The finals of the 2016 SMITE World Championship have kicked off e-sports for the year, with the concluding match taking place last night. European squad Epsilon went up against Enemy from NA to decide who would get the lion’s share the prize pool and some decent rights to a ‘best in the world’ slogan. Spoilers from here on out.
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It only went three games, with Epsilon sweeping their opponents aside to take the crown. All the games have now been uploaded to the SMITE Pro YouTube channeland you can see the first right here:
With the victory, Epsilon’s Craig “iRaffer” Rathbone becomes the 2nd-highest earning British e-sports professional ever, and by a fair distance. He’s just four thousand dollars behind Nate “Ataraxia” Mark, a fellow SMITE player who was part of the runner up team last year. Those figures come from excellent resource site E-sports Earnings, which confirms that while you’re not going to make those Dota millions playing SMITE, a few of its players pepper the top 100 all time earnings list.
PCGamesN contributor and plague-carrier on the ground Chris Higgins tells me that while the finals were a bit of a dud, not least because of a game three pause, the semis had all the action we could want. Particularly Epsilon vs. Cloud9, the returning champions battling it out against EU’s unstoppable juggernaut 2nd seed. Here’s game one:
You can probably guess who won the series if you’ve been reading this article, but it went all five games with some incredibly clutch plays. SMITE’s not a game I follow, but a good match will still keep me entertained.