The items that will be available to those purchasing the virtual tickets for this year’s Blizzcon have been revealed today by Blizzard and they include an item for players of every one of Blizzard’s properties.

First is the items for their mostly widely known game, World of Warcraft. As part of the tie-in to the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion release the WoW item this time round is an exclusive pet: a baby Murloc who seems to be cosplaying as Grommash Hellscream, the leader of the Warsong clan.

For Hearthstone players the item is a new and exclusive card back for Blizzcon 2014, designed around the compass design that is emblazened in the Blizzard courtyard.

Starcraft II players can receive a pair of portraits, one of Hierarch Artanis and the second to be revealed at a later date, as well as a decal inspired by the upcoming Heroes of the Storm MOBA game.

Speaking of Heroes of the Storm, even this not-yet-released game gets an item in the virtual ticket pack. Purchasers can receive a Nexus Mount as well as a portrait of the mysterious Nexus Brawler for the game.

Finally if you’re a Diablo III player the items on offer are six different weapon transmogrifications, one for each class in the game, based again on the upcoming Warlords of Draenor.

Blizzcon is happening at the beginning of November. Our glorious leader Lonesamurai has already decided that he’s buying a virtual ticket to watch the event and receive the listed goodies. What about you?

Last night there was a major upset in the Smite Pro league tournament. Cognitive Red, the top dogs and over all dominant team during the tournament were disqualified from their match against Team Dignitas. As the match was progressing COGR was pressuring DiG but a miscommunication between Dagarz and Divios on COGR resulted in a disqualification when their ADC player Snoopy disconnected, dying to the tower.

The combat pause is against SPL rules but has sparked a huge debate on Reddit where even Hi-Rez are admitting their current ruling is hazy:

“Pausing in the middle of any engagement such that it would give either of the teams any sort of benefit or advantage is strictly prohibited.” Many people are calling for a rule change, and to be honest it would be a much needed change. Some people are even calling for it to simply be a tournament points penalty not a match disqualification. As it stands the overall audience, myself included are saying merely changing the ruling to “Pausing while taking damage from objectives or other players is strictly prohibited and will be punished with a match disqualification.”

Tell us what you think about these penalties and rulings in the comments below.

Smite goes through frequent periods of change and shifts in the meta game, almost every patch Hi-Rez have something new to offer us as players and sometimes it is completely game breaking, or sometimes it does nothing. This patch is so far proving to be the former.

In this patch for Smite we see a rework for two of the most underpowered gods in the game to attempt to bring them back into the meta: Arachne the Weaver and Odin the Allfather. Another change was that Ao Kuang was removed from the game and his abilities were given to Kukulkan whose skins and model look gorgeous. It is a shame his voice pack is a twelve year old boy with a lisp.

The new reworks are great, they take elements from the old kits of both gods. First off, lets take a look at  Odin. For a very long time Odin felt more like a support/tank than a bruiser or damage dealer. His kit was based around a huge team fight ultimate where Odin summoned a ring of spears to envelope enemies and allies alike- nobody could escape unless they jumped out. Odin WAS the king in the ring and thankfully they have not take this away from him. Now however his ring is somewhat more powerful, anybody can shoot into it and Odin’s allies can leave at will while Odin and his enemies cannot. This is a huge and possibly game breaking change as they also took Odin’s crowd control immunity and steroids from him when he is inside the ring, now he is simply immune to being rooted to the floor or slowed which means his ultimate is now even more risky for him to cast. From there the changes continue. He retained 2 elements of his kit- his leap which deals a huge amount of damage still and his circular slow where he swings his spear around himself damaging and slowing enemies hit. From here we come to his second ability which used to be a huge attack speed stim for his entire team, giving them a whooping 55% extra attack speed at max level which made Odin a huge threat in a team fight… now he instead has a shield that once it’s timer expires explodes for an amount of damage depending on how much health the shield has. An added bit of complexity is found in using your first ability immediately after the shield, causing the shield to detonate immediately and deal an unbelievably high amount of damage. Finally there is his passive which used to grant him double the vision radius of other gods, meaning he could forego placing wards around his lane and use the vision to protect himself and anybody else in his lane…. now Odin gains a good physical power buff from killing somebody inside the ring. It feels like they wanted to remove everything apart from his ultimate that made him a team player and instead have turned him into a massive burst warrior which is not actually a bad thing, it just leaves our resident Novindus a bit salty because he loved playing Odin in the support role.

Digmbot’s Thoughs On Odin:

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been killed because and allied Odin trapped me in his spear wall and I couldn’t jump out, leaving me to be focused down by the enemy trapped with us because I was critically injured. The new changes to Odin are welcome, and in my opinion make him much more viable outside of team fights. The Raven Shield/Lunge combo feels a bit overpowered to start with, but can quickly be mitigated by items and alert players. Its still a threat, but it moves from devastatingly effective to simply powerful as the game progresses. Of more concern to me is the new look and feel of his ult. While I appreciate and welcome the ability for allies to simply walk out of the ring, Odin becomes much more vulnerable in his ring than he ever was before. Fortunately, the power buff he receives from his passive in the ring occurs if an enemy dies in the ring. This means that Odin himself doesn’t have to secure the kill. He simply needs to set up the situation where an enemy – or multiple enemies – are caught in the ring for the team to collectively burn down. That being said, during my play with him, I have had serious issues with dropping the ring before the timer on it runs down. This comes under the heading of “A BAD THING”, since Odin is stuck in the ring – unlike his allies. Once you find yourself trapped in that ring with a VERY pissed off Bastet who has a critical hit build, you’ll understand why this is a problem.

Next, we come to Arachne… what is there to say about her before the patch, frankly she was useless. Her ultimate had a short cool down but in reality all it did was pull people into you- which was great early game. In the late game however,  it killed her horribly. Her third ability only had a slow and her two was just a silence leaving gods unable to cast abilities, but as you were on their back this dragged you out of position and killed you more often than not. Finally her first ability, the only ability in her kit that even has a memory in the new rework, was her ability to place eggs on the ground and if someone stumbled into range of them they spawned two spiderlings which went to town on whoever triggered them, this has become a web wall where if someone walks through one of the two web walls you place they are slowed and arachne is given vision of them where ever she is on the map while the fight off the spiderlings. Again this ability feels fairly useless late game except for getting the spiderlings to attack objectives and soak up the initial damage but otherwise all it does is give a slow and vision (which is better than it’s old uses). Her first ability is now an unbelievable attack speed steroid that applies a poison which heals Arachne for a huge amount and can be comboed with her two which is another stim;  however  after a 3 successful basic attacks the victim is wrapped in webs unable to escape for a period of time while Arachne goes to work on them. With these stims Arachne has become a hugely potent threat in the early and mid game. Her passive makes this even more menacing with her dealing extra damage for every 5% of the targets health that is missing, making her very opportunistic in play style and very deadly. Finally we come to her ultimate which is something that has never been seen in Smite before where Arachne climbs up onto a great web above her head gaining immunity to anything but tick damage and she moves insanely fast for a whooping seven seconds! Just like Odin, Arachne needed a rework and to be completely honest she is not a top tier god, but is now perhaps too powerful.

Digmbot’s Thoughts On Arachne:

I’ll be upfront here. I don’t like Arachne, old or new. I do enjoy playing assassins and playing in the jungle, but Arachne is my absolute last pick in that role. That being said, this was a god that was sorely in need of a rework. Her old kit had left her with no place in the meta, and in many of the matches I played she was taken as a joke or to troll people. Her new rework is a vast improvement, but I’m worried Hi-Rez might have swung from one extreme to the other here. The chain effect on her stims makes her unbelievably powerful early game. She also has incredible chase potential, since her ultimate will not trigger towers to attack her while shes crawling on the roof of the screen. Of course, Freya can do the same with her ultimate as she flies. But Freya’s movement speed isn’t buffed nearly to the extent as Arachne’s. Couple this with the fact that you can also buy and use the Sprint active ability before you use her ult and Arachne is basically a roof dwelling, creepy spider version of The Flash. Still, this was a much needed rework. Her spiderlings were simply a nuisance once you got past level 8, and her pull could easily be nullified by an alert player with the right items. All in all, I’ll be interested to see where she slots into the meta with her new kit. But I won’t be playing her.

Welcome, everyone to something new and exciting.

Starting TODAY, Sanitarium.FM is going to be committed to bringing you news, opinion and coverage of the best eSports has to offer. eSports is a massively growing section in gaming, and it offers us the chance to sit down and watch top tier players compete in some amazing competition. League of Legends, DOTA 2, SMITE, Starcraft II…these are the biggest games on the scene, and we’ll be working to cover them and do our part to grow awareness of eSports as well as share our love of competition and just plain awesome gameplay.

What You Can Expect:

• Tournament Coverage
• Patch Notes Breakdowns
• POSITIVE Coverage (We don’t like negativity. Unless it’s EA. Then we really don’t have anything else to report….)
• Embeds of streams so you can watch from the comfort of Sanitarium.FM
• A shiny new forum for you to talk it up about eSports. Its your community, make the most of it
• A few surprise guests

Whos Going To Be Involved:

Our two biggest eSports junkies are Digmbot and Novindus. Expect plenty of analysis and news from them. PredictedCyborg may pitch in from time to time, as well as Lonesamurai. Even Crimsonshade might get in on the act when he’s not busy beating the servers about the head to make them cooperate.  And…maybe some surprise guests.

You Keep Saying That About Guests:

Yes. Yes I do. Better keep a close watch on this section.

Thats the basic intro folks! Keep it locked here for more in the coming days!

eSports. Its blown up in the past few years as games, players and teams become ever more popular and high profile. Tournament attendance, online stream views and prize pools have exploded with I5 recently packing out a massive arena, drawing millions of online views and paying out $10 MILLION in prize money. Despite all that, ESPN says eSports isn’t a sport. Its a competition. Nevermind the fact that the word sports is right in the name: e”SPORTS”.

At Re/codes Code/Media Series: New York conference, ESPN president John Skipper was asked to comment on the recent Amazon acquisition of Twitch. His response was as follows:

“It’s not a sport—it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition. Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.”

While there is clearly a lot of room for this quote to be taken out of context, the overall tone is pretty dismissive when you consider the fact that The International Dota 2 world championship tournament was carried on ESPN 3, ESPN’s online channel. Of course, ESPN probably won’t have a huge impact on the growth of eSports, as recent estimates report that 2.4 billion hours of eSports were viewed during 2013, and the eSports market is estimated to be worth #300 million annually by 2018.

 
And, on a more interesting note, the United States Government officially recognized League of Legends players as professional athletes last year, thereby facilitating their ability to obtain visas.

So, while the definition of sports currently states that it is a physical competition, maybe its time it was changed to just “competition.”

What do you think? Are eSports “real” sports? Sound off in the comments below!