Team Liquid says goodbye to Heroes of the Storm, drops team
Team Liquid's founder has some choice words for Blizzard.
When Blizzard decided not to continue the Heroes Global Championship last year, the competitive league for Heroes of the Storm, many pros were understandably not happy about it. Among those affected were Team Liquid, who had put together a squad for the 2014 BlizzCon Exhibition Tournament, and had a roster make it to the HGC finals in 2018. The team was kept on contract by Team Liquid for an extra month to help smooth over the transition to whatever they choose to do next, and have now been let go.
Over at the Team Liquid website there's a detailed history of their involvement with Heroes of the Storm, including a neat infographic about their performance (their longest match was 38.39, while the shortest was over in just 6.53), most-played heroes, and so on. There's also some info about where the individual players plan on going next. "SportBilly, Nurok, and HasuObs have all been streaming, while Nurok has been duo-queueing League of Legends with Arcaner", it says. "SportBilly has been playing League as well, but alternating that with streams of Fortnite."
Finally, there's a personal letter from Team Liquid's founder Victor 'Nazgul' Goossens, who is critical of Blizzard's decision to cancel the HGC without warning. "This is a full ecosystem with hundreds of young adults relying on its existence", he writes. "To just pull the plug on it overnight is entirely irresponsible. There should be long term commitments from publishers to the leagues they run and a decision about discontinuing should be made well in advance.
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.