I really don't like twitter, and I haven't logged into my account in months (my anxiety thanks me) and I wasn't sure if I was going to announce anything anywhere and just ride off into the sunset, or if people even cared or noticed that I disappeared. But with the pride event coming up and my name being thrown around a fair bit I thought I'd address my disappearance and what's going on, and if I'm attending MCC pride this year.

To those who don't know, I have taken part in every pride event and my team has placed overall 1st each event (dodgebolt 3 times) and winning 2 of the 3 times! A lot of people say Pride is sort off THE event for Gizzy Gazza to pop off and people seem to be genuinely excited to see me each time (which is always a nice feeling!) I absolutely love MCC pride, and the people involved and the community and my team each year. And I'll always appreciate Scott and the noxcrew team for letting me be involved.

With that being said, I won't be taking part in Pride this year. It's not that I am traveling or busy, I just simply chose not to take part.

The reason is because I'm not entirely sure if or when I'll return as Gizzy Gazza. I never want to say "I am quitting" because I hate putting a full stop on things in life. A couple of months ago I randomly made a Runescape video after 10 years. Why? Because its fun! Maybe I want to randomly work on a movie/roleplay show when I have the drive/passion for it. Maybe I want to come back and make something that I find fun in a couple of years. I don't want to say I'm quitting and then come back in a few months. I did that in 2018 when I said I was quitting Minecraft to do animations and then eventually came back to Minecraft. I'm in a position in life where I don't need to make content for money. I want to use Gizzy Gazza as a creative outlet again like when I first started Youtube way back in 2009, and not because I need the money. Money wasn't even a thing in 2009, it was just fun!

Why did I stop Gizzy Gazza in the first place? Well the name Gizzy Gazza, as mentioned above, started in 2009. That's 15 years. A lot of people who used to watch me growing up now have their own kids!! (!!) I'm 31, I'm happily married, I bought a house, I have my dog (who I consider my son, yes I'm THAT kind of millennial) and I've done a lot of things in my 15 years I am very proud of (and some things I'm not so proud of). When I started Gizzy in 2009 it was a fun thing to do that turned into a career as I was given an opportunity because of my friends I made from Runescape started to do well in Minecraft who helped me out. When making a character in 2009 at the age of 14 I wish I could tell myself "hey maybe don't be the white guy with dreadlocks" but suddenly I had a million subscribers and it was too late lmao. What I'm trying to say is, can I continue to do Gizzy Gazza for another 15 years? 10 years? 5 years? As a JOB...Probably not.

You see, I'm not part of a community really, besides MCC. I'm not in hermit, or any SMPs, and I haven't spoken to a lot of Minecraft friends in a while (I still love you guys! Hoping everyone is doing good and I am on discord if you wish to say hi). The community I was in, the roleplay community, died off many years ago unfortunately. When trying to make Youtube work in 2021 I did a lot of studying and found the roleplay niche thriving with channels like Aphmau and Checkpoint, and knew if I wanted an audience in the roleplay space again I had to make content similar to them. So I changed my content, stopped making "series" content like shows and focused on episodic content for kids. 2022 was the biggest year I've seen for Gizzy in a LONG time, it also came with a curse. The different between Gizzy and Aphmau, was that Aphmau had a lot of content focused around herself and her friends with maybe a trend every now and then... Gizzy just did trends. The best way to put it is simply...most people who watched me was Gen Z, and then I started making content for Gen Alpha. While it was smart for me to make content for a new demographic, gen z was MADDD. I don't like going on Twitter because its very negative. I don't like seeing people talk negative about me. I get I can't please everyone (I've done Youtube enough to know you can't make everyone happy), but I don't have to be on a platform I don't feel welcomed. As I dug deeper into this younger demographic I realize most of them weren't subscribing for ME, and only wanted specific things like Garten of Banban, or Rainbow Friends. When it got to the point in August 2023 when I was barely breaking 10k views on a Minecraft Skibidi Toilet video, I took a step back and said... WHAT THE FFFFF AM I DOING. And I had to stop. I wasn't making content I liked, for people who weren't watching. I killed my name. My legacy. My reputation. It hurt me to see so many people turn against me for an audience who didn't care about me. I was hurt. The audience who once cared for "me" was long gone. That was my fault. I pushed them away. I'm sorry if I pushed you away. My brain went "this is my job, I need to make content that makes money" and I didn't put the audience first. I didn't put YOU first. I fumbled the bag. So I stopped.

To clarify... I LIKED the content I was making. I REALLY enjoy improv, and acting, and setting up a scene, and directing, and creating stories. I studied TV and video production for 5 years, and this niche made sense considering my background as a roleplayer and storyteller, I just hit the wrong crowd. I'm definitely envious of Aphmau and Checkpoint because they did it RIGHT, and I tunnel-visioned the wrong thing, and that was greed. Youtube is not easy guys lol...especially if you try to maintain an audience for 15 years.

If I was to make Gizzy Gazza as my brand again, I would need to make another channel for it to even get recommended outside of the "skibidi toilet kids" who won't click any of the videos I want to make, or it'll take a LOOOONG time for Youtube to recommend me to an audience outside of that crowd. And honestly, I'm exhausted with Gizzy. Its been 15 years. I take anxiety medication. I have therapy. I had a cancer scare a couple of years ago (all good but man that was a scary month), and I HAVE BACK PAIN GUYS. Instead of making ANOTHER channel for Gizzy, I decided it could be fun to make a new brand entirely. I work on a few faceless channels now that I manage and run, and its been very fun working with an amazing team I get to work with every day, and from what I've learnt through the mistakes of Gizzy Gazza, I'm fixing with my new brands to not fall into the same trap (I'm only human, let me learn from mistakes and continue to grow), And its REFRESHED my excitement for Youtube again, and I can see myself doing Youtube for another 10 years, just not as Gizzy. I've also been enjoying not having my face public and enjoying life as GARY and then doing Youtube as a job and growing a community. An example of this is Gizzy Gazza would barely break 30 viewers on a stream whereas my new brand gets over 100! I promise I'm learning from my mistakes haha

I wanted to make some kind of announcement but I didn't want to do it on Twitter. I don't like Twitter. I don't feel welcomed on Twitter. MCC I always felt welcomed and accepted. A lot of you guys watched me growing up and always rooted for me in the games, so I felt this was a fitting place to say something, to people who actually would listen to me and wouldn't be toxic or make me feel unheard. I truly appreciate anyone who watched at least ONE video of mine within the 15 years as Gizzy. I truly am happy, and I am satisfied with everything I have accomplished with Gizzy, and I'm ready to focus on the next chapter in my life with my new "job" on Youtube doing other things. And again, I don't want to say I'm quitting Gizzy, I just don't know if or when I'd return. I've love to make Clue 7 and maybe another Purge show. They were so much fun to make, I just don't have the drive right now to do Gizzy.

Sorry this had been a lot longer post than I thought it would be. I was just going to say I'm not doing Pride and then I couldn't stop typing and thought I might as well just say my peace. I'm sure this'll be shared around and that's okay. I'm happy, and healthy!

So, a while back, I was hyperfixating on both MCC and plane crashes because I am a normal person with regular interests and I started thinking about how maybe MCC players could further optimize their performances by adopting certain communication principles from the aviation industry and I nearly got as far as making a whole post laying it all out.

Then it occurred to me that it's a for fun tournament that people play to have fun and the stakes are Perhaps A Tiny Bit Lower than "if you make a mistake, hundreds of people will die" and that the players may not appreciate that pressure.

Now, I don't think sweating and having fun are mutually exclusive and I think that us having fun by chatting and theorizing about how players could hypothetically optimize their performances as much as humanly possible is a thing we're allowed to do.

But also like. Guys. They're playing for a coin. There's no actual stakes here. Players do not want to hyper optimize every single little action all the time and it's important to understand that like players are going to do worse than their theoretical best conceivable performance not because they're bad at the game or not trying "hard enough" but because like. It's not that big a deal if they don't. It's chill. It can be chill.

So many players have spoken out about having a bad time with the Reddit because we're only ever talking about how they're doing terribly and I do think a lot of us have made an effort to talk about people more positively overall and that's great, but also like. This is the whole point of blurring the line between canon and noncanon. It's fine if things are unbalanced and unoptimized and people aren't minmaxxing every aspect of their performance and we can't determine with 100% objectivity who is the best at Silly Block Game Tournament Played For Fun. Like, we're gonna be okay.

Disclaimer: this discussion is about collegiate and I know many of you probably don’t care about the scene, but what’s being done by the current TO is criminal and ruining CVAL.

GGTech Entertainment is the current officiator of College Valorant and League.

In regards to regular season we have had delayed schedule postings, signups taking place during Christmas break (causing over 100 teams to miss the deadline) and a wide variety of minor errors.

Start of 2024 however things took a steep decline.

• They announced that they were ending all official broadcasts of CVAL matches (not even broadcasting grand finals)

• Reduced the champions prize pool by 80% (this one really hit home as a Collegiate player for a club with no scholarships)

• Moved CVAL Champions playoffs location from Riot Games Arena to Boise St University in Idaho

• Limited the teams to attend the offline tournament from 3 to 2 (top 2 travel across country in the summer for 1 bo5 for $400 more)

• Seeded teams unfairly, for example, a university got 6th place in the 3rd split, but qualified as seed 3 because they were given the “1st place” qualification because everyone else qualified by getting 1st OR second in previous splits

• The resulting seeding means teams like Winthrop and Blinn who are both in NA challengers will play each other in ro16

Lastly cause I know people are gonna comment “college esports is dumb it makes no money”.

ABSOLUTELY, it is a waste but if it’s to eventually become the pipeline for talent in the future, maybe we should start streaming matches and not cutting the prize pool.

Other TO’s like CECC have shown that you can host a national collegiate tournament offline: 32 teams traveled to Texas with stipends, took part in media days, and played for the entirety of the weekend.

How many viewers did CECC have?

4k-6k, that is how it is supposed to be done.

Hey folks, with the recent changes of 4 cost oddities on level 8, and bag size changes from set 10, I'm wondering what would be the best strategy for playing a 4 cost meta when units are heavily contested. I saw a lot of high level players, especially from CN and KR streamers to hold 4 cost units during stage 4 rolldown and after, even if those are not from the comps they wanna play. Previously I've also heard mostly from NA players said it was not the correct play to sacrifice your economy by doing so. However there must be a valid reason if many are doing this, so I've done some research and here's what I've found.

For mathematics I've found a rolling odds calculator on Github below. Credit goes to the original author and who helps updating the calculator:

For the scenario we assume it's a 4-1 or 4-2 rolldown for your main 4 cost carry, which would cost you 50 gold between 2 rounds. On average, let's assume there are 25 copies of 4 cost units out of the pool so everyone has around 3 copies of any 4 costs, which is common starting on 4-1. Apparently the real situation would be more dynamic, to simplify the calculation I feel this should be good enough.

On the initial roll down, assuming you have 0 copies and roll for 50 gold, there's 43% chance you'll hit 2 star, and 19% chance you'll get 4 copies. Which is actually pretty common to get an additional copy considering you're likely to rolling for multiple 4 costs at the same time.

Meanwhile, let's see what looks like for the opponent. Assuming it's a 2 way contested scenario and your opponent rolls 1 round later than you, if you hold 3 copies, there's 57% chance of your opponent to get 2 copies, and 26% to get 3 copies. Which is already much lower than you to hit:

What if you hold the additional copy you hit during the rolldown? You can see here now your opponent's chance to hit being further lowered to 19%. To get the same odditity, they now need to spend 10 more gold:

How about if it's 3 way contested? Let's assume you have 3 copies and both of your opponents having 2 copies. Then they need to roll another 50 gold only have 61% chance to hit 1 copy they need. If you have 4 copies, your opponent need to roll 75 gold and if you have 5 copies, then your opponent need to roll a whopping 150 gold only to have the same chance hitting the one last copy they need:

So the conclusion is:

• For 2 way contested situation, every 1 extra copy you hold equals 10 extra gold for your opponents.

• For 3 way contested situation, every 1 extra copy you hold equals at least 25 extra gold for your opponents.

I think the answer is clear here. Holding 1-2 extra copies might cost you about 10 gold worth of interest for the whole stage at most, however it immediately cost your opponent 10 and 25 more gold at least, that's not even considering the HP loss for your opponent not hitting 2 star, and meanwhile you can also hold multiple key units to stop your opponents from hitting.

Since the gold having less value late game, and player damage now increases after stage 3, stopping your opponent from hitting seems to be more valuable in this patch for the current bag size and shop oddities. On the other hand, playing a 3 way contested 4 cost comp is probably the worst thing you wanna do, even 2 way contested might be a bot 4 and cost you the game.

Is this kind of situation what the player want? It's hard to tell as people have different opinions. But for now I think the only thing I would do is pray for god if I ends up being 3 way contested and not hitting.

Valorant, Counter-Strike, Rainbow 6, Rocket League, and PUBG all give orgs their own in-game items which they get a percentage of the profit of. This is the easiest way to get more orgs into Overwatch that I haven't heard my people bring up. Other esports with similar viewship numbers to OW have far more orgs because of incentives like this.

This wouldn't even require very much effort for Blizzard, just tell the orgs to design their own skin for a hero and give them some design rules to follow. Then put the skins in their own tab in the shop and split the earnings with the orgs. Blizzard gets more money from skins they got other people to design for free, the orgs get more money and get their names and logos in the game, and the players get more money after more orgs invest into the scene.

Everybody on this sub has such a doomer attitute towards the future of Overwatch esports, but if Blizzard just puts in a little more effort on things like this the future will be much brighter.