Good Morning gamers and welcome back to another weekly update from Des Moines Gaming Club. First thing’s first, we are hosting a Halo Infinite 4v4 pro-style tournament this Saturday at 2pm but we have been forced to change the format from LAN to online. This is because of an odd bit of code within Halo Infinite that doesn’t allow for players on the same network of a PXE server, which is the type server we and many other gaming centers use, to party up. Ethan and I did quite a bit of troubleshooting the other day looking for any work arounds and of course I also reached out to our friends at ggCircuit who is the world’s leader in gaming center software and they were aware of this issue too. They said any of their gaming centers that use PXE servers, which is most of them, also have this issue and that they are working on finding a workaround but haven’t found one yet. They also said that it is very likely they will find a workaround before this is addressed by the game developers.
So anyways, since players wouldn’t be able to get in the same lobby here at the Club, we will simply run this tournament online. While it will be nice for folks to be able to play in this tournament from the comfort of their own home, we of course are sad because not only does playing in person here at the Club create a much higher level of competitive integrity, but we’ll also miss out on the community aspect of getting all of these Halo players together in the same place and talking about the game. Now, we have run online tournaments before and so how this will work is that we’ll need people to sign up before 2pm through our smashgg page. There you can pay online and we can see which teams have registered. When 1:30 rolls around on Saturday we’ll be in our DMGC Discord server and we’ll utilize the Halo voice channel for communication. If teams just want to have one representative in the discord then that is fine, they can just take the rules, lobby info, and other information back to their team if they prefer. If you signed by yourself or with an incomplete team, we’ll sort out the putting together of teams in the voice channel on discord at that time as well. Currently we have 10 people signed up on smashgg, with another team having reached out saying they would play as well. I can help to fill out a team or not play depending on what we need but we may end registration if we get to a point where we for sure have say 4 teams worth just so that no one gets left because as it stands one person could be left out just based on numbers.
Finally, we understand if folks don’t want to play since it is online but we actually think it will be nice for this team based tournament to be online and then hopefully down the line we will be able to play this on LAN at the Club. So just to go over it again, if you want to play in our online Halo Infinite tournament go to our smashgg page which will be in the description and can be found on our social media pages and our website. Once there, register and pay. Then at 1:30 on Saturday join our discord server, which if you aren’t a part of yet, you can find an invite on the homepage of our website. And go to the Halo voice channel so we can go over rules, build teams, and answer any questions. Cash prize will be paid out via venmo or paypal. Last thing I’ll say is that even though more than one person can’t play Halo Infiinte at the Club, we will have the HCS Raleigh Major playing in our lounge area if any Halo fans want to come and hang out and watch that. And of course, if anyone has any questions about any of this please reach out to us at 515-850-2197, email us at info@dsmgamingclub.com, or message us on Facebook, Twitter, or Discord.
As for the rest of the week here at DMGC we have our typical schedule. Casual play hours are Tuesday-Thursday 1pm-10pm, Friday & Saturday 1pm-11pm, and Sunday 11am-5pm. Weekly tournament schedule is FIFA 22 Wednesday at 7pm, Smash Bros Thursday night with doubles starting at 6:30 and singles starting at 7pm, then on friday at 7pm we have our FGC local which is Guilty Gear Strive, Saturday of course we have our online Halo tournament, and then Sunday at 1pm we have our Rocket League weekly.
That’l do it for updates from the Club, now we’ll move on to some esports industry news.
In the world of professional Halo Infinite, there has already been some controversy before the first Major has even been played. Veteran and world champ Royal2 who played for 1st place ranked Sentinels got banned from competing until late January because of PING cheating. He apparently used a 3rd party software to give him a ping advantage during online play. Because of this Sentinels went out and got none other Matt “Formal” Piper who was playing for Spacestation Gaming. HCS Raleigh is going to be a lot of fun to watch for more reasons than one.
The Rocket League Championship Series Fall Major took place this past weekend and garnered quite a bit of views and attention. It is the first Rocket League Major to be played on LAN in some time and it was held in Stockholm, Sweden. 16 teams from around the world competed for $300,000 in cash prize. Favorites NRG finished in 2nd place as Team BDS who hails from Switzerland won the Grand Finals and took home 1st place. Their team is made up of Marc_by_8, MonkeyMoon, and Extra.
Finally, Valorant held it’s first Global Championship this past weekend as well and it regularly soard over 200,000 live viewers on Twitch. There was $1,000,000 in cash prize up for grabs with the 1st place prize bringing home $350,000 for that team alone. It was Ascend who surprised some folks by beating Gambit in the Grand Finals. NA Valorant didn’t finish very well and Sentinels who was formerly that of to be the best team in the world finished just top 12. The Valorant esport as a whole is certainly taking off.
That’l do it for this week’s Tuesday Telecast, thanks so much for watching, and we’ll see you soon!