A Beginner’s Guide to Shoutcasting

I’ve been amateur shoutcasting for 3 years, and I recently got voted by League Zero to cast the grand finals, but I’ve also never peaked beyond low gold in my game of choice. So don’t worry about your in-game talent level, you’re fine! Shoutcasting has almost a completely different skillset from actual playing (just like how most chess commentators aren’t grandmasters) so don’t feel discouraged about your own personal heights. (This goes for other possible esport positions as well, there are tons of options other than playing for breaking in!) If you’ve ever watched a shoutcast and thought it would… [Continue Reading]

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The Greatest Moment in the Overwatch League Just Happened

Today was the first day of the Overwatch League playoffs, with the six best teams returning to face off in a three-week series to take home up to $1 million in bonus money. The first season of the Overwatch League had something of a bell curve when it came to the teams’ performance; the best teams were unstoppable juggernauts, the worst teams were pushovers, and everybody else was somewhere in the middle. Because of this, the first day of the playoffs were expected to be easy stomps for the Boston Uprising and London Spitfire. In the Spitfire’s case, the casters weren’t voting… [Continue Reading]

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I Attended IEM Oakland!

Hi everybody! I’ve been a bit silent on the blog recently, mostly been working on my first quarter of schoolwork at the UCSC Games & Playable Media Master’s program. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding, and I’ll be updating you all as soon as the quarter ends and I can catch my breath. One of my favorite parts of the program are the other students; they’re all  driven game developers who look out for each other, and love to play board/video games together! Several of them are frequent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, and recently we got the exciting… [Continue Reading]

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Blizzcon 2017 Announcements!

There’s a thread on reddit right now called “Blizzard literally gave us everything we wanted” and that’s pretty much how I’d sum up this cavalcade of announcements we just got at the beginning of Blizzcon. Blizzard is pulling out all the stops with a host of new Overwatch improvements on several fronts. First and most important, we’re getting our first evil healer! Moira is an Irish geneticist who appears to have something to do with Reaper’s necromantic resurrection, and she specializes in medium-range healing and damage-dealing. She’s got several different beam attacks for defending herself and also fueling her healing… [Continue Reading]

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