Josh Swift – Snowball Esports [Legacy] https://legacy.snowballesports.com Oceanic Esports News & Content Mon, 20 Apr 2020 09:14:27 +0000 en-AU hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 https://legacy.snowballesports.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-sb-favicon-32x32.png Josh Swift – Snowball Esports [Legacy] https://legacy.snowballesports.com 32 32 Riot Games make unannounced League of Legends server change in Oceania https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2020/04/20/riot-games-make-unannounced-league-of-legends-server-change-in-oceania/ Mon, 20 Apr 2020 07:31:46 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=8370

The past several days have seen a host of complaints by Oceanic players around the region, with many suffering from variable latency — you’ll know it as “ping” — in their League of Legends matches.

Normally, latency for Sydney players is the ‘perfect’ 8ms. Riot’s client doesn’t show a lower number than this. Melbourne players see a value of around 18-20ms, while Brisbane players clock in at around 24ms in most matches.

Oceanic players haven’t always had it this good either. In years past, when North American servers were the only option, latency was locked to around 140-180ms. Veteran League players from that time will attest to how poor an experience it really was.

If you didn’t play back in those days, and weren’t among the lucky few to be constrained by Australian internet as a housemate explores the wonders of streaming video, you could normally have a pretty great ping in League of Legends.

That is, until recently.

Players attempting to play solo queue in Australia on a wide variety of ISP’s have seen pings ranging from 80ms all the way up to a whopping 380ms, rather degrading the ‘good micro’ OCE players are well known for.

There has been no information from official Riot support channels, with nothing coming forth from their Service Status page or official Twitter feed.

Players expressed their discontent on social media. Specific comments were made about the fact ranked queues — both solo and flex — were still enabled, despite a past history of them being disabled amidst infrastructure issues to preserve competitive integrity.

Consultation with the more network routing savvy among our readers had us gather the opinion the routing to Riot Oceania’s datacenter was being interrupted, or poorly done in some manner. Some reports directed to Snowball even suggested “tromboning,” or traffic destined for Sydney, going to Los Angeles and returning to Australia, instead of a much saner direct route.

Player suspicions were confirmed when a Rioter posted on an Australian Network Operators Group mailing list revealing Riot Oceania’s servers had been migrated to a new facility. This migration seems to align with the period of high latency in League queues.

The same email from a Rioter — seen by Snowball sources — also revealed that due to “time constraints” new IP addresses were used on key peering exchanges in Sydney used by many ISP’s to provide a direct and optimized path for their customers to Riot’s servers.

According to our expert sources in Australia, moving an entire server fleet to another facility without downtime, is an impressive feat and the high latency experienced by the players is on the low end of potential impacts to your solo queue games.

Riot Games Oceania did not respond with a comment before time of publication.

]]> Pabu’s Top Plays: OPL 2020 Split 1, Week 4 https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2020/02/28/pabus-top-plays-2020-s1w4/ Fri, 28 Feb 2020 01:33:01 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=8082 Featuring Jackson “Pabu” Pavone, here’s his OPL Top Plays for Week 4.
? The Plays ?

– Croc and KoreaCK layer ults and decimate Pentanet
– Raes goes huge for Legacy with a triple kill
– Chiefs win the OPL Classico after Croc hunts down his prey
– Gravitas pick up herald and a couple kills thanks to Siuman & Praelus

 

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]]> Pabu’s Top Plays: OPL 2020 Split 1, Week 3 https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2020/02/21/pabus-top-plays-2020-s1w3/ Fri, 21 Feb 2020 03:28:48 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7995 Featuring Jackson “Pabu” Pavone, here’s his OPL Top Plays for Week 3.
? The Plays ?

– Praelus ganks mid and picks up first blood for Gravitas
– Topoon with a fast engage for Legacy
– Order’s Haeri turns around a fight
– Monstrous EMENES gets first blood on Kayle

 

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]]> Pabu’s Top Plays: OPL 2020 Split 1, Week 2 https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2020/02/14/pabus-top-plays-2020-s1w2/ Fri, 14 Feb 2020 03:45:59 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7915 Featuring Jackson “Pabu” Pavone, here’s his OPL Top Plays for Week 2.
? The Plays ?

– Legacy’s Korean duo comes up huge in the top lane against Mammoth
– Dragku comes in for Avant with an excellent teleport engage against Pentanet.GG
– The apprentice kills the master as Thien gets the 1v1 against Swip3rR
– Can’t count the armoured titan out on day 2 as he spearheads a huge play early game for Order against Avant

 

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]]> Snowball Esports: 2019 in Review https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/12/31/snowball-esports-2019-in-review/ Tue, 31 Dec 2019 04:50:48 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7548

As we close out the decade it’s time for our yearly wrap, and a look back at what we accomplished this year.

In 2019, we went through some major growth at Snowball in a couple of areas. At the beginning of the year, San Hoang and Chelsea Moss became the first content producers outside of myself on the team since Snowball began. Having them on board allowed us to maintain the same quality while continuing to pump out more content, especially during the OPL splits.

The team covering MEO 2019.

We hit up IEM Sydney, the Melbourne Esports Open and PAX Australia this year, and brought our flavour of coverage to those events.

In September, we announced that Snowball will partner with META High School Esports next year. We’re really excited to work with Nigel Smart, Woody Wu and the rest of the team on this for their 2020 season, providing high quality content and regular coverage.

I took a different approach with my year in review, going month to month and picking some key pieces from each to give you some insight into our year.

January

The likes of Andrew Wray and numerous others try and cheekily convince me to take on ridiculous time consuming projects all the time. After finding out there would be no tipping system for OPL like in 2018, we’d had discussions about trying to fill that gap and do something via Snowball but ultimately decided it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort to set up and maintain a competition.

We now know how weak-willed I can be when the community yearns for something. I ended up building an entire tipping league just days before the OPL returned in January. Over 200 OPL fans participated in the competition during the Split 1 regular season and some won some great RP prizes courtesy of Riot.

February

A great feature from Reece Perry on Jessica “ARTeMis” Majrouh and Carnage after their efforts at the WESG qualifier in Perth. This piece was also produced by one of our talented new additions at the start of this year in Chelsea Moss.

March

I am intensely proud of this piece from Ellis Longhurst. Ronan’s story is one that resonated with League of Legends fans both here and overseas, and is one of the most viewed Snowball pieces of all time. Ellis took a unique approach composing this story as if it were to become a six-part Netflix series, it’s an intensely inspiring read.

Also during March was the OPL playoffs for Split 1, which marked the return of Snowball’s Gauntlet Run series, kicked off by Harry Taylor.

April

I’m fairly sure this is the longest OPL recap of all time from Isaac McIntyre, and with good reason. It tells the tale of Order’s run through the OPL gauntlet, after barely scraping into the playoffs and taking down each team against all predictions on their path to the final.

Also worth noting in April was an interview ahead of the Mid-Season Invitational with Bombers coach Westonway which garnered international attention as people looked to find out more about the oceanic representatives, and announcing our IEM Sydney coverage, with the intent to bring a team to the event for the first time in Snowball’s history.

May

Along with a myriad of written and video interviews with CS:GO’s biggest names, we had one of our newest writers Ashley Whyte put together a great feature on IEM Sydney, and the legacy that it’s created in our region after we talked with Michal ‘Carmac’ Blicharz.

As part of our IEM Sydney coverage, the popular Survival Guides made a return, this time with Sydney local Bernadette Wong at the helm.

June

After a stellar split in the OPL, Victor “FBI” Huang became the first Australian to make the journey to North America following in the footsteps of New Zealand’s Lawrence “Lost” Hui as told by Isaac McIntyre.

Other notable pieces from June include Emma van der Brug putting a spotlight on the Girl Gamer Festival coming to Sydney, a foray for us into Hearthstone with Legacy signing Grandmasters star FroStee, and the acquisition of the Chiefs Esports Club by ICON.

July

Building up grassroots esports in Oceania has always been a focus for us at Snowball, so when Ashley Whyte pitched a feature on the latest BrisVegas LAN in July and why it’s important to have these kinds of events, it was a no-brainer.

August

The Melbourne Esports Open was Snowball’s biggest event by far of 2018, and this year was no different. Armed with a team of 7 at Melbourne Olympic Park, we worked to bring high quality coverage to as much of the event as we could.

I’ve spotlighted the two OPL final previews, on Chiefs and Mammoth, because it marks something really important to myself, and the wider management of Snowball. These pieces show more than most the growth in both Harry Taylor and Emma van der Brug. Both of them were added as community panelists for Snowball’s OPL Power Rankings in Split 2 of 2018.

These features are a testament to their hard work and dedication to growing themselves, and I’m intensely proud of that. Pair that with some stellar creative work from producer San Hoang and you have some bar-setting content.

September

Although we capped off MEO coverage in early September, also with the unfortunate debut of Roaming Wray, this feature from Andrew Amos on James “Yuki” Stanton is my highlight for September. It’s not often you see players have careers spanning this long, and it’s even rarer when they span as many titles as Yuki has, and Ducky did an excellent job bringing this story to life.

Also at the tail end of September, Go Next Media was announced to the world.

October

I believe this feature is the crown jewel of Snowball’s 2019. It was an absolute pleasure to produce, and was a complete product of circumstance. Andrew Amos was in Korea to cover the Overwatch Contenders Gauntlet right in the middle of Raid’s stay in Busan.

This is the calibre of content we strive for. You don’t often see this kind of unbridled view from retired esports pros in Oceania, and I can’t thank Julian enough for sharing his story with us.

Another notable mention from October was our PAX Australia content, my personal favourite of which was Ellis Longhurst’s look at the Mortal Kombat tournament finals.

November

In one of the most worked-on investigative pieces in Snowball’s history, Andrew Amos with the help of Isaac McIntyre and myself aimed to tell the full story of the scheduling controversy between multiple Oceanic orgs and ESL Australia.

It’s a story we didn’t take lightly, and took the time to make sure we reported the facts of the situation after obtaining full email transcripts between the teams and various other parties.

Other notable pieces from November include my report on the Essendon Bombers leaving esports and selling their OPL slot to Pentanet.GG, Ellis Longhurst’s visit to the Red Bull Fight or Flight PUBG event in Sydney, and Kevin Walker’s Snowball debut with pieces exploring Overwatch 2 and its impact on competitive and a chat with New Zealand’s Overwatch World Cup team.

December

I love this feature from Isaac McIntyre, and it’s a good one to grasp the scale of the offseason oceanic League of Legends has had. We’ll have a piece recapping every move of the ‘OCE exodus’ as its been dubbed in the new year, but his chat with Stephen for this piece shows how dedicated these pros are, and I’m super happy to see so many of them head overseas next year.

Andrew Amos put in some work on the Australian Overwatch offseason this month, announcing the Sydney Drop Bears new roster and telling the story of a new super team being built on our shores.

I’ll leave you with a sneak preview of something that’s currently being worked on, our brand new site!

On behalf of the entire Snowball team, thank you so much for a great year, we can’t wait for 2020. There’s much more to come!

]]> Essendon Bombers to exit OPL, Pentanet.GG enters for 2020 season https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/11/29/essendon-bombers-to-exit-opl-pentanetgg-enters-for-2020-season/ Fri, 29 Nov 2019 08:20:38 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7416

2019 champions Bombers, and parent organisation Essendon Football Club, are set to depart the Oceanic Pro League after selling their slot to Perth-based esports start-up Pentanet.GG ahead of the 2020 season.

Former Bombers ADC Victor “FBI” Huang at the 2019 OPL Split 1 finals. Source: Riot.

The Bombers’ withdrawal comes after the removal of an “operating subsidy” payment to teams from Riot within Australia and New Zealand’s premier League of Legends competition next year, as reported by Kotaku earlier this month.

The Melbourne-based squad won the first split of the 2019 season, defeating Order 3-0 at the Riot Oceania studio in Sydney. Their championship success comes after middling results early in their OPL narrative, before a star-studded squad was built, which included NA imports Victor “FBI” Huang and Tommy “Ryoma” Le. The organisation represented Oceania at the Mid-Season Invitational, where they exited after the international event’s Play-In group stage.

According to sources, Pentanet.GG will replace Essendon’s Bombers esports team in the OPL for 2020.

Pentanet.GG is a new esports brand, backed by Perth internet provider Pentanet and led by radio host and prominent games media personality Pete Curulli as their general manager.

They’ve already made waves in esports, hosting a Rocket League LAN during the Vic Park Festival in Perth just last weekend.

The Essendon Football Club was approached for comment by Snowball, but organisation representatives did not officially respond ahead of publication deadline. Riot Games Oceania chose not to comment when approached.

Pentanet.GG were also approached but declined to comment at this time.

More information on this move and the OPL offseason to come from Snowball. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.

Additional reporting by Isaac McIntyre.
]]> MEO 2019: Interview with Order’s Jordation https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/09/05/meo-2019-interview-with-orders-jordation/ Thu, 05 Sep 2019 03:00:20 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7064 It wouldn’t be a Contenders Australia final without Jordation. He’s played at all five grand finals, and won four of them. Now with back-to-back wins with Order after the Melbourne Esports Open, he talked Contenders, OWWC, and why they brought a bell on stage.

Follow Jordation & Order on Twitter.

]]> MEO 2019: Interview with Mindfreak’s Bus https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/09/04/meo-2019-interview-with-mindfreaks-bus/ Wed, 04 Sep 2019 11:00:29 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7053 While they didn’t taste success at the Melbourne Esports Open, Mindfreak have set themselves up for success in 2020. Snowball Esports spoke to their enigmatic main tank Joshua “Bus” Bussell about their resurgence in 2019, and plans for the offseason.

Follow Bus & Mindfreak on Twitter.

]]> MEO 2019: Interview with Mammoth’s Destiny https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/09/04/meo-2019-interview-with-mammoths-destiny/ Wed, 04 Sep 2019 07:49:50 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7048 The star-studded Mammoth roster arrived at the Melbourne Esports Open with one goal in mind – lift the OPL trophy. Now they’ve done just that, and their eyes turn to #Worlds2019. Snowball Esports spoke to champion support Mitchell “Destiny” Shaw about their next steps.

Follow Destiny & Mammoth on Twitter.

]]> MEO 2019: Interview with Mammoth’s Fudge https://legacy.snowballesports.com/2019/09/04/meo-2019-interview-with-mammoths-fudge/ Wed, 04 Sep 2019 07:42:08 +0000 https://snowballesports.com/?p=7045 An unstoppable Mammoth shocked fans and spectators with a 3-0 at the Melbourne Esports Open but it’s exactly what top laner Ibrahim “Fudge” Allami was expecting. Snowball Esports spoke to the rookie OPL champion after their win.

Follow Fudge & Mammoth on Twitter.

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