Updated 4:50 PM PDT -- more coming.
Two cases of The ULTIMATE Rage Quit.
This country is not even remotely mature enough to handle the explosion of professional gaming (and it's offshoots), and, as of the last several days, we have a YouTube asshole, a Florida asshole and four other people who have been killed as part of this demimonde.
The first of two such stories on this was a YouTube asshole who Darwined himself and probably was trying to take as many people with him as possible.
Trevor Heitmann was 18 when he murdered two people and killed himself on a San Diego freeway last week.
Heitmann was a Counterstrike: Global Offensive player. He became involved, and opened a casino in, the lucrative illegal RMT "skin" trade, where he could, for a fee, have any player attempt to win lucrative rare items from his inventory in a casino setting.
Well, Valve, the makers of Counterstrike: Global Offensive, caught wind of his scheme and banned him, instantaneously ending his casino, and his money-making ability -- and the basis for his YouTube channel that had about 870,000 subscribers until he stopped posting last March.
How much money was involved? He had bought a McLaren 650S sports car -- six figures easily.
It is unclear on the timing between the ban and the actions, but Heitmann decided to take said sports car and start ramming it into as much as he could find. He rammed an elementary school gate and nearly killed two people there about 4 PM Thursday. This after his father, according to another report, had called the police, forecasting these events.
At that point, he took the sports car and starting doing 100+ MPH on the wrong side of the freeway on the 805 near San Diego. By 4:30, he had caused a seven-car melee which killed a 43 year-old woman and her 12 year-old daughter, and caused a fairly significant fire, in an area of the country where such a fire could get out of hand really quickly!
That's bad enough that people should've started having real question as to the future of the e-sports/pro-gaming/YouTube-gaming situation.
Then we get to the latest American mass shooting. Three killed, 9 wounded (latest official count) at a Madden 19 tournament in Jacksonville, FL today.
And this was no small tournament: It was a national qualifier for a live tournament. The top two players would be seeded into the final 16 players of the Las Vegas October live tournament, each receive at least $3,750 -- with $25,000 to the champion of the October tournament.
The shooting was actually captured on a video stream of the tournament. Just before the bullets start, the two players in the match, after a score, are seen on part of the screen, nothing going on here -- at least one is even smiling.
And then all Hell breaks loose.
One of the first commenters noted (and you can see it on the clip, which I will not link, but the Kotaku article does), that just before the shooting starts, you see a laser-sight being trained on the African-American player of the pair.
That player was one of two murdered. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Department has confirmed, as of about 1:40 PM PDT, the lone shooter was White.
At 4:30 PM PDT, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department announced they believed the suspect to be David Katz, 24, of Baltimore, and the FBI was raiding his South Baltimore home.
Katz was the Buffalo Bills champion of Madden 17, and one of the final eight players in a $25,000 first prize tournament for Club Champions.
The person on the game who was killed was one of the final 32 players in the 2016-17 Madden season-ending tournament.
At least two of the potential victims were members of one of the larger-scale American e-sports outfits, Complexity Gaming. Both were injured, one was grazed in the head.
Latest report from Reuters/LA Times: Eliminated player from the tournament raged and opened fire.
The only real remaining question is whether the Black player had actually eliminated the shooter or whether the shooter was earlier eliminated and decided to go "Florida Man".
These little shits and the entire culture around them (I still recall, early days of Madden, an ESPN show on the finals of a major tournament, where it seemed that both players were surrounded by their smack-talking posses) must be dealt with.
I've seen Twitch and Amazon running a bit away from video-gaming, with an increasing emphasis on other content. It's time (and far past) for relevant parties to put an end to the mass expansion of e-sports in this country, because this, women being groomed by YouTube "stars" for sex, and other frauds, bigotries, and deceits (looking at you, League of Legends) IS the "normal".
Or is it all "thoughts and prayers", "thoughts and prayers", "thoughts and prayers"...
"Because American gamers -- the attitude that they purport as a culture (not necessarily all individuals, but the culture) is all about "ME!!", "pwnage", "1337", and what can I get for myself???"
I said that TEN YEARS AGO!!!
As a video game fan since the age of about seven -- E -- FUCKING -- NOUGH!!!
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