Good Afternoon gamers and welcome to our weekly update video from Des Moines Gaming Club. The casual play schedule for this week is almost normal with one small exception. Tuesday-thursday we’re open 1pm-10pm, Friday we are open 1pm-11pm, on Saturday we have a private event at the Club from 1pm-4pm so it will be closed during that time. However, we’ll be open after till 11pm on Saturday. Finally, Sunday we’ll be open as usual from 11am to 5pm.
Our weekly tournament schedule is normal so that means our FGC weekly is tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7pm. The tournaments are in Guilty Gear Strive and Tekken 7. Thursday night is our Smash Bros. local with doubles starting at 6:30 and singles starting at 7pm. Friday night is our FIFA 22 weekly at 7pm and then Sunday at 1pm is our Rocket league local.
We are excited to show off a new overlay for our stream this week for our FGC and Smash Bros. tournaments so be sure to tune in and check that out. Now we’ll be able to have player names and the round of the tournament on the screen so viewers have a better understanding of who’s who and where we’re at in the tournament. Shout out to Lizardman of the Wisconsin FGC for making it for us and shout out to Vanlou and Conman of the Iowa FGC who helped get me in touch.
Reminder that our monthly FGC tournament, Clash in the Capital, is taking place here at the Club on Saturday, January 22nd and that we will be hosting another online Halo Infinite tournament on Sunday January 30th. Both of which can be signed up for on smash.gg.
That’l do it for updates about the Club, now we’ll move on to some esports industry news.
Call of Duty’s competitive scene continues to struggle as the CDL is prepped to start the kickoff tournament approaching in 10 days. Call of Duty Vanguard has received harsh criticism from the community for a number of game breaking glitches, as well as not having a ranked playlist even though the devs promised one. The game is simply not in a place to host a solid competitive esport. The dire situation of the game has led to horrible viewership numbers on streaming platforms as esports news outlet Dexerto pointed out by saying that the category of people sleeping had the same amount of viewers as Vanguard. Now, there are even people in the community saying that competitive should boycott vanguard because of all of these issues and play this years competitive scene on CoD mobile. It is my opinion that the Call of Duty franchise needs to leave behind the idea that they need to make a new game every year. Have one game, release consistent updates, and move the business model to that of micro-transactions. This has clearly worked for games such as League of Legends, CSGO, and Valorant, just to name a few.
Cheating in esports has been a long running issue across various games and the newest cheating scandal is happening in Halo Infinite which is unfortunate for Halo since they have been riding a high since releasing a couple of months ago. The pro Minds who plays for Built By Gamers has been accused of “walling” which means that they can see players through walls. Whether it’s true or not has yet to be verified but you can view clips on Twitter and see for yourself the evidence being used. It is easy to understand that cracking down and completely eliminating cheating in any video game would be hard or nearly impossible as there are so many people who play these games and with technology constantly improving, you just know someone will find a way. However I feel that esports organizations game developers need to implement harsher punishments for anyone that gets caught cheating. I’m talking banned for life from playing in any competitions or possibly just banned from ever playing the game. Traditional sports do their utmost to punish cheaters harshly and to remove that doubt of cheating from the viewers mind. If cheating hangs around like it is then esports as an industry will find it hard to gain more traction as a world wide industry to be taken seriously.
That will do it for today’s Tuesday Telecast, thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you soon.