Why Brawl Stars looks easy but isn’t

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When we first started including Brawl Stars as a main game in the A1 Adria League, critics were quick to point out that the game is “just a mobile game”, and is “not a real esport”. That is, of course, wrong, but it does go to show that mobile games can be deceptively easy to play, and seem childish to an untrained eye. 

Brawl Stars, at first glance, does seem a bit gimmicky. The game is very cheerful and happy, and its art style is possibly the main red flag for broader audiences, because it looks too much like a cartoon. At the same time, it’s very similar in art style to many of the more casual mobile games. But, underneath the cheerful surface, there is a lot going for it.

Mechanics

Supercell, the creators of the game, wanted to create an esports-first game with Brawl Stars. That is why the game is set up like it is: very fast-paced, pick-up-and-play, and with a 3v3 format. The controls are also easy: you move the character with one finger, and use abilities with others. The abunance of game modes and a free choice of what you’d like to play also makes it a very smooth experience – but have in mind, you need to master all of them if you want any chance of esports glory. 

Cover and timers

An interesting thing about Brawl Stars is that cover can be easily destroyed by stronger attacks and matches have a short timer. This forces players to engage from the start, and requires thinking on the spot. Sure, you can hide in the grass for a while and try and ambush opponents, but most team compositions will have a good way of clearing bushes or even destroying everything outright, so sitting and waiting isn’t much of a strategy most of the time. The game modes also reward speed and aggression, with the likes of Gem Grab forcing you to come to the middle of the map to grab gems, otherwise the other team will do it. 

Pure chaos

If you ever saw a Brawl Stars match, it’s chaotic at best, and you probably had no idea what is going on. This is, of course, not the case for the players, but the game’s abundance of flashy abilities does make it tough to follow sometimes. There is strategy in every team composition and team fight, however – and going in a fight and just spamming the abilities will get you nowehere; this is what sets apart veteran players from the inexperienced ones. Each team fight can be viewed as a delicate dance, with both sides waiting for the first move. 

Brawl Stars is a chaotic, strange, and beautiful game which has become one of the staples of the A1 Adria League. This weekend, we’re gearing up for the qualifiers and playoffs for Brawl Stars in the Weekly Tournaments, so make sure not to miss them!

eWave wins it in the closest PUBG finals yet

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With the PUBG action concluding over the weekend, we’ve officially hit the halfway mark of the A1 Adria League Weekly tournaments. This means that we have five more weeks to go, with four games in the A1AL Weekly series remaining, ant two games remaining in the A1 Student eChallenge. Time does fly, right? 

Over the last week and weekend, we crowned the champions in two games: A1 Student eChallenge in Rocket League and the regular PUBG tournament. Due to PUBG taking place over the weekend, the finals of the A1SeC in Rocket League were held on Thursday, with four top-placed teams in the qualifiers facing off: EFZG, FER, FERIT and TVZ. EFZG and FERIT advanced through the upper bracket in the first rounds and knocked TVZ and FER into the lower bracket. Soon after, FER regrouped and beat TVZ in the lower bracket, thus advancing to play against EFZG, who lost in their second matchup against FERIT. In the big final, we saw an exceptional reverse sweep from FER , who made up a 2:0 lead by FERIT and secured the title in the final. 

The weekend was focused on PUBG. Because PUBG is not like any other game we’re playing in the A1AL, the tournament structure is also a bit different, and we saw dozens of matches take place throughout the three days of competition. The open qualifiers were a big success. On the first qualifying day, six different teams won the maps, and what makes it even more interesting is that the winner of a match was the first team to be knocked out in the next game on three separate occasions. Despite the lobby being very similar in terms of skill level, two teams, Triema and eWave, managed to come out on top as the most consistent ones. 

Day two of qualifiers saw the third contender to the title emerge: Grove Street. The lobby once again proved that it is unpredictable and the skill levels are very similar, which was shown on the leaderboard: just a couple of points divided the best team after the end of day 2. 

For the finals, Grove Street started out excellent, and built up a good 20-point lead early in the day, but eWave won two maps in a row, and Trieme strung several good rounds, which had us anxiously waiting the last match of the series. Just six points stood between Grove Street, eWave and Trieme before the final loadout, and after Grove Street made a mistake and got knocked out in the early stages of the game, it went down to the last two teams: eWave and Triema for the title. In the end, eWave won it after some of the best PUBG we’ve seen in the region for a long time. 

We can only congratulate the winners and let you know that we’re playing Brawl Stars, eFootball and the A1AL Student eChallenge in League of Legends this weekend; it’s going to be our biggest weekend yet! 

What makes battle royale so special?

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If you are not a cinephile, you’re probably not aware that the gaming genre of battle royale gets its name from a Japanese film from the 2000s, based on a novel from 1999. But yeah, it’s a fact. The movie is about a competition between students who need to compete on an island until only one survives, a situation that influenced dozens of game developers ever since. With the playoffs in our PUBG weekly coming up over the weekend, let’s talk more about the battle royale genre and what makes it so special and interesting to so many people.

Brendan Greene, more known as “PlayerUnknown” began working on battle royale mods for Arma 2 in 2013 which saw some of the main staples of the genre introduced, such as the shrinking play area and the search for weapons and armor. The Arma mod remained just that for several years and saw a cult following before the standalone version, called Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, released in 2017. PUBG was an overnight success, and built the foundations of what the genre is today. To capitalise on the big popularity, Fortnite, a game that was at the time a PvE third-person shooter where players defended against AI, made a pivot towards battle royale, and the rest is history.

The free-to-play model of Fortnite brought battle royale to an unexpected audience: young players without the money to buy full-priced games. Fortnite’s cartoon-inspired style was also more appealing to wider audiences than the realistic art of PUBG, and managed to make it one of the most popular games ever since. Today, Fortnite is still a cultural phenomenon, and is now much more than just a game – it’s probably the closest thing to a Metaverse we’ve seen outside of a large-scale MMO, and it’s also one of the games at the Olympic Esports tournament, but that’s for another time.

Since then, Apex Legends in 2019 and CoD: Warzone in 2020 managed to increase the competition in the battle royale space, with both games being free to play and very competitive in nature. The battle royale genre lends itself fantastically to esports, and tournaments were plentiful since both of these games released around five years ago. Today, PUBG remains the benchmark for the “real” battle royale, but games such as Warzone and Apex are also exceptionally popular. The unpredictability of the genre, coupled with the pick-up-and-play rules, means that anyone can try it out for free, and many people find the adrenaline rush of a shrinking battlefield unlike any other.

This is particularly true of our PUBG playoffs players, who will compete for the title of the A1 Adria League Weekly champion this weekend. Do not miss the action!

How map swaps affect PUBG

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Every esports title needs a shake-up once in a while—and for PUBG, that shake-up comes in the form of rotating maps. When the map pool changes, players need to adapt their strategies to the new locations and meta. Different game modes in PUBG rotate maps at different times, but the only constant is change. 

Why rotate maps? 

PUBG (and other map-based games such as CS2) rotates maps often to prevent the game from “drying out”, and to keep the meta fresh. Playing the same four or five maps all over again can end up being stale even for professional players, so the creators of these games tend to remove maps (or a single map) from the competitive pool and replace it with others. In the case of PUBG, maps are rotated more often for normal and ranked modes, and less often for the official esports leagues and competitions, such as the PUBG Global Series and PUBG Global Championship. 

In the last map rotation, Vikendi and Sanhok were added back to the normal and ranked PC rotation, replacing Taego and Deston. The maps at the moment are Vikendi, Sanhok, Erangel, Rondo and Miramar, and will remain so during the next week. 

The Adjustment Period

Regadless of experience, players need to adapt to new maps as they come, and this means that the first couple of days of every map rotation tend to be very interesting. PUBG pros and higher-level ranked players know all maps by heart, but even they need to adapt a bit to the rotation, in case a map comes up that was dormant for a couple weeks.  Historically, teams that adapted the fastest to the map rotations are the ones with the best performances, which brings a layer of strategy on top of the usual PUBG madness that follows every game. 

Other Games, Same Problem

Map rotation issues aren’t unique to PUBG; similar challenges appear in CS2, Valorant, and other games. They are perhaps most-known in CS2, where every change in the competitive map pool is heavily commented and praised (or criticised). Interestingly, in CS2, most maps get reworked often, and the return of a map to the so-called “active duty pool” is often a celebration of a new style. The last major update to the CS2 pool happened early this year when Train returned and Vertigo was removed.  Map changes are a much-needed breath of fresh air to competitive games, and are often polarising, but games would not be the same without them. 

To find out how our PUBG pros adapted to the recent map pool changes, make sure to follow the action during the PUBG playoffs this weekend!

Harmony is the LoL Weekly Champion; A1SeC RL playoffs this week

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The A1 Adria League Weekly tournaments are now happening at full speed, and we are happy to have watched some great matchups over the weekend in both the League of Legends qualifiers and playoffs, and in Rocket League, where students competed for the chance to participate in the playoffs later this week. Not only that, but we are back again today with the first qualifiers for PUBG, so there is absolutely no time to waste. 

In the A1 Student eChallenge, we saw a couple of changes to the competitive structure. Due to a number of teams participating in the first qualifier (6), we decided to go with a two-group format, with the winners of the groups advancing to the grand finals. In Group A, FER won the finals against Algebra and secured a playoff spot, and in Group B things were made a bit easier by TVZ forfeiting the qualifier, leaving only two teams competing for a spot, which ended up going to FERIT. 

The second qualifier had two total slots to hand out, which went to EFZG and TVZ. The grand finals of the A1SeC in Rocket League are scheduled for this Thursday, May 8th. 

LoL playoff dominance from Harmony

In League of Legends, we had two rounds of qualifiers over the weekend, followed by two further rounds of playoffs to decide who is the winner of the Weekly Tournament series. After the first round of qualifiers, two teams from each round advanced to the playoffs. From the first round, Vibrations123 were joined by Vertis & Friends after both teams dominated their rounds. Interestingly, Cevapi i Kobasice, a team that later made moves in the second qualifier, got knocked out in the first one.

The second qualifier was much better for the meat-friendly roster, and Cevapi i Kobasice won their side of the bracket. On the other side, Secret Club Esports beat Don’t ban Zyra in a great final, and wrapped up the qualiifers. In the playoffs, Harmony was the best team by far, and stomped their way through to the first place. Cevapi i kobasice put up a great fight in the finals, but were no match for Harmony. Third place went to The Secret Club Esports, and Vertis & Friends finished fourth. 

The action in the A1 Adria League continues throughout this week and weekend, with PUBG Weekly starting today, followed by the Rocket League finals in the A1SeC and PUBG playoffs over the weekend. Don’t miss it! 

League of Legends Fearless Draft explained

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2025 is the year of big changes for League of Legends. The game’s global esports tournaments had notable changes, including an entirely new event called the First Stand, and merging of several regions. However, one in-game feature that might change the game for the better, is called Fearless Draft.

The new draft system, included in the mentioned First Stand, allows each Champion to be played only once during the course of the series. This includes all players from both teams, which means that if a player from an opposing team picks a champion in the first game, you can’t pick it in the next round. This leads to some interesting “pocket picks” and unexpected combinations that make the games more interesting to watch, and perhaps play. 

The thing with the Fearless Draft is that it forces players to be familiar with a broader range of champions, including out-of-the-box picks for different situations. Relying on a smaller roster of champions can be dangerous, and players will be forced to include different characters in their rotation.

On the other hand, this might be an interesting move for Riot, because more Champions will be played, and some of them might be reworked more often than others. Some champions did not see significant updates in years, and with more than 100 possible champions on the line, Riot’s patches might just be bigger in the future. Teams will also think about recruiting players that have a deeper champion pool because it allows them for more flexibility, and players that are deeply rooted in a smaller number of champions might need to adapt fast. 

This weekend, we will be drafting Champions for the next stage of the Weekly tournaments, in League of Legends. The region’s best teams will compete in open qualifiers over the weekend, while best student players will try and win in the A1 Student eChallenge in Rocket League. Don’t miss the action!

EA FC’s yearly cycle and its effect on the esports scene

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EA FC, and the FIFA series that came before it, are famous all over the world for being perhaps the best football games ever made, but interestingly enough, they are also subject to much criticism and “hate” from their own fans. Some of these criticisms are undeserving, but one of them is possibly the strangest in all of esports, and is a case of having to get used to it or just stop playing. We are talking, of course, about the yearly cycle of games.

If you’ve ever watched real football, the game is played in seasons which usually start around October and last into the late spring and early summer, depending on the region. In the off-season, clubs prepare for the next one, new players arrive, and the summer is usually the time for resetting and replenishing. 

The creators of EA FC, EA Games, have realised that this will work great with a game, so we’ve had a new FC title every year for more than a decade. This used to be okay, since the esports landscape of the game was not so developed, and with games being mostly offline it was great to have new players and stadiums every year. As EA FC became a global esport, the appeal changed, and the “reset”  impacts competitive play a lot, most importantly through the Ultimate Team, EA FC’s most popular mode, where players acquire footballer “cards” and create their own lineup. 

As the year goes on, more and more special cards are released, including Christmas, Halloween, Team of the Week, Team of the Season and so forth. Every single of these cards is better in stats than the previous versions, and they culminate in the summer before resetting to regular cards in October in the new game. This reset of the entire game means that players have around 9-10 months of play before adapting to a new game, which always has slightly tweaked mechanics, movement, shooting and other features.

Early tournaments of the competitive year are always weaker in performance than later ones, since the players need to adapt to the game first, unlike League of Legends or CS2, or even fighting games. Even more so, the way Ultimate Team is laid out means that players need to buy new players every year, and more often than not, real money needs to be paid to open more in-game packs and get better players to remain competitive. As the year progresses, more special players mean more in-game coins spent, and the cycle continues. For example, French striker Mbappe had a 91-rated card at the start of EA FC 25, but his TOTY card has a rating of 96, with a total of 165 more in-game stats and 32 more face stats. This means that it’s simply better than the regular card in every way, despite being the same player. 

What could help the game (and the leagues) would be a longer release cycle with a refresh of the entire Ultimate Team mechanic, but that will probably not happen. All we can realistically do is shift our expectations and think about the reset of the game as a fresh page in the EA FC book – there’s some satisfaction that can be had in playing a new edition of EA FC all over again and feeling like you have the same starting point as the rest of the world before finding out that is not the case three games into FUT.

In the A1 Adria League Weekly tournaments, we’re playing the current edition of EA FC, with all of its bells and whistles, limited cards and fancy players. This weekend, the finals of the EA FC are taking place, so keep an eye out for the streams! 

CS2 feels like a Work in Progress, but that’s okay

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Since the earliest days of esports in the region, Counter-Strike has been one of the most popular games to play, together with perhaps Dota 2 and later, League of Legends and FIFA (EA FC). But since the early days of CS, plenty has changed in the game and its latest iteration, CS2, is still not as polished as many hoped. Still, that is perfectly fine (for the most part), since it’s just a case of history repeating itself.

It’s also perfectly fine to apply for the CS2 Weekly tournaments in the A1 Adria League. 

It’s interesting – almost every Counter-Strike started out broken. In the early days of CS:GO, players said that recoil was random, hitboxes did not feel right, and more. After a decade, the game was fixed and now we can’t even remember what was wrong at start. We could go so far as to say that every real Counter-Strike game needs to be messed up in some way in order to be good later.

Despite Valve’s (medium) effort to fix the issues that CS2 has right now, the game is still pretty rough around the edges when compared to CS:GO. For example, players are having trouble with the overal “feel” of the game, despite it looking almost the same as CS:GO, and Reddit and other social media websites are full with critics saying that the movement is worse, the servers are terrible and the anticheat is non-existent. FACEIT does help with this, but this is a third-party fix for some of the things related to competing. 

There is hope

Still, a lot is good with CS2, and some of these things are taken for granted. For example, the new engine provides much better graphics and overall feel, and will continue to work well for years, allowing Valve to upgrade the game visually for years. CS:GO did not look bad at all in its last days for a game that was a decade old, and we feel like the new engine will do the same. Apart from that, Valve does work on the game, and small updates and fixes are always coming. The issue is that some of the things that the community hates are very big parts of the game, and can not be sorted by small fixes easily. But, as with any CS, there is time.

For the A1 Adria League, CS is one of the staples, and a game that we all personally enjoy playing and watching. It has provided us with some of the league’s best and most dramatic moments, and despite it being a bit rough around the edges, we still love CS2 (and it is not because we have no other options.)

The Weekly tournaments in CS2 are starting soon, so make sure you apply through the landing page of the game and try your luck against the best in the region.

A1 Adria League Weekly kicks off with EA FC Mobile

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The first matches of the A1 Adria League in 2025 were finally played over the weekend. The first three qualifiers saw the top 8 players advance to the playoff stage of the EA FC Mobile tournament, and we’re here to tell you all about it. 

Day 1: Mad start to the competition

The first day of the Weekly tournaments and EA FC games provided quite a bit in terms of excitement and surprises. For a start, we saw two newcomers Ekii7 and ANDROVSKI_MKD get into the top 8 players on their first appearance in the competition. The winner of the weekly was the well-known regional layer Somzi, beating Nikolas7 in the finals. However, the true drama came our way in the third-place decider match between Ogiii and SPK_Hamdija. Ogiii won the first match 4:1, and Hamdija missed a penalty in the 82nd minute of the second match but scored one in extra time, thus opening the decider match. However, the third game ended with the result at 1:1, and the replay (played with the golden goal mode) had zero goals. In the fifth (and final) match, Ogiii scored the golden goal in the 15th minute and secured the third spot in the Weekly. 

Day 2: Solid performances without big surprises

In the second day of competition, we did not see blockbuster games similar to day 1, but it should be noted that lazar0001, the second-placed player from the 14th season of the A1 Adria League, won the second qualifier after beating two-time (S12 and S13) champion FE_shaq. 

Day 3: third time a charm for TaleTopG

The third and final day of qualifiers saw the players continue collecting points for the playoffs and hard work paying off for TaleTopG. Despite not finishing in the top three in the first two qualifiers, TaleTopG managed to win the third round by beating HRD_Gale in the finals. Interestingly, TaleTopG managed to grab the first place in the overall rankings despite finishing with just a total of 60 points in the first two rounds. Winning the third round secured him first place with a total of 240 points. 

The eight top players will now prepare for the playoffs that are coming our way on Easter Sunday, April 20th. TaleTopG, shaq, Čola56 and Nikolas7 will compete in Group A, while Somzi, Lazar, Ggaleee and Ogiii will start their playoff journey in Group B. The total prize pool for EA FC Mobile is 800€, with 400 going to the best player, 250€ going to the second-place and the third-place player winning €150. 

 

Make sure you follow the action over the weekend, and remember: there is one more round of EA FC Mobile coming our way in June! 

Why is 2025 perhaps the biggest year for League of Legends?

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League of Legends is the world’s biggest game, there is absolutely no question about it. But, we must all be aware that it has become a bit stale and “safe” in recent times, which is something even Riot realised. So, for 2025, they went all-out and changed a lot: from merging leagues, changing the draft and adding a big new event, just to keep LoL fresh.

Fresh LoL is also coming your way during the A1 Adria League Weekly tournaments, so make sure you apply! 

Merging regions

In the last couple of years, some of the main regions for League of Legends were not performing as well as they needed to in terms of viewership and overall popularity, with one of them being the LCS, one of the most famous esports leagues (which even had documentaries filmed about it). To try and boost its popularity, Riot has merged the LCS with CBLOL, a league that is steadily growing in popularity, and called it LTA. 

This is a similar move as the VCT Americas in VALORANT, and was seen as a good thing after its first split. Of course, it turned out that the NA teams are stronger than the Brazilian ones which is a bummer for the Brazilians, but the metrics are okay so Riot is probably happy, too. 

On the other side of the world, Riot merged VCS (Vietnam) and PCS (Pacific) leagues into one to also make one larger league. The region is also in its first year, and the viewership is also doing okay. Truth be told, the eyes of the world were focused much more on the LTA than the LCP, but the merger will probably be a good thing for the region.

A new tournament

For the first time in around 10 years, Riot has created a new tournament in 2025, called the First Stand. This was also done to echo the structure of the VALORANT scene, with its three big international events laid out in a season. The First Stand took place in March and featured only a single best team from each region, contrary to MSI or Worlds, events that are much bigger in scale. The event went well, and it gave teams one more chance for a trophy, as well as more time to train and practice for the teams that did not manage to enter the big event. 

Viewership-wise, it had 1.1m peak viewers, a good number for a relatively small tournament with the likes of Hanwha Life Esports, Top Esports and Team Liquid competing. 

Fearless Draft

The last major thing, introduced for the First Stand, is the new draft concept for pro play, where players can only play one champion per series. This means that there is much more strategy (and creativity) involved because if you choose a champion in the first match, you are locking both your and the opposing team from using it during the entire game. 

This led to some interesting picks during First Stand, and the usage of some champions out of the 170-strong pool that are not that famous outside of solo queue. Interestingly, this might result in Riot taking more time with balancing champions because they can’t know which ones will be picked, and some of them were not reworked or updated in a very long time.

 

If you are a League of Legends player from the region, you probably do not care about the LTA or the First Stand too much – but you might care about the application process for the Weekly A1AL tournaments. There is still time to sign up and apply for the events, so make sure you organise a team before it’s too late.