Good day, fine heroes! Huge week of all around great stuff in our little world that opens the door to the patch that will change the face of Vainglory as we know it. Let’s roll!

VGL Results

After another spectacular weekend of matches, the first qualifying tournament for Winter Season has wittled down to the final contenders. If you weren’t able to watch much (which is understandable with the sheer amount of gameplay), here’s a link to the quarterfinals (EU matches begin at 41 minutes and NA at 4 hrs 55 minutes). The only quarterfinals match yet to be decided is between VON Menace and Kinetic as a family emergency caused the game to be pushed until sometime this week when both teams are available. Apart from that, here are the finals match-ups.

NA

EU

Draft Mode in Patch 1.14

The biggest announcements to improve your gaming experience came during the dev stream this past Friday with Draft Mode being official in the next patch. Draft will be implemented on ranked queue only and will hopefully ease some of the instalocking pain we all experience out there in the wild. Shout out to Brad from Shatter the Vain for creating the helpful and adorable video.

Vainglory at Pax South

January 29th-31st, Vainglory will be posted up at Pax South with live streams throughout the weekend showing off the next hero. Just to clarify, that link will say Jan 23-25, but that’s a typo, you haven’t missed it yet. Those of you who can attend the event in San Antonio, Texas can get a free unlock of the hero by dropping your player name at the booth.

Vainglory Community Volunteers

SEMC is traveling all over the world and these stops are only going to become more numerous. To keep live events moving smooth, they have opened a Volunteer Program you can sign up for here. Volunteers are promised swag and sweet hang outs with your favorite devs. This is a great way to help grow an already stellar community.

Streamer Appreciation

Have you been looking for an excuse to get your beautiful face online and start streaming? This is what you’ve been waiting for. SEMC is now offering incentives to top streamers of all shapes and sizes that use Twitch and/or Mobcrush to play Vainglory for the public. Prizes (including unlocks, ICE and an IPad Pro) will go to streamers with top views but also those that offer “Most Entertaining” or “Most Educational” etc. You may notice AdyEndrus pictured in the screen capture wearing a very attractive t-shirt.

SEMC New Hires

Back to back announcements online this week proclaimed Roam and Exceptions as official SEMC employees. We saw Roam at the analyst’s desk for VGL Autumn finals and now he will be a permanent fixture there as well as a Project Manager for SEMC. Exceptions has put an immense amount of work into VGL organizing and now has been rewarded with the job of Player Coordinator for all sanctioned tournaments and events.

New Hero Tease

This is a new type of hero reveal for SEMC in that we only got the next hero’s “Source of Power”. What is presumably his/her weapon has an Asian flair about it in this dude’s opinion. Guns, swords, axes and magical powers are very common in the world of combat games, but a metal ring with a sweet Dragon has got my attention. For the record, it’s called an Ouroboros.

Fury Rona

We also were bestowed a tease of the concept art for Rona’s first skin, “Fury Rona”. Very much inspired by Mad Max Fury Road, this turns up the badass dial a few notches on the already rugged barbarian queen of the Fold. I’m impressed, excited and practicing my Rona in casual queue because she’s going to be back in a big way in 1.14.

Team Phoenix Enters The Fray

Another organization has popped up recently in Team Phoenix. They’ve already signed some great top tier talent on two competitive teams and are still accepting applications for a third team and subs. If you’re at least Season 1 POA this might be the home for you.

The Math Behind Spawn Time

Frequent subreddit contributor Ares-2 put together a nice little set of formulas to determine when the jungle camp creeps will respawn after being killed. This is helpful for me as I often wonder how much of a break Jeff and Marty get between killings.

Have fun this week as we all get hyped out of our faces for patch 1.14! See you next time you Ringo Tornadoes and Petal Potatoes.