It might be because they're expecting 20b and MM to end up in the lower bracket tomorrow(bottom 2 are seeded into lower bracket round 1, top 4 into upper bracket round 1) and then you wouldn't see 20b and MM on stream during the entire LAN. It's a way to assure us of some 20b and MM without sacrificing any of the really important games during knockouts, although I think they should probably have picked 4G vs 7 in round 1 and JT vs 4G in round 3 to see a bit more of the top teams against each other on day 1.

At this point, FACEIT is basically giving us everything we're asking for(prize money, a decent matchmaking system and good communication). Valve could learn a thing or two from them about how to approach a community.

It most definitely doesn't. It uses a kanji which refers to dry wood or brush(as in "there is an animal hiding in the brush").

120Hz is better than 60Hz(provided your computer churns out enough frames per second) no matter how you look at it. The best thing you can do is try one and see if you think it's worth the money, because they do cost $180-300 for a basic model depending on availability in your country, brand and whether or not you can find it on sale. It's an advantage mainly for tracking targets with your crosshair and when you flick around quickly to look around you or when things fly through across your screen as they do in arena shooters.

CRTs have a few minor advantages, but they aren't made anymore(well, not for this purpose) and are basically outdated technology. It will be difficult to find one which works properly at a refresh rate over 90Hz, it'll have an aspect ratio you're not used to, it'll consume more power, it'll be inordinately heavy and might give you a headache(varies from person to person).

The 120Hz panels you're referring to are also TFT LCD. The difference is just that they have faster pixel transition times and various other tweaks which make the motion far more fluid and accurate than a cheap 60Hz panel. The difference is significant but not so big that you'll suddenly become an amazing player if you get one. You can improve a lot of things before you get to the point where going from 60 to 120 Hz will be on par with other improvements you could make.

Also, if your computer can't put out a baseline 120 frames per second, it's a waste of money to buy such a monitor.

It's legitimate 240Hz. The only thing that has me scratching behind my ears is how they're going to do ULMB@240Hz(they said it's enabled) without getting significant crosstalk.

I don't think the problem is that people can't decide what they think is balanced/unbalanced, fair/unfair, fun/unfun and apply it consistently. The problem is that whenever a weapon which is fun at a mechanical level becomes unbalanced, let's use the crossbow as an example, you would have to ban it because Valve is incapable of (re)balancing it. The end result is that you end up banning a bunch of weapons which are interesting but a bit too powerful and allowing a bunch of mechanically inspirationless weapons which are balanced, which means you are making a choice between a somewhat erratic but mechanically fun game and a consistent/fair but dull game. Most players seem to prefer the slightly erratic but fun variant. Let's have some examples:

• Balancing by increasing the power level of other items - Gunboats could be balanced by making base self-damage without the gunboats equipped lower, which would cause shotgun to be run more and simultaneously curb scouts, which I'd say most people agree is the most powerful class in organised gameplay
  
• Balancing by nerfing or increasing the power of one item - Black Box heals 1 HP for every 3 damage dealt(that's ~35 on a point blank direct and ~15-20 for a mid-range direct or a close-range juggle), which rewards hitting close-range directs but doesn't give you much for spamming with it
  
• Balancing one class's weapon pool by doing both of the above at the same time without having a negative effect on overall game balance - The crossbow could be balanced by making it heal 50% of what it does now, while needles are given the ability to heal players in a distance-inversed manner(the further the target is from the medic, the more each needle heals the target) for an amount of heals per second equal to the crossbow. The needle gun will not be able to save someone(no burst heal and the target will have to stand still for a long time compared to the crossbow), but it is better at self-defence, so the items are balanced and each unique in their own right(choice between self-defence or hero saves)
  
• Possible to balance but will not introduce more fun or skill - The Vitasaw could probably be balanced by making the other saws better. If you nerfed the Vitasaw, it would just be useless. However, why would you start changing other items which are fun/balanced to compensate for an item which gives you 20% über without even making one single button input?

Now you go ahead and try to accomplish the same balance simply by banning items. It would be like asking Michelangelo to chisel David with a pickaxe; you're going to need a finer tool for the job, and Valve needs to provide/be that tool(some would argue they are tools, but that's not the kind I'm talking about). It's not our theory or practice that's at fault, we just don't have the means to realise the ideal. We can refine the whitelist until we're blue in the face, but it doesn't help past a certain point.

Bonus medic primary idea: A plasma gun which steps, like in Quake, so you could heal/damage people with it reliably at close range if your tracking is good, but the projectiles are slower than needles past the step distance, so it becomes really easy to dodge them/they take a long time to get to your heal target(so they can be collapsed on before you can heal them at long range).

Motion blur is not only affected by how fast the screen refreshes, but also by how long it takes the screen to switch pixels from one colour to the next(pixel response time, often listed as grey-to-grey, but it's better to look at reviews than the manufacturer's spec sheet).
Then there is also the importance of input lag, which is the time it takes for your screen to start changing the pixels after it receives the data to draw the frame(the lower this is, the closer the thing you see will be to what's actually happening in the game).
A lot of people will tell you otherwise(based on their feeling), but backlight strobing technologies drastically reduce the amount of tracking-based motion blur. The quality of the various implementations of this technology varies from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Also, some on-screen menus will give you a brain tumour and make you question how any human being could be so incompetent at designing a settings interface. There's also FreeSync/G-sync and some more minor manufacturer-specific tech that might be appealing to you. Keep in mind that lately all monitors with equal refresh rate and resolution are using the same AUO-made panels anyway, it's just the tuning, binning and extras on top of that which make the difference.

+1 for Tt Galeru. Only bungee which keeps the cable off your desk, but parallel to it instead of angling it up, so it doesn't jerk around when you get to the limits of your reach.

I don't think that applies anymore. During the last sale there were no daily deals or deeper discounts later on because Steam customer support was overwhelmed with refund requests from people who bought games at a higher price earlier on in the sale. I see no reason why this would be any different for the current sale.

Happy holidays to you too.

There is a universal class limit of 6 right now by virtue of having 12-slot servers. I think you mean class limit 1.

Intel has obviously been working hard on foolproofing this by building a sous-vide cooker into Kaby Lake so the chips always stay at the perfect target temperature and not a degree higher. Zip-lock bags not included.

Your CPU has a baseclock of 100MHz and a base multiplier of 40, resulting in 4.0GHz. When your CPU is put under load, it will turbo to 4.2GHz, out of the box. On Skylake, you can make this turbo number go up higher by increasing the boost multiplier. If you just increase the voltage without doing anything else, you're literally just making your CPU run hotter. The only reason you increase the voltage is that when you raise the boost multiplier above stock(42, for a turbo boosted clock of 4.2GHz), your processor will start producing errors because the tiny parts in it won't switch on/off fast enough before the next cycle.

Think of it as a car assembly line where the parts aren't fed to the robots quick enough, and some parts will still be missing before the car automatically moves on to the next station. You'll have to make the feed lines run quicker to keep up or you'll end up with a mess of a car at the end. Want to make cars quicker(higher clock speed)? You need more parts faster(higher voltage). If you ask too much of your assembly feed lines, parts will fly off and damage your factory(overheating of the CPU).

So what you should be doing is raising the boost multiplier and then gradually giving the CPU more voltage if it doesn't run stabile. Raising the voltage alone is useless because your CPU is already running at 4.2GHz whenever necessary, temperatures permitting. Look up a Skylake overclocking guide before you do this.

For those of you who don't know, most of the TF2 weapons which aren't fantasy weapons are based on a specific historical weapon, sometimes interwoven with a pun. Operation Market Garden was a (somewhat failed) attempt during WW2 to occupy a bunch of strategic locations like bridges, mostly in the Netherlands, in order to largely set up an allied victory before winter would set in. It involved a before unseen number of airborne forces. The thing itself is modelled after an M1943 entrenching tool, standard issue for American airborne forces.

The Ullapool Caber is modelled after an M24 Stielhand and the name is a reference to Ullapool, a city in the north-west of Scotland, and a caber, which is a huge pole that's tossed(no pun intended) in a traditional Scottish sports event.

And one more example, the Black Box is modelled after the M202 FLASH. "Black box" is also a term for an object of which the effects are commonly known, but the inner workings of which are known only to one specific group or person.