This week’s stream was quite a blast: three King of the Hill matches and an exciting skin reveal. Heck, this whole week has just been filled with Vainglory content! We’ve gotten a ton of Vainglory lore for Ringo, and spotlight videos for Glaive, Adagio, and Catherine, as well as a Ringo video this weekend! And of course there’s that familiar feeling in the air that an update is right around the corner.

The livestream had quite an interesting start, with the developers all wearing absurd Princess hats and crowns in sort-of-celebration of the Finnish holiday, Vappu. Although, EvilFinn later clarified that you wouldn’t really wear princess hats for Vappu, and that she was mainly trolling.

For the news, they remind us of the Why I Play Vainglory Contest. Specifically they mentioned that they had plenty of original and silly videos and how they were more interested in the sincere videos now. They also talked about a new stream they will be doing on Wednesdays from now on where Zekent and a guest will spectate viewer matches and give feed back on them, similar to our own Shin Kaigan’s Tutor Tuesdays. Finally they mentioned a “Vainglory Scavenger Hunt” where streamers and viewers of streams will be able to fill out a list of in-game achievement-type-stuff, like a Solar Storm Kraken-steal, and win prizes for finishing the list first.

King of the Hill – Europe: Element challenges R3D

Element, the underdog, challenged reigning EU-champion R3D this week. Element ran LazyElement (Ardan), AkumaNoLust (Krul), and tetnoJJ (Vox). A detailed break-down of the match can be read here, but things didn’t go so well for Element. R3D took an early lead and kept it all through the game until the end with a final score of 3-22.

King of the Hill – South-East Asia: SG vs. Reborn

This footage was the video that wasn’t ready in time for last week’s stream, it features the other half of the entry bracket for the SEA King of the Hill: SG and Reborn.

SG ran NixonThrush (Vox), SpearS (Ringo), and Razic (Catherine) against Reborn’s RB_LoanLuan (Koshka), KienPtk (Catherine), and MQuann9999 (SAW). This was a very long game with the lead shifting back in forth and never being entirely consistent. For the most part, Reborn lead in gold, while SG lead in kills. In the end here, Reborn was able to shatter that vain first, setting them up as a contender for SEA King of the Hill.

King of the Hill – South-East Asia: Reborn vs. Phobia

The final game of the entry bracket for SEA was not even close. Reborn, running the same comp as before, quickly and decisively crushed Phobia, running Raymond_sea (Ardan), XaVierZ (Vox), TheDefiantOne (Adagio). The final score of the match was 17-2 with a gold of 17.8k to 8k. Reborn is the first ever SEA King of the Hill!

The feature of the stream of course, however, was the big skin reveal. Unfortunately as some had speculated, there wasn’t a reveal of the underlying system or a double-skin reveal, but this week’s skin was still pretty dang awesome: Shogun Ringo.

This alternate-universe Ringo, took the straight-edge path as a noble and true Samurai. While the skin’s visual appearance isn’t quite finished, it already looks pretty cool and is an interesting contrast to Ringo as he is now.

PlayoffBeard also mentioned that the skin system will not be revealed until the servers go down for the update! This is actually a pretty big piece of news, because it means that the update really could occur without much warning. For all we know, it may have already been submitted to SEMC and is now simply pending-approval from Apple.

Another tidbit of news mentioned was that when forming parties, skill tiers will show up next to players names. So if you been tier-fudging, you better get up soon!

Lastly, this wasn’t in this stream but I feel like it’s worth sharing here, all of the revealed skins now have gameplay videoes on the Vainglory Casual channel. Not just excerpts from the live streams! Here they are with their respective articles:

Queen Bee Petal – Video

Dark Parade Adagio – Video

SAWborg – Video

Kandi Twirl Koshka – Video

Prehistoric Glaive – Video

Shogun Ringo – Video

This was another fun week of streaming and news from Vainglory. I’m excited to see how this ramps up as the update draws closer!