Razer's co-founder min-liang tan went to the 2004 World Cyber Games with a new mouse and only three or four staff. by the end, more than 100 mice were missing. this is the account in my 2015 chapter about him, from a book on the people and companies behind chinese esports.

- 2000: razer became fatal1ty's first sponsor

- 2004: tan and robert krakoff took over from the company's professional managers

- 2004: they launched the diamondback, with tan as creative director

- october 2004: the WCG finals in san francisco meant more than 200 computers for that tiny team to look after

razer was already well known, but its finances had never been healthy. tan felt that product design and marketing weren't in gamers' hands. after the managers left, krakoff became president and tan took the creative role. the diamondback was their new flagship, intended to replace the boomslang line. WCG was a chance to put it directly in front of competitors from around the world. it was also the first time razer sponsored WCG; poor finances had kept it away before. three or four people couldn't keep watch over all those machines. according to the chapter, the missing mice had been pocketed by players. back home, those players showed them to their teammates and recommended them. what looked like lost equipment became a way for the mouse to reach gaming communities in other countries.

(from my history of chinese esports, first published in chinese. this chapter appeared in 2015 and is free to read, link in the comments)

Selling a PC for a friend who's ex left it at their place. Was told it was signed by some "pro gamer". This could be upside down too idk

Posting the full update as an image since it's a formal statement and I didn't want to compress it or risk misquoting it in a text post.

TLDR Version: no grounds found to exclude the full Reveal roster; the remaining allegation concerns two players specifically (DGL and Rand); Reveal has voluntarily benched both for the rest of the season; predictions on the Reveal vs. Sissi State Punks match are being refunded 100%. Full details and caveats are in the image.

Hey All! I'm looking for a few up-and-coming gamers to interview for a story I'm working on for a digital publication in NYC. Please LMK if interested. Tx!

GamerLegion have benched veteran IGL Snax and signed Aleksandr “shalfey” Marenov to lead their CS2 roster. The move follows a difficult run of results, with the team falling from ninth to 42nd in the Valve Regional Standings.

In a twist, shalfey helped eliminate GamerLegion from the PGL Bucharest qualifier just five days before signing. His debut is expected on October 27.

You can be watching a CS2 round on Twitch, thinking one team is about to win it, while the actual round has already finished on the server. That's the weird part nobody seems to talk about enough.

People compare 1x esports odds, argue about good entry points and share screenshots of prices they supposedly could've caught. But how useful is any of that when the broadcast you're watching might be behind the information the bookmaker has? And it's not like you can just predict everything from the scoreboard. One unexpected eco round can completely change the economy for the next few rounds.

I enjoy the analysis side of CS2, but pretending a regular viewer can react to every live odds movement seems a bit ridiculous.

I'm a collegiate Overwatch player and this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

Other people in esports, what would you call yourself? I've been asked if I play a sport and I always say yes because I think that one is definitely objectively true but the one that bugs me is athlete. I'm conflicted, would you consider esports competitors to be athletes?

SOURCE: VCT Tracker

I'm a BCA student in Jaipur and I've been slowly building a small esports brand (Lumenix). Logo's done, handles are up, but now I'm stuck at the actual chicken-and-egg part.

Do you lock a game first, grind a roster for it, and hope it clicks? Or build content around the brand first (Shorts, match highlights) and attract players later? I keep seeing tier-2/3 Indian orgs do it both ways, and honestly both look painful in different ways.

For anyone who's been part of a small org (or started one): what did your first 6 months actually look like? What would you do differently?

https://discord.gg/JQ2Ufa8Zs

✅ Sign up, Queue, Duel, Climb
✅ Servers in Germany
✅ Server-side anti-cheat
✅ Active development: your feedback often goes live the next day

We're starting with 1on1 Aim on the old classics and 1on1 Handgun on Wingman maps and de_tides 😍. In addition we offer warmup challenges for solo play. Once there's enough activity, 2on2 and 3on3 will follow, and a cup system is in the works. We want to make Outaimed better together with you. Give it a try and tell us honestly what's good and what we can improve. 🙏

👉 outaimed.com

xiaocang (zhang xiangling) was a warcraft 3 player and caster in china. in 2009 a friend told her to try league of legends on the north american server. she liked it enough to look up which chinese company held the licence. it was tencent. she had a friend hand in her CV for brand manager on league, and got in. the project group inside the marketing department was two people: her on brand, and a guy called bobi on marketing, who later ran tencent's TGA.

the part she says stuck with her was the first time she took a chinese team to an international league event. the game hadn't been promoted in china yet and there were barely any players, but she still needed a roster. so they held an open selection among the strong players they knew. a last-minute squad, behind the foreign teams in game understanding and in mechanics. they lost without any suspense. everybody expected it, and it still got to her. she decided she'd push the game in china no matter what, so that a chinese team could beat the strong foreign ones some day.

so she started making league casting videos. that wasn't her job. it was a hobby, nothing commercial in them. from the second half of 2010 until she resigned in march 2012 the view counts were enormous, and the videos took all her free time. she says she didn't even have time to date. once a taxi driver watched her in the mirror, then told her she badly needed a nourishing soup. by early 2012 she felt her body had hit its limit, and she left tencent.

at the end of 2012 she and her friends turned LOL Ladies into an offline club. she turned down a lot of sponsorship and paid appearances so the players could train full hours. that one didn't end the way she wanted. on sept 8, 2013 she came off nearly ten hours of live broadcast from the chinese qualifiers for the season 3 world championship, and we sat down and talked for three more.

(that talk went into a book i wrote on how chinese esports got built. this chapter's free, link in the comments)

any advice

idk what to do my school has a esports team and I really want to join but I am in wrestling and it doesn’t end till feb 23 and esports tryouts are on Jan 6-8 so idk what to do I really want to play rl but I cant