Blizzard have announced the formation of a new eSports tournament related to their game of Heroes of the Storm and specially for students. The name? Heroes of the Dorm. The reason this is a mainly student tournament is that the main prize is that the entire team will have their college tuition paid for entirely by Blizzard. There’re also other prizes available for winning which amount to about $450,000 in value.

Any team that signs up and is verified as being eligible for the event will also receive access to the Heroes of the Storm beta in order to compete. The competition is only open to residents of the US and Canada (excluding Quebec), and to register you must have a team of five and register them before March 26th. The teams eligible will then compete in online group stages between March 28th and March 29th, and the top 64 teams will compete in Single Elimination brackets between April 11th and April 19th with the top four team moving onto the final event which will be televised on ESPN.

The top four teams will already win something just by getting to that final point, with prizes including a gaming PC, headset and mousepad (as well as the flight to the event being paid for of course). Teams that make it to the top 64 bracket will also receive $40 in Battle.net funds to purchase heroes ready for the event.

Anyone not eligible for entering can take part in fantasy brackets that will be live during the event, allowing for predictions to be made on the matches. The top five there will also win a gaming PC each, and the top prediction wins $10,000. 25 random winners will also receive prizes and all participants will receive a unique Azmodan portrait.

Heroes of the Dorm Site: [x]

HiRez has dropped a new warrior into Season 2 of Smite. Bellona, Roman Goddess of War is here, and her kit is one to be reckoned with. I’ll show you her abilities and how to use them. As usual, I’m going against bots in Arena to ensure that I get ample opportunity to talk you through the ins and outs of this newest god.

League of Legends has a system called Tribunal within it. It allowed players to review and adjudicate on reports of bad behaviour, involving the community in policing itself. Unfortunately it went down for reworks about nine months ago and still isn’t back. Players are beginning to wonder why.

Riot have apologised for the time it’s taking, but have pointed out stats that seem to prove that even without it in place, toxicity in the game is already way down thanks to other implemented measures.

This is down to a combination of Riot’s machine learning system becoming “extremely aggressive” in tackling things like racism, homophobia, sexism and death threats, which means that the metrics recently have shown such things now occurring in only 2% of matches. There’s also a new intentional feeder detection system at work and the LeaverBuster tool is working to discourage people leaving mid-game.

Tribunal’s own upgrading is taking time thanks to a need to not only tweak the backend of LoL’s report system, but also make some to chatlogs and Riot’s network of sites too. Riot says that it will bring benefits such as being able to review and reward positive in-game behaviours as well as more accurately detecting troll voters. Riot acknowledge that even with their other systems working well to cut down bad behaviour, Tribunal’s delay is not justified by it.

Denial eSports has signed Five Angry Men, bringing the team back into the world of Smite esports. Denial had a team in the first season of Smite, but dropped out for Season 2. They are now looking to make a return on the heels of the highly successful Smite World Championship.

Denial.Smite will consist of:

• Macetodaface- Mid/Mage
• TheBest- Solo/Warriors & Mages
• Shadowq- Support/Mage
• Shing- Jungle/Assassin
• Madmanmarc22- ADC/Hunter
• Rushed- Coach

Look for more as Smite gets Season 2 under way in the coming months.

An updating game client is responsible for the disqualification of a League of Legends pro team from the Challenger Series for the Spring 2015 split in what has to be one of the mostly costly cases of impatience ever.

The team in question is Cloud9 Tempest, and thanks to not having updated his client before a live-stream match one of the team, Ritchie “Fade” Ngo, was unable to log on for the check-in. The team came together to decide what they wanted to do and decided to have their analyst, Tim “Timokiro” Cho, be a replacement for Fade by logging into the pro player’s account and pretending to be him so that there would be no delay in the match time. The team could have alerted the officials of the patching problem but chose instead to take this action, which actually falls foul of the rules for the tournament and the game itself.

Section 9.1 of the rulebook states that ‘ringing’ or playing using someone else’s account is a breach of the unfair play rules, and the punishment is disqualification for the players involved. This has manifested in four different ways – the time itself is disqualified from the Challenger Series for the during of the Spring split; all of its players are suspended from all Riot-sponsored LoL competitions until the time of the Summer split; the team’s manager, Danan “Kaniggit” Flander, is also suspended until the time of the Summer split and Cloud9 cannot sponsor a Challenger team until the Summer split.

The investigation found that the team made the decision to throw Timokiro into the game as a replacement themselves and that team manager Kaniggit was not involved in the making of the decision. He did find out during a team call during the matches, but allowed the matches to take place and play out rather than alert officials and therefore in Riot’s eyes implicated himself. The team’s substitute player, Jonathan “Grigne” Armao, was not found to have had any hand in the decision and was unaware of what was going on and has escaped any penalties himself. The team will not be made to pay any fines.