Snip3down: Pro pay is a "slap in the face", bad Apex reporting in Vice, Pros petition for map change
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for competitive Apex
Snip3down: Pro pay is a “slap in the face”
Snip3down has posted a video discussing the awful financial state of the competitive scene, speaking up about the shitty situation most players are in, almost all of whom work without his base of streaming support. It’s great perspective from an esports veteran who’s made a living through many different games and scenes. Definitely worth a full watch, but his major issue is pay for the summer GLL events, which take up an absurd amount of time, have a total combined prize pool of $100,000, and only pay out to 8th place: netting each player on that 8th place team 300 dollars—or $8 a day per player.
He discussed the meta as well, arguing that Revenant’s current state and playing on the relative unknown of new King’s Canyon will increase the role RNG plays in tournaments and lead to less reliable results. As others have mentioned, these are qualities that might actually be exciting for some fans, and it’s been interesting to watch tension develop between successful players who prefer the status quo, and other teams who have everything to gain from a shake-up for both the competitive meta and its traditionally dominant teams.
Snip3down also discussed the unfairness of holding the GLL tournament series for ALGS points. All teams hoping to play in potential LAN events or even to just compete in the official ALGS Summer Circuit need these points—but otherwise, there is no financial reason for him to participate.
Bad Apex reporting in Vice
A recent Vice article called “Why 'Fortnite' and 'Apex Legends' Top Players Keep Colluding” is half-baked at best, negligent at worst. Even though this writer is putting out multiple articles per day, it hurts to see a take this bad. Basic fact-checking would have destroyed the central premise of the article, which relies on the fiction that top-ranked grinders are the best professional players in Apex.
The take uses the very real news of two top players on the Apex leaderboard and some Fortnite pros who were caught teaming. From that, he spins an intellectually dishonest argument about how battle royales create and enforce class warfare—how high-ranked players are the ‘elites’ and that they team with each other to keep lower-ranked players out.
First, the very real and common phenomenon of boosting, i.e. carrying your low-ranked friends to a higher rank than they might deserve, is an obvious challenge to that narrative.
Setting that aside, it’s really unfortunate that the writer didn’t talk to anyone—a single player, org, or developer—to verify the claims. If he had, he might have realized that they have almost zero basis in fact.
Ah, colluding to reach the high matchmaking rank of Gold IV. I think that’s a forgivable error, though. The fundamental flaw in this take is that idea that the best players are the grinders on top of the ladder.
Of course, fans who follow the Apex scene even casually understand the difference between players who grind the ranked ladder and pros. Many pros don’t grind ranked at all; some don’t even bother to rank up to Apex Predator. And private scrims don’t get pros ranked points, letting players outside the pro ecosystem like content creators and dedicated grinders fill the top of the ladder. There are notable exceptions of course; Snip3down himself was hovering somewhere in the top 50 just a few weeks ago. But the idea that the pro pool is drawn from the top of the ranked playlist is complete fiction. The conclusion, excerpted below, amounts to a vague and unsubstantiated accusation of widespread teaming with little basis in fact. Not much else to say about it!
Pro petition to remove Kings Canyon answered by adding Kings Canyon to the ALGS
Lastly, peesh, currently on the Sentinels roster, wrote a petition yesterday calling for GLL to take away the Kings Canyon map from its Summer Series. As of writing this, 524 people have signed the petition.
Around the same time, ALGS competitors got an email announcing that the next official Summer Circuit tournament would be split between the two maps. It seems like Respawn, who’ve surely put a lot of work into the newest map update, would like to see it in action, and anti-Kings Canyon sentiment from pros means very little to them.
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