Welcome welcome, step in. Today I will be your guide through the magical world of esports. My name is Alexander and I work as Esports Manager for Stunlock Studios, but some of you may also know me by the name GrimGoon.

During this tour please remain seated at all times. To the left we have overblown drama and on your right hand side we have huge egos.

What does an Esports Manager do? Oh, thanks for asking.

On a more serious note, it’s a very dynamic job where you have to be very flexible and a jack of all trades. Often I deal with a lot of people from many different cultures and time zones such as professional players, tournament organizers, production companies, commentators, media, and the platforms that make everything possible such as Twitch and Smash.gg, to name a few examples. Each day is always different. Some days you’re sitting in meetings in the middle of the night, other days you’re across the Atlantic Ocean organizing an event. There are no handbooks and everything within esports keeps evolving, so what I learn today might be obsolete next month. All in all I get to work with a game I love and meet some of the most passionate and interesting people I have ever met, which I think is really cool.

Enter The Arena

So with our first official event behind us I want to first of all give a shoutout to everyone who made it happen. BreakyCPK, FindableCarpet, Rainy and TJ for covering the event, you guys did an awesome job especially considering how long the days were.

Also a big shoutout to Beyond the Summit for hosting the event, BattleRekt (NGE) for covering the qualifiers, Pro Rivalry League for administering the qualifiers, Smash.GG for helping us throughout the event, and of course Twitch for making all of this possible.

Thanks also to the players; that was some of the most intense matches I have seen in a while. Most of all, thanks to everyone who tuned in to watch this event, without you guys this wouldn’t have been possible.

All in all I think the event was great, however, I see a lot of potential for improving things in many key areas, such as production quality, getting to know the players better, advertisement, announcements, more structured format and so on. But I think from here we can only go up and it’ll just get better and better moving forward.

Let’s take a look at a breakdown of the event:

The most surprising difference to me compared to previous events, such as the weekly BattleRekt, Pro Rivalry League and ESL Go4 cups, is the drastic increase of Oldur in competitive play. Prior to this Poloma and Lucie have, on and off, been the most picked supports with Sirius on a secure third spot with no real competition. This time around Lucie got pushed down to the third place being picked 29 times and Sirius down to fourth place being picked 17 times during the event.

Overall, Pearl still remains largely unplayed apart from a few specific teams and players such as Eoekas on U Choose 3v3. Pestilus has been seen a few times but is still without a doubt the least picked Support across all events. Poloma and Varesh have been a strong pairing in competitive play and on the ladder for some time now and just looking at the numbers it’s clear this holds true for Enter The Arena.

Raigon, our newest addition to the roster, did not get picked a single time during the event, which also holds true for Pestilus. Both champions being fairly new to the arena might affect why they have not been picked that much yet, but overall the consensus among the top teams is that they are fairly weak right now. Raigon, however, got a slight buff in the patch right after Enter The Arena, so it will be very interesting to see how well he does going forward and also how the overall meta evolves after our first official event.

My MVP



Yes, who exactly is Nikita, also known as 213213? When looking back at the event to try and decide who would be the MVP in my book, it was surprisingly easy. Apart from playing insanely well he also played some of the most exciting Battlerite I’ve ever seen.

He has incredible diversity and his Bakko Heroic Charge flick shots always keeps you on the edge of your seat.

I’m stoked to see how well 213213 and his companions, Xaynox and Randler (who under the Broken Comp Sori banner, claimed the victory in Europe) will be doing in the future.

Future of Battlerite as an Esport

With Enter The Arena behind us you might wonder what will be happening next in Battlerite esports.

First of all, our Regional Managers have started to cover more tournaments in their specific regions, such as “King of the Arena” in the South American and CIS regions, and the Chinese audience starting to get some tournaments as well. I hope we get to see plenty of new teams that are hungry to prove they can measure up to the current dominating teams from the European and North American scene.

At the start of the year, Esports Observer made an article listing the “Esports Game Tiers“, basically listing games from tier 1-3 in terms of relevance in the Esports sphere. With that in mind, my current ambition is that when an article is made for 2018’s Esports Game Tiers, Battlerite will be placed in at least Tier 3. It’s not a promise, but it’s where I hope to see ourselves by the end of next year and it’s something that I think is actually tangible with our current commitment and things we are tinkering on.

With that in mind I hope you’re as excited as I am for the future of our competitive scene, and I hope to be able to share with you some of the very exciting things we are working on soon.

Until next time and see you on the ladder!

@GrimGoon_

P.S

Two of my favourite moments from Enter The Arena:





And if you missed the tournament you can find the VODs here:

Day 1

Day 2