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I have a friend who works in sports journalism who told me that traditional sports are sitting on a fairly large bubble, too (though probably a more stable one than esports). Live events are one of the few remaining areas where you can guarantee that eyes will see it (versus streaming shows on Netflix or pirated torrents with the commercials ripped out), so there's scads of advertising and VC money flowing in for questionable returns. The falling global rate of profit since the 70s has trapped us in an increasingly weird reality where investors are gambling on the most longshot odds possible because there's simply nothing better to put it in if you want a good rate of return.
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May 24, 2019 05:18
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a lot of money in north american pro sports at least right now is from the live television deals teams have with networks. it's partially why baseball is so hosed recently, at some point somebody involved with the teams realized that ticket gate didn't matter and a lot of teams just decided "eh gently caress it who cares we aren't going to sign anyone and it doesn't matter if people don't come to the games either" of course with the huge amounts of viewership teams like the orioles and tigers have lost you have to wonder how that's going to harm negotiations for further tv deals. baseball also has the alternate revenue stream of mlb am where they're getting cash from other leagues for streaming. but eventually they won't be able to entirely live on alternate revenue streams.
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May 24, 2019 05:21
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Great post CDP. Your posts are the main reason why I read this thread. Couple questions - Why do you dislike Kotaku? How is Brazil/South America doing in terms of poularity and saturation - closer to China or still has potential?
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May 24, 2019 07:11
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Meanwhile... https://twitter.com/Olleh/status/1131614254807756800?s=19
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May 24, 2019 07:59
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It only took an eternity, but starting next season you can buy Team Passes in EU and NA for season-long emote pops, chroma skins, and icon and a ward for your favorite team just like you can for World's. Includes the revenue sharing that was promised ages ago. Rewards are tied to watching games while logged into the Riot website and doing in-game missions for unlockables. Kinda vague in the wording of what you'll earn where, but it also says it includes chests and keys and all that jazz. The minor regions of Turkey, Brazil, LAN, Japan, and Oceana will just get super generic icons and missions with revenue sharing for ALL teams since there's no individualized content
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May 24, 2019 09:04
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https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/bsbpe3/lck_team_griffin_ama/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share LEHENDS playing Yuumi LCK confirmed
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May 24, 2019 09:35
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The team pass stuff is interesting since they said in an Ask Riot last year they didn't want to do region specific esports content when someone asked about team skins so I wonder if the LCS stuff will be available in Europe and vice versa.
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May 24, 2019 10:18
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njsykora posted:The team pass stuff is interesting since they said in an Ask Riot last year they didn't want to do region specific esports content when someone asked about team skins so I wonder if the LCS stuff will be available in Europe and vice versa.
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May 24, 2019 10:41
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Chris de Sperg posted:how many esports games actually make any sense and feel like they're worth watching if you haven't played a hundred hours of the game itself already? If all the people throwing oogobs of money at esports didn’t think about this, I’ll laugh forever. I don’t need to be able to dunk to see how dope a dude launching himself from the free throw line and slamming it is. I don’t have to be able to hit a fastball to get hyped for a huge home run. I need to play a good amount of league to be able to even see, much less comprehend, a good QSS->Flash->Condemn or something like that, and if sponsors/investors never thought about that then boy howdy it’s time to introduce them to the guillotine thread.
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May 24, 2019 12:52
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There's a certain amount of it you pick up over time if you get interested enough, I watched pro League for 2 years before I started playing the game. The instant recognition stuff is often what fighting games are praised for but also fighting games gently caress that up by having about 50 million different nicknames for moves that you won't get if you haven't eaten multiple glossaries. Basically Rocket League is the best esport because it's just loving car soccer.
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May 24, 2019 13:07
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I've never played League (I installed it because I needed a username for the worlds prediction contest a couple years ago, but I've never logged in). I still follow the professional leagues, and can generally understand when something happens if it's because of a good play by someone, or more often, dumb plays by one or multiple people.
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May 24, 2019 14:09
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Gin posted:Great post CDP. Your posts are the main reason why I read this thread. it's a little hard for me to judge just because every Brazilian i've ever talked to ever has been a League fan, but from what i can tell, in terms of gaming and esports fandom, culturally, it feels like they're close to saturation point. however, Brazil is a very weird case where, while the consumer base/player base may not have too far to grow in theory in the forseeable future, there are a lot of very weird things going on in terms of how gaming/esports works on the financial front in Brazil that could in theory change that. the tl;dr version is these two points: * computer hardware (and consoles) in Brazil = ludicrously expensive, like multiple times as expensive as anywhere outside of South America, because of a mixture of infrastructure issues and the freefall of the Brazilian currency, and there's been a massive slowdown in terms of sales over the last few years as a result of that. so it's not impossible to see a world where, if that shifts (and i don't think that's going to happen short-term but you never know), there could be millions more Brazilians with home access to computers and therefore the audience opens up some more * with esports in particular, there is always the possibility of...let's not call it dark money, but let's at least call it shady. i can't certify if i've said this in detail in here, but it's pretty obvious to anyone involved that there's a degree to which the insane amount of money (relative to its size/international relevance) in the Turkish scene is coming from essentially a government impetus. nationalist/ideologue/whatever governments putting a ton of money into entertainment and sports through direct or less direct means as a tool of cultural imperialism or however you want to say it is a tale as old as time (there are a ton of contemporary examples, but it's been going on for a long time - my favourite example is the Colombian association football league briefly becoming one of the best in the world in the late 1940s because they left FIFA and poached all the star players from all over the world for huge fees at a time when amateurism was still pretty common at high levels of the sport). the Turkish league currently has four football clubs and a bunch of other sponsors that sure seem to be along those lines (two teams are sponsored by state universities, there's the mysterious 'entrepeneur' Emrah Kaya who bankrolled Crew Esports Club in 2018 and Royal Bandits in 2019, etc.). of course, the thing about stuff like that is that you are going to see at least some of that money back because while that's something you're doing for essentially propaganda purposes, it does tend to create a market (both nationally and internationally) for whatever it is you're doing. anyway, the point here is that it's very possible that the same thing happens with Brazil under the current government, but it hasn't happened yet apart from Flamengo being able to get whoever they want
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May 24, 2019 16:27
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Chris de Sperg posted:* computer hardware (and consoles) in Brazil = ludicrously expensive, like multiple times as expensive as anywhere outside of South America, because of a mixture of infrastructure issues and the freefall of the Brazilian currency, and there's been a massive slowdown in terms of sales over the last few years as a result of that. so it's not impossible to see a world where, if that shifts (and i don't think that's going to happen short-term but you never know), there could be millions more Brazilians with home access to computers and therefore the audience opens up some more Are PC bangs and the like not a popular thing in Brazil? As I recall, the main reason League's so popular in Vietnam is that it's F2P and can be run on decades-old hardware, which makes it perfect for PC bangs. I watched a travel show where they visited one of the local bangs, and there was not a single screen that wasn't running League. Seems odd that a country with a similar problem (large population with limited access to high quality hardware) hasn't seen them springing up as much.
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May 24, 2019 17:03
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I don't really have a ton to add that Chris didn't cover with his excellent and in-depth points, just that I have thought (and posted ITT) that eSports was a bubble since like late-2016, because it seemed like: 1) overall viewership had peaked 2) tons of sponsor money was flying in to capture ??? 3) prize money was stagnant or declining (the prize pool for Worlds 2017 was worse than Worlds 2016, and there were other events similar) We've also talked a lot in this thread about how bad spectator experience is for a lot of games, like Overwatch. Even trying to get into that and actually loving Monte/DOA casts, the games are just virtually impossible to follow spectator-view. Almost all traditional American sports really benefit from a "single ball" that is the 100% central point of camera focus, which is what makes them all follow-able by anyone who doesn't know poo poo about the rules. Almost all eSports lack this (except like someone else pointed out, Rocket League, which is car soccer).
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May 24, 2019 17:21
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Is it really a bubble? Typically bubbles are profitable until they burst. Maybe league and DOTA actually have made money off their esports stuff.
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May 24, 2019 17:28
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Well if you want a better spectator view Riot will sell you one for $15 for the Summer split. As for prize money I'm not sure being stagnant is necessarily a bad thing when it's being kept at an affordable level, and the difference in Worlds prize pools hasn't exactly been huge. 2016 was $5.07m and 2017 was $4.94m. Then the 2018 pool was around $6.12m because everyone loves Kha'zix and that skin was real good. Invalid Validation posted:Is it really a bubble? Typically bubbles are profitable until they burst. Maybe league and DOTA actually have made money off their esports stuff. It's a bubble when everyone's rushing in to get a piece of the action while its the new hot thing (see, dotcom bubble) and eventually some new hotness comes along and all the venture capital investors take their money to that new shiny thing instead. So esports is definitely a bubble while every developer on earth with a game that can be played competitively launches an esports series with "League" appended to their game name and waits for everyone to throw money at them without asking questions on how it will actually work and will anyone actually give a poo poo about it (hello Clash Royale). njsykora fucked around with this message at 17:38 on May 24, 2019 |
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May 24, 2019 17:34
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Vermain posted:Are PC bangs and the like not a popular thing in Brazil? As I recall, the main reason League's so popular in Vietnam is that it's F2P and can be run on decades-old hardware, which makes it perfect for PC bangs. I watched a travel show where they visited one of the local bangs, and there was not a single screen that wasn't running League. Seems odd that a country with a similar problem (large population with limited access to high quality hardware) hasn't seen them springing up as much. LAN cafes etc. can do a lot to make gaming more accessible, but i guess there's a limit to that when the underlying infrastructure to create that service costs that much to assemble still (because while personal wealth is an issue in KR/SEA, a ton of the manufacturing being in east asia = you're not quite paying the same premiums if you're a local buyer who knows where to look. though this is delving into territory where i don't really know, some quick Googling suggests that in present day present time you are still probably paying a premium in those countries but that it's still nowhere near as bad even in the worst cases as it is in Brazil, and that the premium is more for high-end computers rather than acceptable cobbled-together rigs, which come out to similar or cheaper than in the US)
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May 24, 2019 18:06
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njsykora posted:Well if you want a better spectator view Riot will sell you one for $15 for the Summer split. jfc I'm a loving idiot but I'm probably going to buy this
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May 24, 2019 18:25
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Yeah that sounds like something I'd throw moneys at.
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May 24, 2019 18:35
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Sexpansion posted:jfc I'm a loving idiot but I'm probably going to buy this Not at all, I never minded paying for GOMTV's Starcraft subscriptions. I was expecting Riot to do something paid for LCS for awhile, but giving POV on demand of multiple players including mouse/key activity? That's awesome. If they actually do put the money into the teams/league as they state, that's even better. edit: Having said that, I just realize that Riot being Riot will probably not be able to implement this without loving things up. Expecting 50% more pauses going forward, since they can't seem to keep 10 computers running cleanly throughout a tournament day. (It must be nice to have a IT job where you can't get fired for loving up, or we wouldn't deal with all these pauses for this many years.) Kalas fucked around with this message at 19:16 on May 24, 2019 |
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May 24, 2019 19:09
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Schiavona posted:If all the people throwing oogobs of money at esports didn’t think about this, I’ll laugh forever. its one of the reasons that stuff like CS:GO and COD are the best spectator sports from an esports persepctive, all it takes is a glance at the screen and the average layperson knows exactly whats going on: both teams are trying to kill each other, the bigger number indicates who's winning. I could almost certainly show my mom, who's never played a video game in her life, could almost certainly tell what's going on in a round of counter strike whereas in league she'd give up 5 seconds in. ninja Kalas posted:edit: Having said that, I just realize that Riot being Riot will probably not be able to implement this without loving things up. Expecting 50% more pauses going forward, since they can't seem to keep 10 computers running cleanly throughout a tournament day. there's already been PoV streams for awhile, this would just make it so that they're on command for whatever player you want. for instance, here's DL's pov from ig vs TL game 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD0T_1SZsEw Luna Was Here fucked around with this message at 21:25 on May 24, 2019 |
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May 24, 2019 21:23
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Luna Was Here posted:there's already been PoV streams for awhile, this would just make it so that they're on command for whatever player you want. for instance, here's DL's pov from ig vs TL game 4 They put position up for vote during the LEC playoffs and the net result was basically gently caress you if you want to see a support POV.
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May 24, 2019 21:33
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Sounds kinda neat but I’d much rather just spectate the lcs games in client with the commentary piped in.
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May 24, 2019 21:41
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Invalid Validation posted:Sounds kinda neat but I’d much rather just spectate the lcs games in client with the commentary piped in. This would be even better, when I heard about the new service I hoped it would be client based, but I'm okay with streams.
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May 24, 2019 22:42
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DotA did (does?) that and watching The International in-client with the ability to switch between audio streams (they had a specific newcomer audio cast) and observers is the entire reason I got into watching esports. I'd only played the original DotA a few times and so only had a basic grasp of what was going on, but I tried it because I saw people talking about it and the newcomer cast helped me really wrap my head around what was going on, which lead to me trying out the game and spending some money on it before figuring out I don't really like playing DotA. It got me started watching and buying team merch though! If Riot really wants to try and build their audience they should work on something like that, or at the very least start offering newcomer casts for the later stages of MSI / Worlds.
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May 24, 2019 23:16
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I'm gonna be honest Id prefer video streams over in client streams but to each their own
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May 24, 2019 23:38
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Garen alert in the College World Champs match that's going on right now
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May 25, 2019 00:07
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I can't see myself spending 15 dollars with an asterisk on it for player cams. Or  for the team pass with... a Dragonslayer Braum Chroma as the big hot prize. That skin is how old at this point? It just seems stupid and greedy. I liked the idea of getting some bonus BE and a couple icons for tuning in every week and got all my spring split rewards, but I'm 100% not interested in any of these paid things.Like they literally added a "We might charge more for new things as we add them" clause, since clearly it wasn't already a stupid enough money grab. Yuck. No thanks.
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May 25, 2019 03:55
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I thought they were going to do a brand new skin like the Kha'Zix and flags but lol if it's just for a Braun chroma, what the hell are they doing
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May 25, 2019 06:15
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I'd probably pay for some sort of Worlds package(like the current passes) but paying for an individual split seems not worth it
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May 25, 2019 11:54
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Game 4 of Western Ontario vs UCI in the College Championship is a strong throw of the year candidate.
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May 26, 2019 07:24
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Chris de Sperg posted:esports industry/financial sustainability I think a general "crash" is more likely than just a gaming industry one. Prices and valuations are at an all time high industry wise. The point you made about esports team being 13x rev vs 5x rev for sports team stands out and it go's with your point of projected audience growth for esports. First of I don't think it's fair to give esport teams the same valuations as tech companies because tech companies play on a larger scale. That's why honestly it should be closer to the 5x rev valualations of sport teams. Anything that has a geographical importance will inevitably have some scaling limit. One of the reasons why tech companies are so highly valued is because of the rise of the middle class in China, India, Philippines, basically any other emerging market but an esports team from America has no potential customer base in Asia(European soccer teams are big in Asia but Asia is better in games than the west). Meanwhile a processor made by AMD is going to be valuable and where it's made is not important. The valuation for esport teams only make sense with audience growth which you also pointed out most likely doesn't exist. My assumption is that esports orgs are overvalued compared to sports org not because of a audience growth story for esports but a lack of audience growth for real sports. Millenials in general watch like 30% less TV than the last generation and sports is still the one medium that is heavily centered around cable television + the old advertising model. A lot of the sport orgs have started their own online services but it hasn't seemed to caught on yet. The most successful one is maybe MLB or UFC who got into online live services before anyone but they still have a large portion of their viewerbase through traditional platforms. Invalid Validation posted:Sounds kinda neat but I’d much rather just spectate the lcs games in client with the commentary piped in. Honestly the POV package only makes sense if you want to learn about the game. I still play ranked on the weekends and try to climb(hardstuck plat) so I can see the 15$ being useful. I found the best way to learn is just to watch pro streams without commentary and think why they take certain trades etc. I will probably get it just to watch some pov streams of matchups I don't understand in midlane. Obviously proplay is a bit different since they have comms. but I think it should be useful for learning basic trading early on in matchups stuff like that. I totally forgot that LCS starts this week. They honestly do a horrible job of marketing the start of the new split. It's like they still can't handle the workload from MSI and haven't had time to prep for LCS. NA Academy starts on Thursday and the teams have still not been "confirmed". Interestingly it seems that Clutch Gaming have dropped Piglet in favor of Cody which took a surprisingly longer time than I expected. Also Ryu, 100T's former midlaner is out of retirement to play in NA Academy. I just think he is playing because he is already under contract with 100T and they couldn't find anyone else. I honestly can see Prolly dropping Soligo for Ryu if Soligo doesn't prove he is LCS level. It just seems 100T is keeping Ryu as a last/emergency option if they end up near the bottom again. E: https://tsm.gg/news/tsm-league-of-legends-mid-2019-season-update TSM announced they will use Akaadian and Grig for LCS during summer split. I kinda doubt it since Western teams always promise 10 man rosters but never have any idea how to use them. The only one that worked was C9 and FNC last year. Ulio fucked around with this message at 02:32 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 02:18
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It's not about gaming crash vs general market crash, it's specifically a bubble of outside investment flowing in to esports leagues/teams with no viable revenue stream in place to ever make back anywhere near as much as they're spending. Look at Overwatch League, where the franchise fee is 60 million this year and you had investors falling all over themselves to pay it. Blizzard is raking in the money and boasting about how successful everything is, but those investors will never make that money back. Then there's the separate issue of players pay and treatment being questionable at best and obviously a few orders of magnitude below the real money being thrown around. Even the big prize pools at international/world championships are nothing compared to the franchising and ad money these game companies are pulling in. All the big money is flowing into the pockets of the game devs and very little is being spread around. It's unsustainable as people start catching on to the obvious racket.
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May 27, 2019 02:48
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New mordekaiser gonna be interesting in pro play. Even just from a purely technical standpoint of how to show the shadow realm thunderdome along side a team fight.
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May 27, 2019 22:30
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Savage Cracker posted:New mordekaiser gonna be interesting in pro play. Even just from a purely technical standpoint of how to show the shadow realm thunderdome along side a team fight. You'd assume they accounted for it and they'd both just be tinted blue or whatever.
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May 27, 2019 22:38
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Savage Cracker posted:New mordekaiser gonna be interesting in pro play. Even just from a purely technical standpoint of how to show the shadow realm thunderdome along side a team fight. Just wait till it's first triggered and doesn't untrigger and we get stuck in the shadow realm forever
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May 27, 2019 22:39
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Removed a bug where activating Heimerdinger's ultimate sent all Heimerdingers in the game to Mordekaiser's shadow realm.
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May 28, 2019 03:37
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Honestly, they really should've just called it the Shadow Realm to begin with. No one, except maybe the casters, is going to call it the Death Realm or whatever.
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May 28, 2019 03:46
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Fixed a bug where casting Ivern's ultimate in the Death Realm causes Daisy to spawn without a health bar and be unkillable.
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May 28, 2019 03:50
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Vermain posted:Honestly, they really should've just called it the Shadow Realm to begin with. No one, except maybe the casters, is going to call it the Death Realm or whatever. Trademark issues?
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May 28, 2019 07:00
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