Hello again, Dan here with Des Moines Gaming Club. Hope everyone out there is well and staying warm in this freezing cold weather we’ve been having! Some quick updates here at the club, this is our first week that we will be hosting online locals. “Locals” will be be regular events that happen each week at the same time so that we can start to form a schedule. We will hold the event no matter how many participants we get. Cash prizes will be awarded and the amount will depend on the number of participants. Thursdays at 7pm is Smash Bros. Fridays at 7pm is Rocket League, and Saturday at 1pm is Warzone. We plan on having a rotating event Sundays at 1pm as well.
Now, we are starting with these three games for two main reasons. 1) These games have received the most interest from our community. 2) They all allow cross play and have relatively easy ways to play online events. Again, Sunday’s at 1pm we will eventually start to do different games and events like for example maybe we’ll do a Fifa 21 Xbox tournament, then a Halo 3 throwback tournament, then a Fortnite event, etc. And then of course as we grow and when we are able to open up our club and host customers, we plan on having more regular events, leagues, tournaments, watch parties, etc.
The game we’ve received the most interest in so far has been Call of Duty both Warzone and Black Ops Cold War. We had received quite a bit of interest in starting a Cold War league so we have registration open on our website for people to sign up and claim their spot in our first ever league. We have 8 people, or two teams, signed up already and just need 12 more people to sign up so that we can have at least 5 teams of four people. Registration was supposed to close today but we will keep it open until we get that magic number of 20 people. Once we have 20, we will have a 3 day grace period to see if anyone else wants to join, and then after those three days we will schedule out the league, setup a kickoff tournament, and then have all those signed up for the league become members. So all Call of Duty fans out there, spread the word and get your buddies signed up!
I want to add a quick segment each week to these Tuesday Telecasts where we go over a few big news topics from around the gaming and esports industry. Probably the biggest piece of news that just happened yesterday is the release of league play in Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. CoD fans have been clamoring for this for years especially since so many other big games have good ranking systems. Now of course, as with many things in Call of Duty, it has come under some sharp criticism. Even though the league play mode does a lot for the player like taking out banned items, having the rulesets in place, using only competitive maps, and allowing only four players per team like in the Call of Duty Professional League. There are things like RC cars, War machines, snipers, and no significant penalties to people who quit in the middle of a league play match. For me personally, I am happy to just have a league play mode and I’m sure improvements will be made. My only gripe is with the ranking system, I don’t know what the hell is going on there!
One game that seems to continuously be picking up steam, no pun intended, is Valorant. The EU and NA champions tour just came to an end marking a successful debut into regular esports events for the game. The NA saw an incredible run from Sentinels to win the event coming all from loser’s bracket.
Finally, there has been a lot of talk recently that Warzone is losing some of it’s popularity. In large part this is due to content creators constantly complaining about all the cheaters out there and how develops haven’t added any significant ani-cheat software to the game. Dexerto, the esports news site, has just published an article stating why now is the time to switch from Warzone to Apex Legends. We will link the article in the description below, but as a fan of Apex myself, if you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it!
Next week we plan on giving an update on our space so be sure to tune in to see pictures and videos from the club itself. And that’l do it for us here today, thanks for watching and as always, be happy, be healthy, and stay warm out there!