With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.
Apex Legends held its first “tournament”
The Twitch Rivals “tournament” as reported by PC Gamer was a held on twitch recently where “pro” players get points assigned to them based on how they do in the game verse random other players. The point broke down was one point for a kill and five for a win. The “winners” of said “tournament” was Team Kings Canyon who comprised of Ninja, Dizzy and King Richard with a score of 420. Now again it’s important to keep in mind that there is currently no custom game option in Apex Legends and these “pros” were matchmaking against random others and not against a group of their peers. The other players in each round had no idea a “tournament” was even taking place and this was a pub stomping exercise to boost visibility of the game.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com (Respawn, EA)
Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject: I’m speechless that this event is even being described as a tournament. This was a publicity stunt to get the word out on the game but the real kicker here is that there was cold cash on the line for the “winner”. The total amount for both EU and NA was $50k, $8,000 for first place team and $7,500 for the player with the most kills. I really find this appalling to be described as a tournament in any form. This was a publicity stunt that people got paid to pretend was a tournament. You may be asking yourself why I care so much about this. We continue to dilute the meaning of terms in the gaming industry i.e. beta doesn’t really mean what it used to mean and why we feel the need to do the same thing to tournaments is just heading us down a path I doubt we could recover from. When every event or Twitch stream can now be a “tournament” it really waters down what real tournaments are supposed to be, the best of the best players fighting it out who is number one at that specific time. We have a whole Esports scene for many games where we want competitive gaming to be taken seriously and then we have things like this. I won’t get into the issue of stream snipping but in my opinion it’s the responsibility of the streamer to mitigate that. Luckily Apex Legends has some good tools to make that easier in game. We should not be paying players to pub stomp random other players and calling it a tournament, it just is all in bad taste. With that said another Twitch Rivals “tournament” is set to take place on 2/19/19.
