come out at the same time side by side. The music is quite good. UI/HUD is a little weird and I prefer the classic one they used. Overall, event is produced quite well, but it's just a few hiccups from the new host which I can excuse given his passion.

The round-to-round plays on some of these maps are actually entertaining. Scoreline only tells a small amount of the game.

MY CHEST. THESE MATCH UPS ARE ACTUALLY WILD

Fair point to make - JDG as a whole is quite weak and I do remember stew on RA being an absolute beast. If he can unlock that sort of peak performance like free1ng is doing right now on DRX, by all means, T1 stew can cook.

Carpe's a capable player, but I hate how he forgets that he is the solo smokes for the team so he cannot be dying first. His survivability must be better. Buzz kinda fell flat after the lead was lost. Meteor doesn't feel quite the same - he has good moments and then goes missing for the next rounds.

Definitely agree that in certain instances, they definitely respond too passively. They misread a lot of how they should play and it applies zero pressure to the enemies. I wish that they had better plans on attack since they really let things slip too quickly. They need to bait util from the enemies a lot more too. Too many times that they try to accelerate against Tejo rockets, Breach stun, Raze nade, etc. Also breaking Vyse util is so key. Makes the B-site a lot more open.

TL vs EDG on Split was an absolute barn-burner. Amazing start to the event. DRX showed some amazing plays against SEN - free1ng and hyunmin had most of the casters and watchparties in awe. T1 vs VIT was a battle of superteams and looked amazing in the first half of Fracture. Though things slipped away. And I will give you that G2 vs TE is definitely the biggest gap in match-up, but Trace are still fairly good.

Honestly, Stew would be a nice addition, but he feels like he has fallen off since joining JDG. 6-man roster is still weird and I genuinely wonder why they switch in and out between carpe and Sylvan. I will say that there are greater issues that came from the T1 match.

The big one being carpe died first 3 times on attack meaning that 3 rounds were basically lost almost instantly since it's so difficult to open up Fracture without smokes. He did well on defence, but for some reason there were huge breakdowns on the attempt to enter site.

Another issue is that they have weirdly inaccurate reads - they hear spike tap, smoke off halls and flood from drop towards the smoke rather than towards the spike-planter. Derke got such a free ace because T1 decided to ignore the spike tap they heard.

And lastly, they really struggled to push off the operator holds with util pressure. They should have really tried to bait out any inkling of Derke's presence and rotated off of that information to pull the map because they kept hitting not only Derke's op, but the stacked site. They didn't stick together too well when fighting the retakes and it all felt very messy. T1 really threw Fracture which would have been a great map to steal because they broke down mentally and only read short-term.

Try to bait harder next time please and thank you

If this is your reaction to someone valuing Jenn as a translator, do not go into any VCT stream chat.

After today, the comment is a bit more justified. He had a stinker.

What did kamyk do? I understand the kamo drama, but kamyk is a great player and probably the most impactful behind Keiko to get TL to a grand final

Leo is gonna wake up to see Bangkok highlights and go berserk in the second half of the season.

Nah, Primmie is best in active engagements rather than passively holding the site. His peeks, aim and movement as a whole is really good. He was frying on Clove multiple times and Clove is the most duelist-like smokes agent. So why not let him play on duelist as a whole?

Big true. EMEA is broken up into smaller subregions for Tier 2 and it's filled with good players who all want to make it to Tier 1. And then you get the best from each subregion competing.

I just want Killua to maintain Breach and Vyse. He was so good on these agents that you would fumble to swap his role when he is proven to be a great flash-init or flash-based player.

The take is pretty bad given that it is just stating the obvious. You're naturally gonna watch the matches with the team you support. Tarik is incentivised to watch Cubert, but that's fair grounds given he is literally an employee to Sentinels.

Sure it would help to grow Tier 2 by giving everyone an equal pegging in terms of watchparties, but every team gets broadcasted by the Valorant channels anyway. The whole narrative of "support Valorant" is kind of stale and narrowminded if you take into account that this is not applied for traditional sports. If I was an Arsenal fan, I'm not gonna watch Brentford FC play unless they're playing Arsenal. This is the proportionality of representation in sports. You're as popular as you market your brand and players.

Now as for digging up tweets from 2022, that feels a little snaky. I don't know if Madi was dating Icy back in 2022, but these definitely are not "tea" or "messy" unless it's fact that she was dating Icy at the time.

As a last point, she was definitely baiting for responses in her replies with comments like "who is 'he'?" and "is it not obvious?" which only riles people up because she is hard-indirecting at Tarik.

So MinigodCS is definitely a good guy to check out. He's got his Youtube channel, Twitter and a lot of Aimlabs routines you can pick from. Primmie and Something basically spammed deathmatch, ranked and played the game to get an understanding of crosshair placement in all the maps.

Aimlabs/Kovaaks will always be nice to refine your mechanics in a broad sense, but deathmatch is so crucial to let your brain understand where people peek from and where to place your crosshair.

The additional tip is that you need to make conscious decisions and not autopilot. When you autopilot, your crosshair will drift and you might make your next gunfight a losing one.

I mean, South Asian cuisine typically uses Thai chilli peppers which are pretty spicy - in fact some of the spiciest dishes come from South Asian cuisine. My family is Bangladeshi so we use Thai chilli peppers, Naga chilli and other peppers often in our food and it definitely adds heat. Most pepper spice is just heat with not as much flavour profile. There's definitely regions in South Asia which use milder flavours, but they will still use a lot of aromatics like cardamom, garam masala, etc. But Japanese food is for the most part not spicy compared to other regions like South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But I will stand my ground in that I did not say Japanese food lacks seasoning. I just said the flavours are milder. You can still taste the food and I actually enjoy Japanese food a lot more now because I appreciate those more delicate flavours and the umami profile. South Asian cuisine is dense with spice since you use multiple pungent spices as well as chilli peppers in a lot of the cuisine. Japanese food is seasoned, but the flavours are definitely milder and more oriented towards salty, sweet, umami.

Edit: I added the last question as a bit of good faith in this post because it will at least be educational to tell what sort of dishes which foreigners might not know about should try to get a better understanding of Japanese flavour profiles and the cuisine in a broader sense.

If you took the time to read my post properly I said in regards to the ramen's meat being underseasoned was just my personal experience. I didn't say that Japanese food lacks seasoning, but by comparison to South Asian cuisine where the seasonings are more pungent, aromatic and spice-oriented, Japanese flavours are a lot milder and delicate. Obviously, there is a whole world of cuisine to try if you go to Japan which the original poster is probably missing out if all he knows is ramen, cheesecake and sushi.

I have tried quite a few different Japanese foods and even stuff seasoned or made with togarashi is milder compared to some South Asian cuisines. It's mainly down to the quantity of the spices involved because I know with confidence that when South Asian and Southeast Asian food claims it is spicy, they are not joking. Chilli peppers are tossed in like they are tomatoes. To give a rough comparison from my own experience, paprika which is a common eastern European seasoning is not that spicy to me and even underwhelming.

As a last point seeing as you have the Japanese flag, do you have any dishes, snacks or other cuisine items you would recommend foreigners to try for a better understanding of Japanese cuisine?

Reduxx has all the hype going for him because he was decent enough on Oxygen and he's a young buck who can't play until he turns 18 in April. He's got the can-do attitude since he is grinding with Cubert Academy whilst he waits to play for Tier 1.

Verno has always felt a little more subdued in vibe. He feels more reserved which is fine, but that could have strained some of the chemistry. He definitely grinds ranked, but in terms of practice, there is the scrims, VOD review, strategy building which he has to be engaged for. Now, none of us are privy to that info, but it could be the case that this was what he was missing in terms of practice. We will never know fully because it's fairly confidential.

The most difficult decisions require the strongest of wills. I enjoy Mystbloom a lot for the finisher noise. Neofrontier is really nice for the reload animation, colours and style. Primordium has amazing shooting sound for a phantom. Personally, I would say Neofrontier because you can revert it to Level 3 for a nice lowkey skin and then Level 4 if you like the finisher, colours, etc.

Curveball, recon phantom and oni phantom are cheaper if you want two skins which are very popular and versatile.