iirc his roster is Pyyyour, clockwork, flame, blackstar, steel, PapaSmurf

Hey guys, North West Majors top 8 is going to happen fairly soon on twitch.tv/teamkhaos

Brackets: http://nwm8.challonge.com/SFV_Top32

Top 8 currently consists of Jwong, Chris Tatarian, Alex Myers, Julio, FChamp, ROM, Jiewa, and LPN.
This is in order so the pairs are the ones that are going to play against each other (ie. Alex Myers will play vs. Julio)

NWM has ended with Justin Wong taking 1st place after a dominating performance. Following Justin are Julio, once again placing fairly high, FChamp, continuing to show off his consistency, and LPN taking a surprise 4th place.

Chris T, Alex Myers, ROM, and Jiewa follow it up to round out the rest of top 8.

See you guys next weekend when Thaiger Uppercut and Dreamhack Austin take place. Expect many asian players at Thaiger Uppercut and American players (plus Jiewa apparently idk is he stuck in USA or something lmao) at Dreamhack Austin.

In other news Kuwait Battle Arena happened already and Xian is the winner of that tournament. And he's still using FANG...

Good for him. I still think SFV is going to be a solid game for Xian but he's still trying to gimmick people out with FANG (he has actually admitted to this in an interview) so most likely around CEO or EVO Xian will bust out his real character.

Oh and how could I forget. Congrats to Julio for getting sponsored by Echofox. Dude is super dedicated.

Note that Kuwait Battle Arena is not a ranking tournament.

Some of them are from moba and other blizzard game backgrounds. For the most part the only top TF2 players that were notable in overwatch are Enigma, Seagull, TviQ, ShadowBurn, Forsak3n, Dummy, Milo, KnoxXx, Numlocked, Ryb, Zebbosai, and Mesr. I'm probably missing some people but there it is.

cool stuff war i once had a dream where it was just you and me lying on a bed next to each other and after a long pause of silence i just got up and said "ok im just going to go" and you said "fook yeah bang it" and u raised a fist so i fist bumped it and i went outside and kanye west was there and i helped him discover why him and 50 cent went broke and it was actually p diddy the whole time so we shot him down and then i woke up. thanks for the sweet dreams war.

carried me to silver champion with bison and dh they're cool

oh ok sorry i cant read.

how is it a typo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UItqkgid-zQ

If anybody is wondering how Maplestory used to work here is the gist of it.

They announce a new class. It comes out and it's overpowered as fuck. They sell a ton of cash items specifically for that character. After a couple months and people start getting bored of the new character they nerf him to hell. They make 2 more classes and do it again. Then they have a "resurgence" of these old* characters and buff them again and make their cash items slightly more expensive but in a bundle. While you're making these characters you also have to buy new character slots if you don't want your time wasted to leveling up to 200. Did I mention that you also have to buy expensive books so you can actually level up your best skills to the max? They sell those too. Oh and after everything is said and done they nerf the three characters they have a "resurgence" for and then nerf the main classes (but only by a bit).

*Old meaning around 6 months

Seemingly at random, as though they had a bunch of characters on a wheel and spin it and whoever it landed it on will be picked, they will have a themed event of one specific character that you forgot even existed. They will then load the fucking cash store with his stuff that barely matters to you. But if you don't buy this shit fast you will look like a retard because everyone else has their pink chair and you don't so you automatically get ridiculed and probably never picked to be in a party because you dont have the chair.

Nexon also completely shut down the auction market where you could sell items for NX (premium currency). While people had differing opinions on it such as people were making actual money from it or the fact that the economy was the fact that 99% of the people in MS' economy was eating the other 1%'s shit or the fact that it was very possible that people can never pay Nexon a dime and still get stuff from the Cash Shop.

Don't even let me get started on the hackers. There are literal vacuum cheats in this game where anything dropped gets sucked up into your inventory. People drop and pick up items to show their wealth against each other as a sort of pissing contest. I did it once against some guy and the second I dropped something of value it went straight into his inventory and poof he was gone.

A little side note to make here is something you get during your questline. You're expected to do some of your quest line to at least get to the point where you fight a fairly easy miniboss to get his head and wear it as a hat. It gives +15 or so of your main stat but it is also ugly as fuck. Guess what's in the list in the beginner's package for this game? A transparent hat so you can't see the ugly but stat-wise decent hat. Nexon does it again.

There is also of course the thing most mmo players dread. The grind. Maplestory actually does an okay job of this as they make you unlock new skills by advancing your class as you level up. So when you're close you get that urge to level up and finally get these new skills. Oh but wait you have to grind quite a few levels so these skills are actually useful. So you still have to use some of your skills from your previous skill list to make these ones actually useful. Nice. Let's not forgot that probably 90% of place you think are okay grind spots are fucking awful. They're so bad that people make guides that just tell you the best enemies to grind on. And some of these enemies are nuts. For example Jesters give 1.3k exp and have 50k hp. If you have decent equipment and money to spend on burning potions you can actually go there at level 20 or so. From level 20 to level 34 the exp required to level up goes from 3708 to 19136. You could actually probably stay there until around level 50. Think about that. You can go from level 20 to 50 by killing only one type of monster.

Should we also go into the class system for a bit? Classes literally don't matter. There is no supporting in this game unless you are a Bishop. Even if you are a bishop you're expected to do some sort of damage (though with genesis having like a 1 minute cooldown now, which was a map-wide aoe spell, it's pretty much impossible). Nothing matters in this game except for damage. Having extra health doesn't really matter if you mow down mobs like it's fucking dynasty warriors.

Let's not forget the type of people this game attracts. If you go literally any where you will without a doubt find some weeb with hearts all over them and having an attack macro (in-game one) that spams some sort of weeb attack name. These are also the people most likely to spend tons of money on the game so they will always have at least 100+ megaphones which are items that let you send a message to the entire server on the top right. Now we can all experience yukichan12345's new anime recommendation.

The key binding in this game is also horrendous. The first time I played this game my friend who introduced me to it told me immediately to rebind my keys. I wondered why and then I looked holy shit was it really awful. Mostly because you're expected to use most of your left keyboard space to use actual skills. The entire top row is filled with just tabs. For every single window in this game.

How could we forget the way equipment is handled in this game. There are probably like 10 different ways to upgrade your equipment. And those ways keep on coming. First of all we have scrolls which you apply to your weapon and depending on what scroll you use have a chance to increase the stats. The lower the chance the higher the stat boost you get. Simple enough. Oh hey there is also a rare, epic, legendary system as well. Sounds pretty standard. They give stats dependent on which is rarer. Rare could give a simple 2% increase in your Luck stat while legendary could give a nice 15%. Cool. Now let Nexon work its magic. You can buy items to reset your weapon if you mess up a scroll as each weapon has a set amount of times you can use a scroll on it: whether it's a success or not. You can also buy an item that lets you increase the amount of times you can apply a scroll to an item. Oh and of course you can also buy an item that lets you reset an item's rare status so if you get something shitty on a legendary item like 10%+ HP (because nobody fucking needs health you just need to buy potions and drink them constantly) and try and get something good. There are probably even more ways to make your weapon better but these are the two glaring ones.

And last but not least, the players of this game. Just like in TF2 there are people very insistent on never playing the game. They sit in Henessy (the official don't do anything here just sit down town) and talk to each other. And god fucking damn the drama there is juicy sometimes but fuck me when I realized how much time these people waste. People there I feel like actually go into depression because they can't find an in-game gf by sitting down all the time in the game. Surprise you're sitting down in real life too doing nothing and you don't have a gf there either. I had an in-game gf in Maplestory once because she asked me to. I was really confused and I didn't really know what that entailed and there would be literally no repercussions if I said yes so I did. The next day while I was out actually playing the game she said "I want 2 be w/ u :3" and I was already starting to regret it. I teleported to her and sat next to her in a town for like 5 minutes before I just got up and left and blocked her. It was so pointless. On a side note I was walking around in the same town like a week later and "she" was quite literally asking people to be her sugar daddy.

I have no more room for text so my rant is done sorry.

tl;dr Nexon is a group of evil geniuses that are out to consume everyone's soul.

Still though i wont ever forget my homies in that game that helped me sell maplestory items through paypal so I could buy a good computer at 15 years old. God Bless.

So a bunch of things happened over the weekend that I could not watch, sadly..
The big one is Redbull Kumite.
The other two are ranking events, Texas Showdown and FrogByte, in Texas and Italy, respectively.

We will start with the ranking events.

The winner of Texas Showdown was Julio who crushed PR Balrog in 3 straight rounds after 3 straight rounds from PR Balrog who reset the bracket. This is the second time PR Balrog has lost to a Ken from WNF.

The winner of FrogByte was Phenom who beat out Problem X and Cuongster. Packz and Afii got 4th and 5th place, and them being sponsored by Perilous gaming who also sponsors a TF2 team I thought I would give them a bit of love.

Now these two events had their share of hype and good play. However the big tournament was of course Redbull Kumite.

And so here are the results:
1. RZR|Infiltration (Nash)
2. Tokido (Ryu)
3. Kazunoko (Cammy)
4. RB|Bonchan (Ryu)
5. FA|BigBird (Ken)
5. EG|Momochi (Ken)
7. AvM|GamerBee (Necalli)
7. EG|Justin Wong (Karin)

9. MCZ|Daigo (Ryu)
9. RZR|Xian (F.A.N.G)
9. Alioune (Chun-Li)
9. Innova|Keoma (Karin)
13. RB|Luffy (R. Mika)
13. YP|Valmaster (Necalli)
13. RB|Snake Eyez (Zangief, Alex)
13. Secret|Poongko (Cammy)

Overall a super cool event. All these top players. However I considered Kumite a "test" to see who is going to transition well into SFV from USF4.

So far the results show that Poongko, SnakeEyez, Valmaster, Luffy, and Keoma are struggling to transition. Luffy and SnakeEyez are Evo Champions and have few excuses. Poongko is struggling but I still just think he doesn't have his character yet. Urien or Juri might be what he needs. Keoma did not even make top 4 at his regional event not too long ago and he got bodied here too winning only against Poongko.

While I had my doubts about Bonchan and Momochi they got some fairly decent results here. GamerBee also looking good, eliminating Daigo. Speaking of Daigo his performance was not stellar either. He did however lose to Tokido and GamerBee so I'll give him a little longer. His gameplay is strong but his results aren't. I was doubting both Bonchan and Momochi but their gameplay has told me otherwise. Both with strong performances and results today at 4th and 5th place, respectively.

So far the only people to have beat Infiltration and Tokido are Infiltration and Tokido. Hopefully the rest of the world can catch up to these two titans in this game eventually.

Everyone else is doing as I expected them to do more or less. With their current character that is.

Texas Showdown has begun for anybody that is interested. Dreamhack Summer Qualifiers is going on so I get it if you don't want to watch it. I'm probably going to watch DHSQ too anyway haha.

Pools:
http://txshowdown.challonge.com/
They're at the bottom of the page + on page 2.

Not many international terrors in this tournament since most of them are at Kumite. I do spot a Chinese Jiewa in brackets but his performance thus far has not been the best. 801 Strider, alucarD, brentiscool, PR Balrog, Alex Valle, and Julio will be the names to watch out for. I'm betting on either 801 Strider or PR Balrog to take it all. Rog is just on another level while 801 Strider I feel has the perfect character for him in Alex.

Just a reminder that FrogByte (in Italy) and Texas Showdown (in USA) are happening next weekend. I imagine many European players will be going to FrogByte.

Texas showdown will of course house some Texan players. Some American players from Final Round are likely to make an appearance such as Nuckledu.

However the main event next weekend is of course going to be Redbull Kumite 2016. 14 players invited and 2 more qualifying for their spots by playing in a tournament will duke it out in Paris, France. This is also the first time we would see both Daigo and Infiltration in a tournament so if they play each other that would be fucking hype. It's going to be tough watching some matches, however, as some of your favorite may have not transitioned that well. Snake Eyez recently didn't even make it into top 8 at WCW and Keoma also didn't place as high you would expect of a top 8 at CCC with a 5th place finish. Though I'll believe in these players for a little long as for them it could be either A) The character that best suits them isn't out yet, or B) They are just learning the game.

imo the players that haven't shown the best results are:
Momochi, Poongko, Kazunoko, Keoma, Snake Eyez, Bonchan, and Xian

Xian might just be a character issue with him using Fang. Xian said in an interview that he wanted to try and place high in tournaments with a character that's fairly unfamiliar to many players: Fang. After that I'm pretty sure he said he would switch to either Claw or Nash. imo Claw suits him way more. Poongko I feel just does not have the right character yet. He is the god of gambling in fighting games and Cammy, while she has some gambles, still doesn't have that really high risk for really high reward for him just yet. Momochi is probably just taking his time learning the game because I have seen some sick stuff from his Ken. Keoma is looking really shaky, as well as Kazunoko. Snake Eyez has not been doing well lately. Any tournament with strong players he gets bopped. However I think this is due to his character. In WCW he lost to a decent Claw and a decent Nash. Two of Gief's worst matchups. It's kind of ironic how before Capcom Cup he had a web series which always ran with the phrase, "Stop being a Zangief player, and start being a Street Fighter Player" and right now he is losing because of his character imo. If Snake switches to another grapper I think he would be sick. Or maybe I'm wrong and he just has not shown some Gief tech. (Reminder that this is all in comparison to other top players. By no means are they complete scrubs now. They're still gods just not gods among gods.)

The players that have not made big appearances in tournament are:
GamerBee, Alioune, and Daigo.

Daigo's been streaming so we have seen what he is capable of. That set with Nuki was nuts so I believe Daigo transitioned fairly well into SFV. GamerBee has also been streaming somewhat but I haven't seen any of it sadly. Alioune has not made any appearance so far. Widely considered the best French fighting game player at the time, before stopping for a while for school I believe, before Luffy I'm sure he can pull off some sick games.

Players that have proven themselves:
Infiltration, Justin Wong, Tokido, and Luffy.

Infiltration has won 2 premier events, not much else to say about that. He's going to be the one to beat. While jwong had a fairly weak showing recently at WCW his dominance at Jam Festival and his 3rd place at NCR are a testament to his ability to be immediately good at any game that comes out. Tokido was also consistently up against Infiltration between the 2 premier events Final Round and NCR. Luffy also recently got second place at Hypespotting V. He lost the event to Problem X who continues his winstreak over Luffy since Capcom Cup last year.

Top 8 for WCW has started and is being streamed at twitch.tv/leveluplive

Here is bracket http://westcoastwarzone.challonge.com/Wcw5_sfv_top32

On winners side:
Filipinoman
Chris Tatarian

PR Balrog
Ricki Ortiz

On losers side:
NYChrisG
Fchamp

Jayce
Justin Wong

Congratulations to Chris Tatarian for winning WCW. He was one of the best Ken's in USF4 outside of Asia and is looking to be one of the top players in USA for sure after a very close game between himself and PR Balrog, an American powerhouse in his own right.

Top 32 for WCW started and is being streamed at twitch.tv/leveluplive

Here is the bracket http://westcoastwarzone.challonge.com/Wcw5_sfv_top32

Notable happenings:
Jwong got knocked down to losers by Commander Jesse. My prediction is looking shaky but I still believe.
Snake Eyez also in losers getting knocked down by ROM's Claw.
Justin eliminted by Filipinoman. My prediction is officially dead.

West Coast Warzone started yesterday and is currently being streamed at:
twitch.tv/leveluplive (for SFV)
twitch.tv/guardbreak (for the other games)

We're going to see some familiar players from the US here today such as Justin Wong, Snake Eyez, Julio, Chris Tatarian, ChrisG, Fchamp. and others.

Here are the various brackets http://westcoastwarzone.challonge.com/

imo Justin Wong is the best player in the USA right now and a good choice to predict who wins it all this weekend. Let's find out if any other US players can fight toe to toe with him.
rip jwong go eduardo