Choperius

Today Funcom released their report over the second quarter of 2012.

Some interesting highlights from the report and presentation:

• Bloodline Champions § Free-to-play game, with Premium top-up and ingame store § Skill-based action oriented PvP game with strong eSports ties. § More than 1.500.000 players so far § Adding new classes to play, adding skins and visual upgrades to existing classes

• Future games from Funcom will be based on more focused, gameplay and player driven games, more in line with the developments in todays market. Such games have shorter development time, and less upfront investment. Examples are League of Legends, World of Tanks and Minecraft.

• Bloodline Champions Free-to-play MMO Launched, Cash flow positive

I found this awesome pic of the developers at Stunlock Studios when I was browsing Facebook. Who is who?

As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't been very active in the last weeks. The reason is that I've been running out of time lately. I've had a lot to study, pracc for StarLadder/Manly Bacon and on top of that I'm also writing for the Swedish eSports site Rakaka.se.

I'm not leaving the scene or anything, I just won't be writing this blog anymore. You'll probably see more of me in the future since I have some other projects going on. 

Best regards, Chop

Yesterday the brackets for the Star Series was released. The series will consist of 15 matches between all of the 16 teams, which will be held on an almost daily basis. Out of these 16 teams, the top 4 will go to Ukraine and play a LAN final at Cyber Sports Arena.

The first match starts tomorrow, you can find all of the matches and the brackets here.

Over at SK-Gaming's website you can find a good recap with all the qualified teams, made by Onin, you can also find the invited teams here.

Last friday Stunlock Studios moved office once again.

Today StarLadder.tv finally opened up for the public. The site looks fine, nothing special in my opinion. There is a function for creating a profile and teams, which you can apply to tournaments with. There is also a video section.

On the site you can also find an interview with Gazhag, jouho and Entarion from Meanwhile in Finland. Read it here.

It does also tell us that there will be a prize purse of 1000$ for the Amateur Series.

During Sunday the Russian qualifiers for StarLadder.tv was being held at the Russian servers. The top-4 teams qualified for a place in the Star Series and the tournament ended up like this:

1st place: Mouse One (Relish, Bugagashka, Tropos)  2nd place: Too mush RU server (BCAA, ZephyrK, Garrid) 3rd place: Ne radi deneg (5k1n, CorrupteD, Insolence) 4th palce: бп лучше джона (evo1wa, Следопыт, Pururin)

As the 2nd team had already got an invite earlier, another new Russian team is also going to get an invite. The invites weren't the only stuff the teams got, they did also get cash prizes:

1st place: ~543 euro 2nd place:  ~310 euro 3rd place:  ~233 euro 4th place:  ~233 euro

Today James "2GD" Harding, former eSports manager for Bloodline Champions, launched the hype trailer for his upcoming eSports project The GD Studio.

The GD Studio is a studio in Stockholm, from where 2GD, Semmler, Apollo and Trance will host eSports shows and tournaments on a frequent basis. 

During the weekend, Hazard LAN has been held in Stockholm, Sweden. They hosted a Bloodline Champions tournament that ended up like this:

1. (1500 SEK + 3x Titan) HybriD Dandido Choperius

2. (750 SEK + 3x Champion) JensBond colden101 SundbergarN

3. skrff Bubba Vuze 

The finals were also commentated by Semmler and Drakir live at stage.

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At 14.00 CET/UTC+1, Semmler and Drakir will be casting the Hazard LAN finals live from Hazard LAN in Stockholm.

After a long delay the StarLadder site finally got into some kind of beta state. You can apply for an invite over at the site. I have done so myself and am now waiting for an invite.

Yesterday Team Dignitas published an interview with the famous old school player Malakor. Malakor who still seem to be sponsored by Team Dignitas after the break-up with Wisteria and skrff, has for long been a member of the top scene and has two DreamHack 4th places to his credit.

Today we had another Weekly Update, the most of the update contained old information about the LAN partys Hazard and Lanorama and the Avatar Contest but there was also some new information about the Alt+Tab bug:

The widely known Alt+Tab bug! It seems like we’ll most probably have a fix for the worst cases of the Alt+Tab bug for the next patch! (I’m super excited, but I’ve been waiting on this for 3 years, I was stunned when they told me at a meeting today!) So, hopefully after the next patch the game should not be unplayable if you alt+tab in the loading screen and you should be able to move your BLC window between different screens without the graphics disappearing! :o No promises, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed for this! Some of the smaller problems like missing weapons and such might still occur though. 

Another change that I really like is that you know can observe rated games. This doesn't have to be patched, you can go into the game and watch all rated games already today. 

Valhack is a LAN association in Skövde, the hometown of Stunlock Studios, who regularly hosts LAN partys in their neighborhood. 

On the 19th-22th of April they are going to host Valhack V5 at Valhall in Skövde, Sweden, with a bunch of tournaments including one for Bloodline Champions.

On their site they have announced the prizes of the tournament:

Bloodline Champions 3v3 - 2000 SEK 1. 1000 SEK + Titan packages from Stunlock Studios 2. 1000 SEK 

Are you interested? Sign up in the thread on the Bloodline Champions forums.

Questions? Ask the Valhack Crew over at Fragbite or e-mail them here.

Today  Funcom released the financial report over the fourth quarter of 2011, it tells us much about their investments in their new game The Secret World and how Age of Conan is stepping down but there is only one line about Bloodline Champions.

It does simply say:

Bloodline Champions remained cash flow positive in 4Q.

Read the report here or check out the presentation here.