ESTNN Daily: Esports News Recap 3/1

Welcome to the ESTNN Daily for March 1^st, 2019! We’ve got some pretty big League news today, along with Mcree’s Ultimate and the quarter-final matchups for the CSGO Major! Let’s dive right in.

Contents

1 League of Legends
2 DOTA 2
3 Overwatch
4 CSGO
5 Fortnite

League of Legends

estnn daily march 1

In League news today, Riot Games has opened up a poll where players can choose the next Tristana Skin! The last time Riot left a skin up to League’s players was over a year ago, when voters got to pick a brand-new skin for Illaoi. The options up for Tristana this round are “Sugar Rush,” “Galactic Gunner,” and “Little Demon,” and they all look amazing. Make sure you check out the poll here if you want to vote. I’m definitely not telling you what to do, but vote for Little Demon Tristana. Just do it. Seriously. I’ll wait.

In other, definitely-more-important-but-also-less-important-because-I-love-Tristana news, League Dev Ed “SapMagic” Altofer posted a /dev update today detailing some of the problems and solutions that Riot has been working on in regard to Ranked Play and positional rankings. According to SapMagic, Riot is weighing whether they might give positional rankings the axe for good. Altofer also explained some problems that are exclusive to high MMR matchmaking in Diamond and above, including incorrect LP gains and Masters+ players matched with Low Diamonds. You can read Sap’s full post here on the Riot forums.

Riot also announced the hiring of a Chief Diversity Officer, Angela Roseboro, to lead up improving the working environment inside Riot Games. Our League of Legends Section Editor, Major, wrote up a fantastic piece on the hire and the impact it could have on the gaming community. Make sure you check it out!

DOTA 2

Dota 2

Good news! Well, its just kind of news, unless you really like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, then its bad news. DOTA 2 stole back its top spot on the steam charts from the popular battle royale game for the month of February, pulling in a peak of almost 965,000. PUBG has been on a decline ever since the market was flooded with battle royale games, but it’s good to see Valve’s baby get back to the top of the charts. Thanks, Autochess!

Overwatch

Not much in the way of Overwatch news today, but HAS ANYONE TRIED OUT MCREE ON THE PTR? This guy rips now. Seriously, check this out. As we mentioned yesterday, Mcree got a buff on the PTR, and now his fully-channeled ultimate can take out an entire team, even with Lucio’s sound barrier. I’m excited, partly because I love Mcree and mostly because even GOATS can’t defend against this. We’ll have to see how far Mcree gets into the PTR patch cycle without getting this nerfed, but it’s almost fair considering he has stay locked on for the full duration.

CSGO

ESL One Katowice Dota 2

In CSGO, the second and final two quarter-final matchups kicked off today, and, unlike yesterday, there were zero upsets. MiBR handily took care of Renegades, beating them in a convincing 2-0 where the Aussies never got their feet under them. MiBR will face off Astralis tomorrow in the second matchup at 1:50 PM EST.

Speaking of Astralis, they decimated the Ninjas in Pajamas boys 16-2 on Map 1 of their quarter-final matchup. Map Two was a much better showing by NiP, but Astralis fended off the NiP T-side and won the map 16-4.

The first matchup tomorrow will be Na’Vi up against ENCE, the Finnish team that crushed NA-favorite Team Liquid yesterday. That match starts at 10:00 AM EST tomorrow.

Fortnite

Do you like Fortnite!? DO YOU LIKE WEEZER?! If you’ve answered a hesitant “yes” to both of these questions, then boy I’ve got a map for you. Weezer is promoting their thirteenth studio album through our favorite building-battle royale, and you can find it tucked away inside the Fortnite Creative Mode as a premade area. Once inside, you can listen to tracks from the album, titled “The Black Album.” Which is cool. I guess.

How's this for arts and crafts? 📻 Rock out with the @Weezer Jukebox Feature Island in #FortniteCreative! pic.twitter.com/ISD8lLjNkU

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) March 1, 2019

That’s all for the ESTNN Brief for Friday, March 1^st. Make sure to head over to ESTNN to catch up on all of the latest news and check back here tomorrow for another Episode of The Daily!