DreamHack Bucharest took place over the weekend and Life won the event. Given who attended/was invited, the Zerg-heavy results were not surprising. The quality of the games was a mixed bag and the event comes nowhere near the quality of IEM or WCS. On the whole I was disappointed with the R16 onwards, although I enjoyed the many upsets in the group stage (ToD beating Jaedong and Golden; Snute beating HyuN (and he should have beat Jaedong, but threw the final game); KrasS beating RorO; Zanster and Bunny beating First and Patience (Bunny beating the latter twice); and uThermal beating jjakji). My disenchantment with the latter stages isn't due to the lack of foreigners (or their success), but rather the humdrum collection of Koreans (only two Code S players and Innovation barely counts), and the fact that DreamHack sticks to a BO3 format up until the finals which is not a great way to decide who the better player is. Regardless, viewership looked strong despite all the ZvZ's (official numbers should be available soon).
WCS Europe and NA begin their Challenger matches this week (I'll post predictions shortly) and I'm looking forward to the BO5 format--we should see good games and no player should be able to luck or cheese their way into Premier.
ploguidic3 takes a look at Adblock's impact on Twitch. I don't think the constant imploring for people to turn off Adblock is ever going to work, although in the short term it helps streamers recoup a tiny amount of the money they are losing. I can't speak for others, but personally I have no other option; running Twitch ads consistently crashes my Internet. Long term streams will have to find better ways to monetise their content.
WCS Europe and NA begin their Challenger matches this week (I'll post predictions shortly) and I'm looking forward to the BO5 format--we should see good games and no player should be able to luck or cheese their way into Premier.
ploguidic3 takes a look at Adblock's impact on Twitch. I don't think the constant imploring for people to turn off Adblock is ever going to work, although in the short term it helps streamers recoup a tiny amount of the money they are losing. I can't speak for others, but personally I have no other option; running Twitch ads consistently crashes my Internet. Long term streams will have to find better ways to monetise their content.
I'm a big fan of Aligulac--it's a peerless source for match histories and statistics and does a great job at predicting outcomes. However, their ranking system does have flaws and its worth remembering that. A snapshot (April 25th) has ForGG as the #1 ranked player. Think about that--ForGG. This is the same guy who failed to make it into the most recent season of WCS Europe and hasn't won a major tournament...ever! It would be nice for Aligulac to create a more weighted system to avoid mid-range Koreans benefiting from pummelling foreigners.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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