Fnatic take home title at FACEIT S3
The FACEIT Season 3 LAN finals at Dreamhack Winter finished Saturday in Jönköping, Sweden with Fnatic managing to win out over Luminosity Gaming 2-1 in a hotly contested BO3 series to take first place at the event. Luminosity had a great showing event with their newly revamped roster (see more below), taking out TSM, nV, and NiP.
Cloud9 loses sgares
The North American eSports organization suffered a heavy loss this week with the announcement that their in-game-leader Sean "sgares" Gares will step down from the team'; it is yet unclear whether he will will be retiring from the professional scene entriely. Read a small excerpt from his full statement below:
Luminosity changes two
The top Brazilian team, Luminosty Gaming, made major roster changes this week, dropping longt-time team members Ricardo "boltz" Prass and Lucas "steel" Lopes in order to bring in Lincoln "fnx" Lau and Epitacio "TACO" Pessoa, both from Games Academy. To fill the empty spots, GA have added boltz to their own roster as well as John "felps" Vasconcellos from g3x.
Trade holds introduced for items
Valve has decided to combat the widespread item scam issue with their implementation of their new item trade rules that delay item trades long enough for a victim of a scam catch the error and cancel it before their items are gone. The new system also will now incentivize Steam users to use their mobile authenticater; find out more in the full article.
IEM Championship to return to Katowice
This spring will see the IEM Championships return to Katowice, this time for CS:GO, ESL has announced this week. The tournament will span three days and will feature the customary $250,000 prize pool.