A lawsuit against James ‘PhantomL0rd’ Varga and PhantomL0rd Inc. has been filed.

As you may know, the catalyst that sparked this inclusion into the class action lawsuit was the hacked Skype logs given to Richard Lewis.

The logs imply Varga, Joris Dahau, and CSGO personality cAre as the owners behind CSGO Shuffle. Without ever confirming ownership, Varga and cAre continually “promoted” the site. In reality, they — as well as popular streamer Dinglederper — were attracting users to the site rigging bets against them.

What’s more, the Skype logs indicated FaZe ownership of CSGO Wild as well as Vulcun’s reach into the Counter-Strike gambling scene.

Varga’s significant other Tory, better known as Dinglederper, has come out to state that she had only acted a promoter of CSGO Shuffle — through the Skype logs seem to indicate her as knowing more about the inner workings.

Phantom has not spoken on the issue himself as of yet and when his business partner cAre reached out to the community to speak about the gambling site, the French CSGO personality failed to follow through.

You can find the full timeline of the PhantomL0rd fiasco here.

Though advised to keep a low-profile, Varga fills his Snapchat with Vegas parties and his lavish lifestyle.

The same law firm, Jones Ward, that filed a class action against Valve, CSGO Lotto, and OPSKINS amongst others now includes James ‘PhantomL0rd’ Varga, PhantomL0rd Inc., CSGO Shuffle, Trevor ‘TmarTn’ Martin, and Thomas ‘ProSyndicate’ Cassell according to Legal Newsline.

Jones Ward remains as one of the lead firms against Draft Kings and FanDuel dealing with extremely similar online betting. They seem to be well equipped to achieve the best results for the community behind the class action.

A group of more than 30 consumers is suing multiple companies, alleging violation of Washington state and federal gambling laws…

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs suffered damages from having valve’s steam users able to participate in online gambling. The plaintiffs allege the defendants allowed users under the age of 21 to participate in online gambling despite being aware of this illegal practice.

Users have probably only been affected by only one or two of these sites and grouping them together may seem unjust; however if the case goes ahead to a jury trial, the select few will go entity-by-entity to determine who-did-what.

The rewards for Overwatch Competitive Season 3 are coming your way soon. Each season, according to Blizzard, should last around “two and a half months” making room for four competitive seasons a year.

It’s almost time for those two and a half months to end and the rewards for the third Overwatch competitive season shouldn’t come as a surprise — players will be receiving a Player Icon, Spray, and Competitive Points.

What’s more, players that enter into the Top 500 will be invited into the (unofficial) professional Overwatch Discord where they could have a chance to get signed by professional teams.

According to an image Metabomb ripped from the PTR, this season’s rewards are Volskaya themed.

Competitive Points

Competitive Point rewards are tied to your seasonal rank, as was with Season 2, and you may spend them on golden weapon skins for whichever characters you choose. At the moment, golden weapons are the only reward you are able to spend points on. However, Overwatch’s Game Director Jeff Kaplan stated that they “would like to add some more rewards to the system.”

Unfortunately, the most dedicated competitive players may run into the competitive point cap:

“New items are not going to happen at all for Season 3. Probably not for Season 4 either. And if you’re active, you’ll hit that 6000cp cap before we add new stuff.”

For most players, a golden weapon will signify their main character as each one costs a hefty 3000 competitive points. Though if you’re a competitive Overwatch badass and have been finishing each season in the higher tiers of play, you may already have the golden weapons for your favorite characters.

If that’s the case you’ll likely be aiming to collect other characters’ golden guns you want to improve with or simply spending points so you aren’t constantly capped out.

In a competitive fashion, players are rewarded in higher increments for higher skill ratings. Bronze players should receive 100 points while Grandmaster players should be receiving 3000 points. Below is the reward distribution for Overwatch Competitive Season 2.

The point gains may change at Blizzard’s discretion.

Seasonal Spray and Icon

Every player should receive a spray and icon themed around Volskaya as a reward for competing in Overwatch’s third season. The first competitive season rewards were designed around Ilios while the second season was Route 66-centric.

Season 4’s reward theme should be marked when the Overwatch team releases their official announcement to highlight the end of Season 3 and further changes to the mode.

In addition, players grinding into the Grandmaster ratings may want to push even harder before the season ends. Competitive players in the Top 500 will receive rewards unique to the powerful few.

Not only will the Top 500 Overwatch players receive the unique player icon, they’ll also be rewarded with an animated version of the Season 3 Spray. Below is an example of the first season’s animated Spray.

Every season’s brought changes to Overwatch’s competitive game mode, from reworking the skill ratings after Season 1 to adjusting the effect of placement matches after Season 2 — the end of Season 3 should be no different.

I hope you’ve been working on getting that SR up as high as it can go, as the Overwatch team has announced the official end date for the third competitive season: February 21st.

Season 4 will begin just one week later, on February 28th.

Here’s Blizzard on the rewards, which include a player icon, competitive points used to purchase golden weapons, and a spray:

If you completed your placement matches during Season 3, you will eligible to receive a special spray and player icon. These will be unlocked automatically when you log into your account the first time after the season ends. If at any point during the season you managed to break into the Top 500 players on your platform (and in your region), you’ll receive an extra player icon and animated spray on top of the other seasonal rewards.

Aside from sprays and icons, you’ll also receive a number of Competitive Points based on the maximum skill rating you achieved during the season.

Here’s the Skill Rating (SR) to Competitive Point (CP) breakdown for Season 3:

SR 1-1499 (Bronze): 100 CP

SR 1500-1999 (Silver): 200 CP

SR 2000-2499 (Gold): 400 CP

SR 2500-2999 (Platinum): 800 CP

SR 3000-3499 (Diamond): 1200 CP

SR 3500-3999 (Master): 2000 CP

SR 4000-5000 (Grandmaster): 3000 CP

The rewards, which were previously datamined, include these icons:

There are some things you should be doing before the competitive season ends, to make sure you can climb as high as you can go – namely, stop queueing up with your friends, and try to group with as few people as possible so you won’t run into premade groups. If you try and become a leader for the groups you end up gaming with, your success and coordination in Overwatch should be much better.

Bluehole is still improving the stability of the game, its infrastructure, as well as adding new weapons and vehicles, but we’re going to see a new batch of cosmetic items drop into PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds sometime in the coming weeks.

Reddit user DevinWatson datamined the most recent patch for the game and found over 50 new cosmetic items in-the-works. There were no weapon skins present in the game files, but DevinWatson found plenty of new options to gear out your character.

There’s no information that points to these items being part of Battlegrounds’ planned microtransactions, but this could be Bluehole’s first batch. On the same thread, they may include these into a new Pioneer Crate, so don’t go dumping all your Credits just yet.

We’ve selected the more interesting cosmetic items, but you can find the full album here.

Starting off strong: a full suit of tactical armor was found, but there’s no easy explanation of why it would be introduced into the game.

Bluehole could take the route of adding an even higher class of armor, but that doesn’t seem likely. This may be a specific armor set exclusive to custom games, but there’s no custom game mode or anything in-game to reasonably tie it to.

Next up is a piece of chest armor with a spiked shoulder pad.

The PUBG developers have never mentioned their intention to add skins to player armor, but this may very well be the case. This notion is further evidenced by the backpack skins (or new backpack look) that were also found.

In addition to these skins, DevinWatson also found plenty of simpler cosmetic choices: skirts, shirts, jackets, gas masks, and goggles.

But more interestingly, Bluehole might also be introducing new forms of boosters or healing items. There’s a fiber cloth in the game files as well as an apple, both of which could act as small boosters. It’s not so outlandish having the apple as a booster when you consider the fact that you can consume an Energy Drink to regain health over time.

Obviously, there’s no expected release time since these items were found through a datamine. That said, because these items were already in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds game files, the developers can flip the switch to make them available in-game at any time.

Now that most people around the world have plenty of time at home, why not try out new games, especially when they are free! You wouldn’t mind that, would you?

Epic Games is taking advantage of this apocalyptic time. It’s offering includes free games like The Stanely Parable and Watch Dogs.

The Stanley Parable: It’s a first-person exploration game. You’ve probably guessed it. You’ll play as a guy named “Stanley,’ but hold on, you also get the option to not play as “not Stanley.” It’s a game of choices, you will be offered different scenarios as you go along. You might want to play the story, or not play the story. It’s your choice!

Watch Dogs: What happens when the whole city turns against you? You’ll be running to save your life in Chicago. The entire city is trying to kill the infamous hacker named “Aiden Pearce,” who also has a checkered past with violent family tragedy.

Both games are only available to play on PC. Enjoy your stay at home and stay safe!

During a developer livestream, DICE shared their plans for Battlefield 1’s May Update. In the preview, they described many of the planned changes including the new ability to repair stationary weapons, several game mode changes, and netcode improvements. The developers released the May Update to their first-party partners, Microsoft and Sony, and will release the patch upon their approval.

At the latest, you can expect Battlefield 1’s May Update on Tuesday, May 30.

Here’s everything that was previewed during the live stream. Keep in mind the exact numbers may be changed before the patch becomes active on all live servers.

Bayonet Charge

• Activated aiming speed modifier during prepare state as well as charge state.
  • This means a player can rotate a maximum of 50 degrees during the prepare state. Also added an input modifier disabling strafe while charging.
• Adding a subtle boost to third person footsteps when bayonet charging to increase threat awareness. Boosted volume of Enemy VO for Bayonet Charge when close to the player.
• Slightly reduced maximum turn rate while charging.
• Removed damage reduction while in charge. Weapons will now hit charging players for normal damage.

Netcode

• Tweaked values to reduce the number of kill trades within a 30m radius.
• Improvements have also potentially fixed an issue with not being able to continuously hit somebody even if they are standing still.
• Implemented per region threshold settings for server-side hit detection: 130ms for US + Europe, 200ms elsewhere.
• Fixed server-side hit registration interpolation.
• Leading shot only necessary by the margin above the threshold, eg. For US @ 150ms ping, you have to lead by 20ms.
• Fixed latency display for server which is also responsible for decision if to perform client or server-side hit registration.
• Fixed input offsets for server-side hit registration to match client-side.
• Fixed wrong hit indicator display when dying.

To explain leading your shots, if you have a ping above 150 ms you have to aim ahead of your target a little bit more to compensate for your lag. This should decrease the number of times you feel you were shot after getting behind cover.

Map and Modes

• Spectator Mode: Fixed a bug where the first-person camera could become stuck during the Pigeon Carrier Artillery camera sequence on the Assault Tank.
• Changed ticket count for Domination to 200 from 100.
• Fixed missing game mode description for Breakthrough.
• Tweaked scoring values for capturing flags in Conquest. Capturing gives less score now, however, more capture ticks have been added and the team controlling more than 3 flags than the other team will be awarded Conquest Control bonuses.
• Decreased the percentage of contribution to flag capture/neutralize from 50% to 30%.
• Added Join Any Operation button to the main operations screen. Will start a matchmaking session to join any available operation at any size (40 or 64).

The developers have also changed the end-game lobby process for Battlefield 1’s Operations. You should no longer have to exit to the main menu and re-queue after your current match ends. With this new continuous lobby, you’ll stay with your team and switch sides.

Vehicles

• Tweaked self-repair for A7V, FT17, St. Chamond, and Pierce-Arrow.
• Reduced health gained per self-repair cycle from 320 to 200.
• Reduced time taken to complete a self-repair cycle from 8s to 5s.
• This makes these vehicles’ self-repair equivalent to the self-repair of the MkV Landship.
• Increased time that the shell camera is active on the MkV mortar landship from 3.5s to 4.5s. This better fits the increased flight time of the new heavy shell.
• Extended Fighter and Attack Plane elevator flap scaling curves to better cover the entire speed range.
• Reduced cooldown of speed boost ability from 30s to 15s for both the Dogfighter and Airship Buster Attack Plane.
• Set up rear view on all planes.
  • Hold freelook while in third person to use rear view.

Field Gun and AA Changes:

• Doubled the health of Field Gun and Stationary AA.
• Made Field Gun and Stationary AA Indestructible.
• Field Gun and Stationary AA will now enter a disabled state at 50% health where they become unusable.
• To use the weapons again they must be repaired back to 100% with the repair tool.
• Changed how max range for AA is applied.

Changes to Fighter plane variants:

Dogfighter

• Added new secondary weapon, Incendiary Ammo.
  • Incendiary Ammo does greatly increased damage to plane parts, allowing the dogfighter to quickly cripple an enemy plane by breaking a wing.
• Changed active ability from emergency repair to speed boost.

Bomber Killer

• Changed active ability from speed boost to emergency repair.
• Increased field gun damage against light vehicles.
  • Armored cars will no longer take less damage than light tanks from field gun hits.

Changes to FT Packages

Close Support Tank:

• Increased 37mm HE ammo from 4 to 5
• Replaced Secondary Case shell with Coaxial LMG. These changes should help this tank better fulfill its general purpose role.

Flanker Tank:

• Increased reload time on the autocannon from 2.5s to 3.75s
• Increased HE autocannon direct damage from 15-10.5 to 17.5-12.5.

Howitzer Tank:

• Corrected primary weapon to HMG as shown in customization, was actually LMG. The more powerful HMG should help offset its limited firing arc when compared to the Coaxial LMG of the Close Support Variant.
• Changed driver secondary weapon from case shell to flamethrower on the A7V Flame Tank Variant. This change will reinforce this variant’s role as a close range tank.
• Added third person freelook to the FT Howitzer Variant.
  • Missed this one with the other tanks because the normal version has a turret that can rotate 360 anyway.
• Added rear firing Tankgewehr as driver secondary weapon for the Tank Hunter Landship Variant.
• Enabled driving and third person camera while using driver rear guns in the Squad Support and Tank Hunter Landships.
• Improved MkV Mortar Landship Variant.
  • Changed secondary mortar shell from airburst mortar to heavy mortar. Heavy mortar does much more damage and is effective against both infantry and vehicles, but has a much longer reload.
• Replaced alternate smoke and gas mortar shells with with track repair and vehicle smoke equipment.
  • These changes should make the mortar Landship more viable as a combat vehicle, rather than sitting in mortar stance in the backline.
• Fixed a bug with third person aiming on vehicles that caused a bullet to not fire in the correct direction when aiming at a soldiers head while they are on a horse.

Gameplay

• Adding a camera shake advanced gameplay option to adjust the amount of camera shake caused by explosions, etc.
• Added missing spotting animation when spotting a downed allied soldier as a medic with the Medical Syringe.
• Automatically show low on ammo icons on friendly soldiers.
• Made all players immortal during EOR.

Controls

• Players using controllers can now do custom buttons/sticks mappings.
• Fixed select Operation button not properly appearing when using the joypad or on console.

In addition to the patch preview, DICE confirmed that Premium Friends will remain active until EA Play 2017, which begins on June 10. During EA Play 2017, the developers will preview the Russian DLC, In the Name of the Tsar.

You can expect Battlefield 1’s May Update at the latest on Tuesday, May 30.

Chalk another one up to the PlayStation Store revealing things earlier than intended. Street Fighter V’s Ed has been revealed as the next Season 2 DLC character.

As you may or may not remember, Ed was the young boy that Balrog was training in his story mode. According to his CFN profile, he was at one point going to be a new host body for M. Bison, but that was put on hold thanks to the destruction of the SIN base in Street Fighter IV. He does seem to possess some form of Psycho Power, being fueled by a Shadowloo crest on his hand.

He was even able to shut down Nash in the story trailer, so clearly he’s got some power to him:

The store leak notes that Ed’s now available, but we know that Capcom delayed the next patch to continue improving their online service, the Capcom Fighters Network.

Speaking of the Capcom Fighters Network, here’s what its profile says about Ed:

This guy might’ve piqued your interest, no?

He’s the youngster who was working together with Balrog. He’s got quite the mysterious aura about him.

Basic info

• Name: Ed
• Height: 167cm
• Weight: 58kg
• Blood type: Unknown
• Birthday: 3rd of September
• Country of origin: Unknown
• Likes: Billiards
• Dislikes: Idealistic people

Profile

• He was captured by S.I.N and planned to be used as a potential spare body for M. Bison.
• After Seth was defeated, Master Balrog saved him from the collapsing laboratory.

This is far from the first time that online console stores have leaked upcoming releases. Recall that Overwatch’s Uprising event was spoiled by the Xbox Live store – among numerous other occurrences.

Street Fighter V‘s latest update brought some new skins to the mix, but the one everyone’s really waiting for include those sweet, sweet balance changes, as well as a number of new moves for everyone’s favorite Street Fighters. Capcom did say that there was also the possibility of another Street Fighter V beta test coming soon, which will likely include Ed. But they did not confirm when it might take place.

The viewer numbers are in for the ESPN2 showing of EVO 2016’s Street Fighter V finals.

Yankees/Red Sox averaged 2.066 million on ESPN.

EVO World Championships: 201K on ESPN2.

— Sports TV Ratings (@SportsTVRatings) July 19, 2016

This is on top of the 213,927 watching on Twitch (in all languages), with 182,716 watching the main stream.

These numbers are actually comparable to ELEAGUE in recent weeks. The one exception to this would be in week 3 (June 10th), when the NBA Finals were also airing:

Interesting that a 1-hour repeat of @EL #ELEAGUE in Week 7 got more viewers than the Week 8 LCQ Semi-Finals #in pic.twitter.com/o5ueoUOiyA

— Manny Anekal (@mannyanekal) July 19, 2016

EVO proved that the FGC can at the very least run with the other esports in terms of television viewership. We have to wonder if this is the dawn of a new era for the FGC – every TO out there is going to see these numbers, and surely will be talking to ESPN in the coming years.

UPDATE: Chad Gutstein, CEO of Machinima, provides this interesting bit of context via Twitter:

@Machinima series Chasing The Cup on @TheCW had triple the viewership of EVO on @ESPN https://t.co/RfbeINOpgO via @pvplive

— Chad Gutstein (@chadgutstein) July 19, 2016

A team of transgender Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players were barred from entering an online female-only tournament and were told by ESL they could be penalized for faking their gender.

The team’s captain, Sly Buehl Rigilio, is based in Italy and has been a gamer since she was 10. “Gaming has always helped me cope with the burden of not being able to express my true feelings fully,” Rigilio said to BuzzFeed. “As you’ve probably heard, we’re not very welcomed in this community, at least among the average player. [But when] I met a group of other transgender girls, things started to look up from there.”

Sly and her team wanted to begin competing, entering into the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 5-on-5 Female Open Summer 2017 tournament hosted by ESL and organized by Munich Finest Gaming. However, after Sly sent in her team’s application, they were rejected. ESL had replied in an email stating:

No males are allowed. Please take care, [faking] your gender can be penalized.

“When I saw this I almost broke down in tears,” Rigilio continued. “Here I am thinking we finally have a shot to shine and show our true colors to the gaming world, and then we get shut down based on our looks because we didn’t look ‘female’ enough for them.”

She continued to fight for herself and for her team, first opening a support ticket with ESL, asking why they were excluded.

“Now from what I’ve [seen] and read,” Rigilio expressed in the ticket. “We’ve passed everything. However, the only difference with our team is that we have a few members that are open transexuals. So from our point of view, it seems an admin has deemed us not suitable for this tournament, which is rather huge in discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community.”

Unfortunately, the response she received was not helpful. They could be added to the tournament manually by an admin, but only after each active member of the team submitted a passport legally identifying them as female. This was a problem for Sly and her team as some of them have yet to go through the trouble of changing their gender on their passports. “I’m going to guess you don’t understand how embarrassing and hard it is to change your info like that, [especially] in such a short amount of time,” Sly finished.

Because of the official tournament rules, the ESL admin had no other option but to once again deny Rigilio’s team.

Anna Rozwandowicz, an ESL spokesperson, gave a comment on the situation. “As female tournaments are meant to help develop and support the female esports scene,” the spokesperson shared. “We are extra careful to triple-check that those who want to participate in female tournaments are also eligible to do so.”

For the record, I am not saying that we think the team in question is trying to troll us – I am saying that the extra checks we performed on them, we performed on everyone else to ensure the competitive integrity of the tournament is safeguarded.

Interestingly enough, ESL, in partnership with Intel, founded the AnyKey Organization which “is committed to a long-term vision of a gaming community that is welcoming to all players, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, religious belief, background, or physical appearance.”

Left without other options, Sly Bruehl Rigilio and her team were forced to the sidelines as the female-only ESL tournament began.

Update: AnyKey has put out a new statement, expressing their continued efforts against exclusion, somewhat referring to Rigilio’s denial.

Regardless of what it says on your passport or ID, or what judgements people may want to make about who they think you are, at AnyKey we believe in a policy of “you are who you say you are.” This means that anyone who self-identifies and lives as a woman should be able to participate in any women-only tournament.

You can find their full statement here.

Update 2: To the surprise of many, it turns out that Rigilio and his team was acting in bad faith — specifically, they’re a bunch of right-leaning YouTuber trolls operating under the alias “Rigatoni Family.” Per their interview with infamously far-right publication Infowars, they’d deliberately targeted ESL to provoke controversy and trvick publications into writing about, well. Fake news.

Their actions are, of course, reprehensible and beyond the pale given the history of discrimination and harm specific to the trans community. But there is a rather clear silver lining. The actions were undertaken by ESL, with AnyKey’s consultation, still leads to a more welcoming environment for trans gamers. Rigilio’s attempts to perpetuate harm against them may ultimately just serve to make their lives easier.

Wait a minute. Let me check the date again. It’s not April 1st, is it? No – this is just weird news.

Team Liquid owner Steve Arnhacet has just announced that Team Liquid will be running a competitive Civilization VI team.

Founded in my gaming roots, it’s a dream to run a team again in competitive @CivGame   https://t.co/bBeyZCZydr

— Steve (@LiQuiD112) October 21, 2016

Their first player is Stephen ‘MrGameTheory’ Takowsky, who will be the team’s captain.

“The foundations of Team Liquid are built on strategy games. My Team Liquid co-CEO, Victor “Nazgul” Goossens, began his competitive career with StarCraft, and he transformed Team Liquid into the most popular StarCraft website on the internet,” Arnhacet said. “While Victor was shaping the competitive StarCraft scene, and before I began competing in League of Legends, I was polishing my competitive bearings with the Civilization franchise. It was through competing in Civilization IV at the highest level that I found the confidence to jump into the world of esports and leave behind my job in the world of finance.”

MrGameTheory currently holds the record for most 1v2, 1v3, 1v4 and 1v5 ladder victories in Civ IV, and held the #1 rank on the Civilization Revolution leaderboard, Civ IV International League and the Civ V International League. He’s also commonly referred to as the God of Civilization by the community.

MrGameTheory had the following to say on the signing:

Civilization holds a very special place in my heart, and I still feel nostalgic about those times I used to enter “C:\games\civ\civ.exe”. I spent countless hours spamming settlers and phalanxes back in 1991. It was in Civilization IV where I hit my peak, and that’s when I decided to create my own team, dominating the multiplayer scene in weekend CCC events—decathlon-like Civilization events with 10+ person teams playing in various formats (ironman, anc ss, medi, occ, etc)

When Civ V came out I was too focused on building the foundation of what would become Team Liquid to participate as actively in the multiplayer community. However, with the release of Civ VI and after spending hours watching twitch streams, looking at the various game modes, mod features, and the hints to the resources, and noticing the new focus on FFA multiplayer, I’m once again excited. What really thrills me is the real evidence that Civilization VI is going to be competitive and will be here to stay, even with any dramatic changes to the teaming structure that MPers have grown used to playing with.

Team Liquid says that they will be launching a tournament for Civ VI (which just released today) soon.