58 teams in Open. 58! This puts us on par with Season 13 (60 teams) and imo really sets us up for a sustainable IM in season 18 and beyond.

Jeez its like 2011 all over again. Im gonna die if we lose after a lead like that.

Completely serious, donating money to the ultiduo tourney was the best use of $20 ever.

Thanks grape and ninjanick for some awesome ultiduo and quality entertainment, and thanks Kevin + the admins for putting on a great show!

meat market is paid up which makes 10 teams ready. I'm no expert on this but I think IM is looking good, ~15 teams seem committed and several more are in the works based on above comments. We good ESEA?

Done.

Yeah that wasnt well thought out lol

Would love to see them revert falloff and the radius over time part in one update... but it won't happen. The max radius being same as RL is a good, small nerf. I don't think anything more is necessary, even for pubs.

Also, I would love to see the new nade launcher be "pills explode when they hit the ground". Then it might actually be interesting instead of a slight downgrade.

My opinion on new weapons:

New Shotgun is bad. It's always worse than stock imo. Fun weapon for fat scout pubs tho I guess?

New Grenade Launcher is interesting sidegrade. Better for spamming points, worse for spamming chokes. Look at edit below

Quickielauncher is complicated, I'm leaning towards sidegrade, espcially with the new radius mechanic. Could be really fun for kritz tho (153 is min krit damage 180*.85, with the faster chargeup and fire rate). Needs more testing for sure.

On a different note, I wish Valve had just gone with the sticky -> rocket explosion radius. The radius change over time is too gimmicky for my liking. Overall awesome update tho, great to see real content getting put into the game.

EDIT: after a bit more testing I more and more disappointed with the new grenade launcher. No rollers means the effective range is actually way less. Slight downgrade imo, tho it could have legit situational uses? dunno

I love the king randomly moving 5 squares on the first move and taking a pawn.

Kinda disappointing no actual content, but pretty good sfm and not bad overall.

Any news on whether this will be working for ESEA lan? Because that would be awesome. :)

That article is trash.

The US is now second to China in terms of GDP PPP. So, Gross Domestic Product (the sum value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year) adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity. PPP is where you adjust GDP for the cost of living in the country. Because China is still a lot poorer than the US on a per person (per capita) basis, the cost of living is still much lower; Chinese people can buy way more with (Chinese equivalent of) $1 than an American can with $1. In fact, that is also why Chinese products are really cheap for Americans to buy.

What really matters for comparing how large the economies of two countries are is GDP, not adjusted for PPP; if you don't adjust for PPP, you can actually see how much these countries produce per year on a global standard. Basically, why would you want to adjust for cost of living in that country when determining which country is more powerful? It doesn't make sense, and that's why PPP is usually reserved for analyzing how well individual people are doing in a country.

If you look at regular GDP figures, you can see the the US is still way ahead of China (about a factor of 2): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29#Lists

Even if China passes us (which should happen in about 10-15 years), it's not a big deal. China has 1.4 billion people, while the US has 320 million. So even though the average American produces way more than the average Chinese person, there are ~3.8 times as many Chinese people.

This is a slightly more subjective point, but China's one child policy (effectively a 1.3 child policy on average) means that China's population (and their workforce) will start declining soon. Immigration means America's will continue to slowly increase. So in 50 years (barring some world changing war or whatever), China will actually be weighed down with an old population and America will still be growing slowly but surely.

tldr: article sucks and way over simplifies; 'Murica still #1

28525

Definitely remove the solemn vow. It seriously changes the meta when there are adequate communications between players. Good call on the crit-a-cola btw. :)

Solemn vow is generally considered a bad idea for sixes (banned in ESEA and CEVO). Other than that the whitelist looks good I think?

Edit: Yeah and crit-a-cola please no.

Thanks, I will try that the next chance I get. Should I set anti-alias to 4x or 8x?

@dippidy: I agree that the input lag does seem high, but that being said I'm already playing on a 32" tv with really high input lag (haven't measured it but I'm pretty sure it's high because it's a fairly low end old tv). So my tolerance is pretty high for that sort of thing.

Thanks for all the help, everyone! I really appreciate it.