The same reason Australia is in Eurovision, being a member of the EBU. Israel's Moroccanoil has also been a major sponsor for years. I think regardless of what EBU does, it'll always be controversial, so I feel like they have no choice but to just keep rolling on with it.

Yeah echoing Diamond, any chance of getting hold of the database? Would be really good to have the competition/player history archived somewhere.

can y'all keep it down up there...

oh nvm it was all a bluff

https://s.mitchc.live/u/Ewt84k.png

Was there a reason for it being Bo3 instead Bo5?

https://media1.tenor.com/m/7U73mlVOLSoAAAAd/fridge-meme-good-ending.gif

promod's looking hot

If you're not already you should join castellum! lot's of like-minded video editors here and happy to help: https://discord.gg/4u4TNJq8FT

Myself and ozfortress/AsiaFortress have tried a few times to organise cross-region activity between NA and APAC, however there are not many teams actually interested due to the ping. If there was new interest in it, I'd be happy to work with others to organise a cup.

There is an Asian bookable service called Matcha that has server regions all over Asia, which could offer decent ping.

Guam used to exist as a region, however after thorough testing it was found that only a small group of players were getting better ping compared to other regions, so it has since been deactivated.

First time watching LAN Downunder? Here's everything you need to know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqiMOjMYEaE

First time watching LAN Downunder? Here's everything you need to know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqiMOjMYEaE

Got pretty lucky! One of our operations staff used to do journalism for Japanese Overwatch. They're goats and sent out 50 mousepads to give away as prizes.

Unironically would love to see some sort of international rep in the future. The venue down here is pretty special and I think teams will enjoy a holiday down under ;)

In Sidular's defence, following his post about his Father, his Mother also passed away not long after that post. I think we need to give some leeway here.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are some really ambitious ideas that might need to be reassessed, but Sidular is obviously passionate and I think with some adjustments, there is definitely a space for him to run something.

LANs are really tough to pull off, especially first-time events with all the complexity of international teams and venue constraints. The Fireside team did an amazing job making this tournament happen. The format worked great, and despite some production hiccups (which were pretty much unforeseeable), the LAN was a huge success. Props to everyone who made it work!

Australia/New Zealand
ozfortress still thriving with ~40 6v6 teams, 21 HL. LAN Downunder 2025 will be held in Melbourne July 19-20th, with tickets almost sold out.

Asia
AsiaFortress are almost wrapped up with their preliminary qualifier period, with a smaller ~16 team league about to start. A lot of players now play in ozfortress though.

I think instead of looking into a Promod, we could use this opportunity to propose/code some community changes, with the hopes Valve may push it into the game at some point. Valve don't seem to mind pushing community fixes as long as they don't have to do it themselves.

Think big! We could push our proposals for fixing Competitive matchmaking, weapon buffs/nerfs, other balance changes. I know from a production/casting point of view, there's some changes I'd love to see in the spectator client, especially things like adding smooth lerp commands like the CS:GO build had to make those nice cinematics.