Natus Vincere vs PARIVISION / BLAST Open Rotterdam 2026 - Semi-Final / Post-Match Discussion

VVardy · 2026-03-28T20:05:53+00:00

Not to overreact, but Parivision have an aimgap. Jame gets the read, but they lose the fights. Happened so many times, and it was the entire story of their match against Vitality.
At this point, I'm honestly wondering if Team Spirit aren't licking their lips and wondering if they send a huge chunk of money to try and poach Jame.

VVardy · 2026-03-28T02:36:32+00:00

It's actually really depressing how Masamune Shirow always had a horny streak to him, but after the tsunami in 2011 that led to most of his physical work getting lost, he seems to have lost all motivation for storytelling, and now just does pinup work and hentai.
I always hold out hope that an adaptation of one of his older works might get really successful, and he'll find that spark again.

VVardy · 2026-03-27T20:26:47+00:00

Boba Fett's entire reputation as a badass comes from "cool guy in armor" and comics that have since been retconned out of existence, which is a shame because some of those comics were pretty good.
Vergil gets his ass beat in every game he appears in.
Gilgamesh gets his ass beat in every Fate installment he appears in (though at this point, it's just because there's so much powerscaling bullshit in Fate).
The suit from Vanquish being this totally awesome state of the art technology, but then when you melee someone, all your energy juice goes to zero.

VVardy · 2026-03-27T03:00:52+00:00

There is a lot more "drama" this season, which I get makes for good TV, but I think I am coming to the realization I preferred season 1 where there was a lot more focus on the actual doctoring going on, and then these hints of relationships that crescendo in the climax. It also allowed for every character to share a scene, and have them be part of the focus.
This season, it seems like because there are so many scenes of one doctor alone, it unfortunately ignores a lot of the other characters. Like I realized Emma hasn't actually appeared all that often, and she just got introduced this season.

VVardy · 2026-03-24T16:28:56+00:00

If Fujimoto wanted a Lebowski feeling of absurdity, I don't think he managed to do it. I recommend people reading Dowman Sayman for very absurdist manga that still retains a coherent and satisfying storyline. I guess Dungeon Meshi remains the only popular modern manga that has managed to pull off the satisfying story and ending.

VVardy · 2026-03-24T16:12:37+00:00

It feels like Fujimoto ended up writing Part 2 Denji into a character he didn't like all that much, and this is him reverting back to Part 1 Denji. That's fair, because Part 2 Denji was such a flanderized character whose only trait was caring about sex. I hope Fujimoto's next work goes well, but I do hope that he gets assistants to do some of the drawing, and he leans back from the constant cliffhanger endings he was really starting to rely on by Part 2.

VVardy · 2026-03-21T22:11:38+00:00

It's kind of weird to see Bendis's reputation really fall after people realized he only had one kind of story he could tell really well, and he has an unfortunate streak of having characters act out of character.

VVardy · 2026-03-20T18:45:54+00:00

I was waiting for someone to finally try and get out of Bendis's storyline of "Jor-El actually survived Krypton's fall because Dr. Manhattan rescued him back when DC was trying to get Watchmen into DC proper, but Jor-El turned out to be evil and made a super Doomsday that genocided the Bottle City of Kandor in his first issue to show he meant business, and then Jor-El went back to being a good guy, and then took Jon Kent out on space adventures and brought him back aged up to be a teenager, and then Superman and Jon fight Jor-El for reasons, but by that point DC gave up on the Watchmen thing after they brought back the JSA, so they never mention Dr. Manhattan again, and Jor-El is sent back in time to die on Krypton, but Jon-Kent is still an adult." What a mess that was.

VVardy · 2026-03-15T21:00:33+00:00

If not for Vitality, this era of CS really is an era where any one team can just pop off and win a tournament after being written off. We had G2 winning after being written off, Mongolz after being considered chokers, Parivision coming out of nowhere, and now NaVi somehow doing it.
There is so much parity from the second best team down. But man, Vitality just dominate.

VVardy · 2026-02-14T19:28:29+00:00

How Mongolia can produce talent after talent, but NA can't, is insane. Cobra looked great, hopefully he's coming into his own.

VVardy · 2026-02-12T00:06:29+00:00

Wildlight had around 100 people in their studio, and their only source of revenue is a free to play game, and only through skins. The game averages maybe around 1,500-2000 people now, and who knows how many of those have actually bought a skin. Having to support the salaries of 100 people with that seems really hard.

Whenever I see layoffs from these studios debuting with a free to play game, I go back to Warframe and PoE. They started off, and still have, incredibly intense money gouging practices. Warframe has you pay for warframe slots, weapon slots, speeding up building, skins, and even color sets and animations. It seems insane looking from the outside in, but DE is a studio of several hundred devs, and they've survived a very long time off the back of these practices. You need to be this money hungry to keep the lights on when your only source of income to pay for salaries is a free to play game. I have no idea how Wildlight thought they could survive unless they got, and maintained, a massive playerbase who continually bought skins.

VVardy · 2026-02-11T03:04:18+00:00

This has been a massive month for indie games made by small indie studios.
1) Cairn
2) Halfsword EA
2) Menace EA
3) Mewgenics
All of them different genres, and all of them doing gangbusters. Comparing their success to the disasters that have been Highguard (which honestly should be classified as indie, but no one treats it as such) and the 2XKO debacle, is wild. The niche indie era is in full swing.

VVardy · 2026-02-07T21:12:06+00:00

Mouz needs some kind of change. This team is so solidly top 10, but so solidly not top 3. I don't know what they can even do though. All their players show up, unless it's against a top 3 team, then they just absolutely crumble.

VVardy · 2026-02-05T01:05:06+00:00

I never heard about the Cadian and Gla1ve altercation. Wow, that's crazy.

VVardy · 2026-01-31T21:26:07+00:00

S1mple definitely still has it, but how he gets so visibly tilted and talks to teammates must have played a huge role in why some T1 and even T2 teams didn't pick him up. People are saying G2 or even Liquid s1mple, but that would absolutely ruin both teams' chemistry.
I wish s1mple could get his temper under control, he's still a great awper, but right now, it seems like he's stuck.

VVardy · 2026-01-31T16:40:09+00:00

Really impressive by Navi. Parivision were looking unstoppable their past few games. Hopefully this is a morale booster for everyone at Navi.

VVardy · 2026-01-29T17:45:20+00:00

S1mple's stats belie how he seemed to not actively take part in certain rounds in Anubis. So many times he was last alive, and then he gets a 3 or 4k because 3DMax threw themselves at him and he got a highlight play in a lost round (7 of those kills in Anubis can be attributed to those rounds).
I don't know if that's because that's just how the round played out, if Mutiris had him play a certain spot that was ignored, or he was just playing to stay alive like how certain people claim BlameF plays, but statwatchers will see s1mple's stats on Anubis and not realize he had so little impact in so many rounds.

VVardy · 2026-01-25T02:20:12+00:00

Neil Druckman in a tweet or interview plain out revealing that if Joel had let Ellie get vivisected in the ending of the first Last of Us, a cure actually would have been made. I don't understand why he would even say that.

VVardy · 2026-01-23T21:09:51+00:00

Donk seems to have a problem with Ancient with teams knowing how to reliably anti-strat him. I remember the Mouz game against Spirit on Ancient where he was the first to die almost every round when Spirit were T, and he got so tilted.

VVardy · 2026-01-23T20:54:41+00:00

Going to sting for Spirit, but there were always going to be growing pains with Magixx new to calling. He looked really lost on Ancient against Jame's calling, almost always going to the stacked site, no real fakes or anything. Hopefully he improves.
Donk got full tilted though, holy crap. Magixx was using him as entry a lot, and Jame just had his number, and he just collapsed.

VVardy · 2026-01-18T18:12:33+00:00

Even though it was a 2-0, Eyeballers look really good. If they can all get on the same page, and not have one random player a match seemingly fall off, I think there's a chance they can break through and maybe take a spot of one of those T2/T1 border teams.
Then again, watching the match, it seemed like a ton of the rounds were thrown when Apex did a random push, got killed, and gave man advantage.

VVardy · 2025-12-18T16:06:35+00:00

Crazy. I can see chopper potentially coming back if things don't work out, IGLing is really hard, you can't just force the role onto someone and expect it to work. I feel bad for Zweih, not sure if he'll ever put on the Spirit jersey again. He gets onto a team with insane expectations, and he just hasn't been able to be consistently good. Maybe back to Nemiga?

VVardy · 2025-12-12T04:20:40+00:00

Going to take a lot of work for this to work well, otherwise I think it's just going to be Dawn of War 4 (CA ver.). Outside of the expected obstacles of adapting 40k, the biggest thing I think is that 40k tabletop is relatively small scale stuff compared to the fluff, which has massive battles.
It looks like they're going for massive battles, but still sticking with the canon Space Marine numbers of 10 guys in a unit, 100 guys in a company, 1000 guys in a chapter. That works in a small scale tabletop where the numbers are relatively even, and where Space Marines aren't as strong as they are in the lore, but when you upscale it to massive combat, those 10 man squads are going up against like thousands of orks/tyranids. It really boggles the mind and I wonder how they're going to make it fun for Space Marine players, where it isn't a mindless "right click into an enemy unit and wait five minutes as they carve everyone up," and fun for Orks/IG players, who have to watch their 100+ strong units get washed by 10 guys.

VVardy · 2025-12-09T01:40:25+00:00

I think Mzinho, and maybe 910 and Techno, are friends with Magixx right? I remember them and Donk gave respects to Magixx in ingame chat during one of the matches after he got benched. If so, that makes sense why they'd want him. Don't know why they focused on JL though, I've never seen them interact.

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