AsiaFortress Cup/PURE League Division 3/Open Blog

  PURE Season 3 Reflections  It's been a long season, and lots of happenings have been covered in the rankings. Deciding on Top 5's was quite difficult, as outside of the sandbaggers that dominated the top 2 or 3 spots, the skill level was extremely close.  In this reflection post, I'll wrap up with my thoughts on Season 3's Open Division with some Honorable Mentions,  a final power ranking of each team, my all-star team which would be the best roster I could make with all the talent who played in Open this year, and my picks for Top 10 Overall Players, Honorable Mentions This year had so many good players that just barely scraped the top 5. It would feel wrong to not write about them somewhere, so I decided to write all of them here. Are there any others that you feel should have gotten a mention? And if there are, how mad are you that you aren't here? Demoman - Meth (NotReallyGood) The Pakistani Superstar, Meth established himself as the true pinnacle of Div-3-nes...

  Season 3 Rankings - Pocket Scout All of Asia's best players are pocket scout mains, there's no way around it. So, you can really bet that the pocket scouts this season were all spectacular. Here's the top five I chose from a huge pool of sensational talent and skill. 5. Flam - Korean Beefer Korean Barbeque is one of my favorite things to eat. And at Korean Barbeque restaurants, my favorite thing to order is usually the beef. Cooking my own slices of beef, adding my own sauce and tasting it will always be the most sensational of experiences. Speaking of Korean beef, it's Flam, the pocket scout, leader and maincaller for Abusement Park. Going into the season, I thought of Flam as the weakest member on Abusement Park's core roster. He always seemed to beef the important shots, and I never saw him get over 60% accuracy. I never really thought of him as the maincalling type either, I figured that it would be some other more experienced player like Swift or Khronus. Des...

  Season 3 Rankings - Flank Scout Like Roamer, it was quite difficult ranking the flank scouts and with the high level of play we saw in this season, it was challenging deciding on five. Flank scout is a difficult role to play in the div 3 meta of today, but I tried my best to rank the scouts fairly, based on their DM and impact on the game. Without further ado, here's my top 5 Flank Scouts. 5. Toxic - さみしい Toxic, only the fifth edgiest player in Division 3. He's also the fifth best flank scout in Division Three. While searching through his profile, attempting to gather some information on the enigmatic flank scout for Abusement Park, I found a number of things. To name a few, I found his sensitivity (32.4cm/360 - about the size of a horse penis), his previous competitive history, and I also found that he linked a song captioned 「 さみしい」- meaning lonely in Japanese. And I think "lonely" or  「 さみしい」really about sums up Toxic's playstyle. 「トクシック」or「毒性」was one of the ...

Season 3 Rankings - Roamer Roamers in div 3 are a confusing thing. Occasionally, it can be even less enjoyable than playing medic; especially with the high quality of the scouts this season. It was quite challenging to rank the final three roamers. Here's my list: 5. GreenShaDow - Light Green like Novice I couldn't decide on a fifth place. It had to be a Thai ahhahahaha XDDDD. Anyways, Thailand is to the Asian scene what Russia is to the European scene. Both have the same stereotype. Silent, mechanically gifted, and not very good at speaking English. GreenShaDow fits directly into this stereotype. As roamer for Ravens Clutch, GreenShaDow would make amazing plays and hit amazing shots. Despite this, the same curse that befell the pocket soldiers befell Mr. Noodle Language himself. GreenShaDow didn't communicate with his team very well. He always had a lot of potential with his great mechanical skill, but he always seemed out of sync with his team. Sometimes his medic would n...

  Season 3 Rankings - Pocket The pockets this season had a really large gap in skill, but mostly because the pockets towards the top of the division were so good. Yup, good at sandbagging. Thanks Rustic. Anyways, here's my top 5 pockets of Season 3 Open.  5. Roza - Always Pride Month Hey! It's pride month. Not because its June, but because we're talking about Roza. The gayest MGE lord, Roza is a real gaymer. From the endless novice frag movies, to the shotgun denying in MGE. Roza has always been my favorite patient to study because of his lack of a brain. During his time on Yang Ciao, Roza was always the one taking coinflip 1v1s and sometimes also doing his job as a pocket and taking space.  Roza seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from MGEMike, with the amazing DM really shining through on a team like Yang Ciao. However, he didn't really seem to take any of the amazing decision- making MGEMike was also known for into account. Despite this, Roza has a lot of potent...

 Season 3 Rankings - Demo The demos in this season were all very close in skill, and it was very hard to rank these players. Here is my ranking for the the top 5 demos for Pure Season 3 Open Divison. 5. Errol - Rich and Edgy Agh! I cut myself. We're talking about Errol so get your band-aids ready, you will probably need to patch up some of the cuts you will get from the raw edge of this man. Errol, the demo for Yang Ciao, was a weird choice for me. The decision to move Acesty from demo to soldier was a weird one, as Acesty was one of the top Novice Demos at the time. However, I didn't question it, as Acesty is still a decent soldier and Errol was one of the top Asian pubbers with a massive amount of respect from pubbers (Highlander players) and Novice puggers alike.  In late regular season, Errol shined through on Clearcut and Villa with his traps, taking so much space for his team and letting his scouts and soldiers roam free. Despite this, his tendency to W+M1 like his true ...

  Season 3 Rankings - Medic With the end of PURE League's Season 3 Open Division, and the end of any enjoyable Asian TF2 where one team isn't completely dominating the the other, I decided to rewatch a whole dumpster of demos in an attempt to give my life meaning again. While watching these demos, I had a spark of inspiration  from CommanderX's i58 ranking blog, where he ranked the best players at the i58 LAN in 2016. As such, I give to you my ranking of the best players on each class (as well as overall) to you. Starting off, the Medics! 5. Gale - Indian "Random Class" Main Gale - the medic for ABNA Black. In the pre-season of Season 3, when I heard that both Carnival and Deceptive had left ABNA, I feared the worst. I thought that the team would have just died on the spot. But when I heard that they had replaced Carnival with Gale, I feared the most eldritch horrors. Flashes of logs with two+ drops per game and deaths in the twenties ran through my mind. And at f...