Tag: league of legends

Cloud9 is going to find out the hard way

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Oh, how little they realize the danger they’re in: Cloud9 secures $25M in Series A financing from various notable entities, including the WWE

In other words, the world of eSports has let the wolf known as World Wrestling Entertainment into the chicken coop.  AKA Triple H, the de facto ultimate usurper and infiltrator has found his way into the burgeoning and profitable world of eSports.

And now that his foot is in the door, it’s only a matter of time before Triple H ultimately takes over every single C9 professional team, and then it’s only a matter of another time until Triple H, and just Triple H is the champion of League of Legends, Overwatch, Counterstrike and Smash Bros.

Granted, eSports will have been systematically ruined and destroyed, but hey, it would at least be a North American champion in some of these games, for once in the history of competitive gaming.

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Life is boring lately

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as it pertains to my want to write every now and then, it sure doesn’t help when there’s nothing to really talk about outside of sports.  Like really, I comb through news sites, and I try to watch a little bit of news here and there, but on a regular basis, it’s the same old shit that’s being driven further into the ground every single time it comes up, so there’s really nothing particularly interesting to me that gives me any inspiration to really write.

On the local level, the AJC further reinforces the notion that they’re a clown outlet, since the front page of the site has basically turned into the SEC football daily, providing links and news for not just Georgia, but just about every single SEC school’s football programs.  Granted, I guess it sure beats the alternative to the daily shootings, robberies and killings in Southwest Atlanta, but surely, surely, there has to be stuff worth reporting on aside from college football.

National and global news are more of the same crap involving sexual harassment dogpiling, talk of building a wall, and the perpetually constantly rising tensions between the United States and other countries.

Same shit, different day.

It’s no wonder why I always fall back onto sports and wrestling to talk about, because there’s not much else worth writing about that doesn’t just trigger, bother, infuriate or simply annoy.

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Money > Loyalty – The Rito Way

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking recently about how interesting it is to be actively witnessing the formation and establishment of the rise of professional competitive gaming.  Obviously having been around since like the 1960s long before I, or anyone else in my generation or younger were even born, competitive entities like MLB, NFL, NBA and even the NHL have been around for decades, and had the vast majority of their rules and infrastructure already build, established and requiring no more than occasional tweaks and union-related agreements to operate smoothly on a seasonal basis.

On account of that, I’m often fascinated by the way the ever-growing professional League of Legends scene as well as other professionally played video games operate in, by comparison, some very fast, loose and always changing rules and structure.  I get that they’re the new kids on the block in professional competition, but it would be kind of nice to not have to re-read the rules and conditions of the league every single season.  In LoL alone, the format has switched from best-of-ones, to best-of-threes, and then there’s all these weird convoluted tiers when it comes to playoff seeding, and they’ve basically invalidated the entire first half of a season, by making the first half winner not a lock for Worlds, while the winner of the second half is an automatic #1 seed, which makes absolutely no fucking sense to me at all.

The global professional League scene is just now at the tail end of just their seventh year, but it’s safe to say that aside from the map they play on, it’s entirely a different game now than in which it started when Europe were kings and Korea and China hadn’t even entered the playing field.

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Writing when I’m not feeling writing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then, I’ll hit a point where I look at my docket of written things, and feel as if I haven’t written anything in a while, and then I feel anxious because I’m OCD like that and feel like I should be writing at the very least, once a week.

However, admittedly a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been feeling like the world around me is in this stagnant state where on any given point, it feels like the world’s primary topics of discussion are encapsulated in these really small capsules as of late, and it’s like the same things are discussed and rehashed 50,000 times before the next thing that should probably be taking a back seat to larger things emerges and the cycle repeats itself.

Like, for example, it seems like the only things being talked about in the world are:

  • Sexual harassment that stemmed from Harvey Weinstein
  • Gun control that stemmed from the Las Vegas shootings
  • Kneeling during the National Anthem that stemmed from Colin Kaepernick
  • Football

Despite the fact that there are vastly bigger issues in the world currently such as:

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Photos: Dragon*Con 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: Among many of the things random visitors might be remotely interested in seeing, would be convention pictures from years past.  And of the several cons where I took my camera with me to take photos, Dragon*Con 2017 would be one of them.

I’ll be honest, this was a particularly trying D*C for me, and there was a lot going on in my personal life that was justifiably distracting me from having any semblance of genuine enjoyment during the weekend, and it was pretty evident as far as I was concerned.  But it wasn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the company of many friends that I did get to see.

However, the fact that there’s literally only a singular gallery from the convention itself should say enough about where my head really was, but there’s still some good stuff amongst the photo dump.

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kT LOLster

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is not a rebroadcast from last year: Samsung Galaxy defeats kT Rolster, advances to Worlds

Honestly, despite knowing that this was always a possibility, I would have put my money on kT to win the regional qualifier, and make it to Worlds as the #3 seed for Korea.  I don’t think it’s at all that often that a team of talented players doesn’t figure out how to rectify their shortcomings and overcome obstacles in their path; however, on that same token, it’s never out of the realm of possibility that a competitive team also has their kryptonite, and that for whatever reasons, falls short to the exact same circumstances repeatedly.

Regardless, despite being the vaunted meticulously constructed super team, kT Rolster for the second year in a row, will not be going to the League of Legends World Championships, falling short at the hands of Samsung Galaxy, again.

If it sucked being kT Rolster because they couldn’t ever beat SK Telecom at all throughout the year, it really sucks to be kT Rolster when they didn’t just fall short of winning Worlds, but didn’t even make it into the tournament at all.  This would be like if the Miami Heat didn’t even make it into the NBA Playoffs in the years that they had LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

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It must suck to be kT Rolster

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In Spider-Man comics, Doctor Octopus brought together Kraven the Hunter, Electro, the Vulture, Mysterio and The Sandman, to form the Sinister Six; a group formed with the intention of destroying Spider-Man.  Numerous times, they failed, and everyone’s favorite web-slinger always stood triumphant at the end of every conflict.

That’s pretty much kT Rolster’s League of Legends team, whom made big waves this season, when they dumped four-fifths of their previous year’s roster, and replaced them entirely with all-star caliber free agent individuals, most of whom were returning to Korea after unsuccessful stints in China.  Mata, Pawn and Deft, three former Samsung players with the first two being members of the S4 Worlds champion Samsung White squad and the reigning LCK MVP Smeb joined Score, the lone kT holdover, to form a team that on paper looked unbeatable.

The goal of this League superteam was obviously to win Worlds, but there was no secret about how the organization specifically wanted to dethrone the 90’s Bulls of League of Legends, SK Telecom T1, aka SKT.  Organizationally, kT and SKT are basically the AT&T and Verizon of Korea, two giants of the telecommunications industry, who are in endless competition with one another.  And the players themselves, many of the newly signed guys were players that either had long-standing grudges with their SKT counterparts, were simply tired of their one squad always winning, or both.  Both Pawn and Smeb have something of vendettas against SKT’s Faker, the oft-proclaimed best player in the world, easily stemming from resentment of said title.

Needless to say, prior to the start of Season 7, there was much ballyhooed about the construction of the new kT Rolster and how they’d fare against SKT throughout the year.

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