DOTA 2 Nothing much is happening in Dota 2 the past couple of days other than the resumption of different tournaments such as the OGA Dota Pit S2, OMEGA League Europe Immortal Division, The Great American Rivalry D1, etc. On the other hand, we can expect The International 2020 prize purse to blow up with the augment of Treasure II. Personally speaking, I’ve only taken a liking to the Witch Doctor staff as opposed to other sets but hey that’s just a personal take. I’m somehow not liking the headpieces released in Treasure II. What do you think? Prominent mid laner, Sumail, departs from OG Esports while Ceb makes a return to the active roster after a brief hiatus as a retired player. The roster consisting Sumail never officially took off as members were playing across the globe on different pings due to the ongoing covid pandemic.   Overwatch The Chengdu Hunters have parted ways with co-head coach Wu "Dokkaebi" Xiuqing and Murong "Chen" Chen has been promoted in the interim. After a streak of impressive success over the New York Excelsior, the Hangzhou Spark, and the Seoul Dynasty, the Hunters are running hot as they advance as a top seed in Asia in this month's tournament, the Countdown Cup. https://twitter.com/OWBeacon/status/1287624714291040256 While this past week flew by with how one sided some of the matches were, the Overwatch League didn’t lack surprising results. The Washington Justice shocked the Houston Outlaws, a team that theoretically should have been positioned to perform in this particular metagame. While we did get to see Outlaws’ maintank João Pedro "Hydration" Goes Telles on his signature Wrecking Ball on Busan, things did not go Houston’s way throughout the remainder of the match. https://twitter.com/washjustice/status/1287530962998497286 League of Legends The LCK is still being dominated by the insanely talented DRX roster. An intense BO3 series win over Gen.G leaves them at 11-1 with their biggest opponent coming up in a couple of days: a rematch against Damwon Gaming, which will basically solidify DRX’s first place if they win. Despite the impressive performances by the top three squads in Korea, it’s hard not to feel like 4th place T1 aren’t just going to blitz through the playoffs and beat the region’s best team as they’ve done too often in the recent past. We’ll see, though. LCS was a wild ride, with Cloud9 losing to Team Liquid, with C9 playing an unusual composition of Sona and Lux bot lane, with Sett mid lane. Their early game saw them ahead of TL, but a couple good slip-ups in the mid game gave over control to TL to close out. Team Liquid didn't have an easy weekend, because while they secured first, since they won the head-to-head against C9, they lost to FlyQuest on Sunday. Broxah had several unsuccessful ganks and Impact tried for an epic flank, with the rest of TL very slow to follow-up, resulting in losing a critical teamfight to getting back in the game. While TL grabbed the top standing, the win/loss of this weekend wasn't much of a confidence booster. The LEC is still the hardest region to read due to how close the standings are. MAD Lions still look like the best team in the league, despite this week’s loss against SK Gaming, but other than that it is hard to gauge the other squads’ power level. Fnatic has a bit of a resurgence but G2 still look incredibly shaky, even in their wins. The playoffs will be extremely contested and we’ll see how much of this Bo1 performance translates to BO5, especially in the case of MAD Lions. Valorant Big updates of Valorant content are subdivided up into Acts, for smaller additions such as new agents and Episodes, for large additions such as maps, and the first act of the game is about to conclude. Until Act 2, which is set to be released on August 4, a few adjustments have been revealed in the next Act in Valorant ranked mode. A few improvements to Valorant competitive mode were revealed by Riot Games. What Riot calls Act Ranks is the biggest new addition. Act Ranks are how Riot can control and view the success and achievements of a player when an Act is over.a Act Rankings serve as a commemorative reward for the players and is displayed on their profiles. FaZe Clan added to the VALORANT squad another CS:GO retired professional.  FaZe revealed that Jimmy 'Marved' Nguyen, a 20 year old, recently joined their VALORANT division. Marved withdrew from CS:GO after playing in North America for almost five years on a semi-professional basis.   Editor's Take I could add a whole diatribe, but instead, I'm going to link to my Twitter thread. There's been a lot of commotion around game addiction and a lot of denial, stemming from Joe Rogan's latest take on the matter. If you want to know my thoughts, here's my thread on that.  Honestly, more important than the actual subject matter is the ability to stay open-minded and not fall to base, instinctual tribalism when forming your world view on things.  There's are healthy and unhealthy traits to video games and esports.  Consume responsibly.