u/coldrolledpotmetal

https://www.twitch.tv/apesquadorg/clip/PiercingGleamingHeronNerfRedBlaster-sKAs5H-v8AShvNh1

The Pro Hub League’s Play Days have two broadcasts per day, one for EMEA (still live right now as of posting), and one for the Americas. The play days are running for the next few weeks, which will end up being a lot of posts, so before I go and schedule all of them I want to see what you all think is the right cadence.

These threads get a few upvotes every time they’re posted but they don’t get much discussion so I’m not sure how much value people are getting out of them. The main reason I wanted to create them was so there’s a persistent place for tournament discussion and to act as a little reminder that things are happening. Of course, there’s always the calendar pinned at the top of the subreddit if you want to see what events are live or coming up.

Let me know what you think of them, I’d like them to be useful to people.

Also, side note, I’ve been flairing them as “match threads” when that’s not exactly accurate since they cover entire tournaments or days of league play, not single matches. Definitely open to suggestions if we keep them (broadcast thread, event thread, or something else)

View Poll

There were some fantastic games yesterday, congrats to the teams that qualified! Here are the VODs if you missed the broadcasts:

EMEA VOD

AMER VOD

Source: the site formerly known as twitter

EMEA rosters and quals results: https://www.phltf.com/events/cmo85tc9v0009kz04rqr5hpmu-phl-26-emea

AMER rosters and quals results: https://www.phltf.com/events/cmo84v5fy0000kw04gbwa8cyk-phl-26-americas

Both regions are running tomorrow on Twitch: EMEA at 10:30 AM PDT and Americas at 4 PM PDT. Whoever makes it through moves on to League Play starting May 6.

Full schedules on phltf.com: EMEA | Americas.

The event calendar has everything else coming up if you're interested in watching (or participating in) other events!

Finals Contender League - Season 2

Week 4 Group Stage (Final Week) | NA

Wednesday, April 29 | 6:00 PM PDT / 9:00 PM ET

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Format: 16 teams split into groups of 4. Four rounds of Ranked Cashout per group. Points earned through placement, kills, and cash. Top 8 advance to single elimination playoffs (Bo3, Final Round). Bottom 8 eliminated.

Stream: twitch.tv/fcltf_

Liquipedia: Finals Contender League - Season 2

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Last chance to lock in a playoff spot. Discuss the matches, final standings, and who makes the cut.

I keep seeing Matt's answer about the melee rework in the AMA get telephone-gamed into stuff he didn't say. I'm not arguing for or against the rework, I haven't seen it, none of us have. I'm just asking people to argue about what the devs actually said, not a compressed version of it. I'm not going to tell you what to think about any of this, but I'd really recommend reading or watching what they actually said and seriously asking yourself whether what you think they said matches what's there, rather than relying on memes on the front page or what people say about it in the comments.

Below is a cleaned-up (just removing "um"s and stutters) transcript of the relevant section, where Oscar asks Matt (Design Director on The Finals) about the melee rework. I've bolded the claims about the rework, so if you're skimming, at least read those.

TL;DR: Matt said they don't have a final solution for the melee rework yet, they're prototyping and testing. He described the current problem like this: there's no defined combat loop for melee-vs-melee or melee-vs-ranged the way there is for gun fights. The gun user "just gets... mash mash mash," which Matt said is "not fun for the victim" and "not really a huge amount of fun for the melee user, necessarily, if it's just spamming the button." The damage nerfs they've used to offset that frustration have left melee struggling competitively. The design target Matt described is a combat loop where the gun player gets to fight back in a way that "feels fair" and the melee user gets real payoff for closing distance skillfully, with each melee weapon getting its own specializations on top of that shared loop. Oscar summarized the goal as making melee "viable without making it super frustrating to experience," which Matt confirmed. The end state Matt described is: the gun user gets killed by the melee player but thinks "yeah, that was totally fair, that guy did the right thing, closed in and they killed me." Matt also said the same fairness goal applies to melee-vs-melee fights.

VOD with timestamp if you'd rather listen to it: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2755133956?t=00h29m44s

Transcript (29:44 - 34:12)

Oscar: All right, so now we're approaching leak territory again here, but maybe it's worth talking about. So we have talked here and there about a melee rework. It's been on the topic at least internally for a very long time. I think we've talked about it publicly once or twice in the past as well. It's a topic again. Is there anything we want to say or share on the topic of that melee rework?

Matt: I want to talk maybe a bit about the philosophy of it.

Oscar: Yeah.

Matt: That word came out weird, "philosophy."

Oscar: The philosophy? Should I get my monocle out and the top hat?

Matt: We'll get there, yeah.

Oscar: All the hats on and there we go.

Matt: The philosophy.

Oscar: The philosophy of melee.

Matt: So we don't know right now what the exact solutions are. For example, we are prototyping a bunch of stuff at the minute, we are testing it, we're trying out little bits and pieces.

But if I talk about what we want to kind of achieve philosophically and how it affects gameplay, the best thing I can do right now is compare it to a gunfight. If you're in a 1v1 gunfight, shotgun user versus a sniper user, the shotgun user is trying to get maybe across a 50 meter open space, using cover to close distance on the sniper.

Oscar: Yeah.

Matt: And the sniper knows the shotgun player is trying to do that, and they're trying to stay away from the shotgun user, keep distance, keep long lines of sight.

Oscar: Yeah.

Matt: And from that you get a little game, you get a little trade-off, and you're trying to outthink each other, you're trying to make smart decisions. And that's ultimately a small combat loop that is going to be engaging over the long term.

Oscar: The micro gameplay, yeah?

Matt: Right, and I think what we feel like with the way we approach melee from the start of the game through to now is we've never really defined what a melee-melee combat loop looks like, those two 1v1, or a melee vs ranged user fight ends up playing like.

So, often what happens is, as a gun user getting attacked by a melee user, you end up in this position that you're just getting, like, somebody appeared out of nowhere, they're on top of you and just mash, mash, mash.

Oscar: That's right.

Matt: That's not fun for the victim. And it's not really a huge amount of fun for the melee user, necessarily, if it's just spamming the button. And then on the flip side, often to offset that, we're also nerfing the damage of those melee users, which is then meaning that they often struggle statistically in terms of: can they win tournaments easily, can they compete in those kinds of things.

And so the approach we're taking is, can we build more complete loops for those kinds of combat encounters? Like, how does a gun player get to fight back in a way that feels fair against a melee user when the melee user gets on top of them? How does the melee user get payoff for having closed distance in a really skillful way? How else can they close distance so that that is a skill in its own right?

So we're trying to almost do back to scratch and build that loop up. And ideally that would be a loop that can work for all of the melee weapons. And then on the foundation of that combat loop, you do little specializations for different weapons and different items that make them distinct from each other. So, very kind of design theory approach to it, I guess.

Oscar: Is it my simple mind, maybe, if I try to understand it... we would want to try and make melee viable without making it super frustrating to experience.

Matt: Right. I guess the... if I asked a bunch of players right now, I'm sure a bunch of them would tell me that melee doesn't belong in a shooter game.

Oscar: Fair fair, yeah that is an opinion, sure.

Matt: And sure, you know, some people see it as low skill, and then some people that use melee are like, "Dude, I have to try so much, I have to learn all these bits of tech." That, yeah, to be honest, we don't really want those exploits to be in the game.

Oscar: Yeah.

Matt: And so it's hard for the melee user. So it's both high skill and challenging, and then also seen as low skill at the moment right now. And we want to get to a place where it is very much the gun user goes, "Yeah, that was totally fair. That guy did the right thing, closed in and they killed me." And the same for the melee user when they face another melee user or a gun user or those kinds of things.

Oscar: Cool. It was a philosophical answer.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oscar: But not very abstract.

Matt: No.

Oscar: It was quite understandable.

Matt: Not really long words, to be honest. No Greek.

Oscar: No Greek words. You didn't throw any weird epsilons out there.

Matt: Yeah.

Oscar: I think that's...

Matt: Maybe.

Oscar: I don't know. I have no idea. What do I know? I made my career just talking quickly.

Ape Squad Classics I 2026 - EMEA

League Day 3 | Top 28 | Secondary Cut: Bottom 4 eliminated

Sundays @ 1PM ET / 7PM UTC

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Format: Round-robin lobby system. Points awarded per lobby placement (1st: 6, 2nd: 4, 3rd: 2, 4th: 1). Bottom 4 teams on the leaderboard are cut after today. Field narrows to Top 24.

Stream: twitch.tv/apesquadorg

Tournament Info: apesquad.org

Liquipedia: Ape Squad: Classics - EMEA League Play

Discord: discord.gg/apesquad

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Discuss the matches, standout plays, and results as they happen.

The Heist Games - 2026 NA Circuit Grand Finals | Top 8 | $1,000 + Cherry Xtrfy Hardware

Saturday, April 25 | 6 PM ET

Format: Top 8 teams by cumulative points across the four qualifiers. The Grand Finals will include true final rounds, following the same 3v3v3v3 elimination format.

Stream: twitch.tv/the_heist_games
Tournament Info: heistgamestournament.com
Liquipedia: The Heist Games - Grand Final

Discuss the matches, standout plays, and results as they happen.

(Sorry for the delay on this one, thought I had it scheduled!)

https://www.twitch.tv/apesquadorg/clip/SucculentShakingRhinocerosPastaThat-OaCbQE6hUQ7FUu4Q

Ranked is just the floor of competitive play in The Finals. The next step up is pick-up games (PUGs): organized team play against teams that actually want to compete, casters covering the matches, and a Discord full of people you can build a team from. The community runs casted weekly PUGs Monday through Thursday, and Brawlr.gg launched earlier this month as a standalone competitive platform that adds its own ranked ladder, scrim-finding, and tournaments on top.

Weekly community games

All three run live on Twitch with full casting, so your match might end up on broadcast. Join the host's Discord to get in the lobby.

• Ape Squad Merch Mondays, Mondays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Custom games hosted by Ape Squad, the same org behind the Ape Squad Classics tournament series. Discord | Stream
• TFC Tuesday Night PUGs, Tuesdays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Hosted by The Finals Central, a community-run content portal covering the Finals (and Deadlock) scene with articles, event coverage, and featured streams. They also post featured matches to YouTube. Discord | Stream
• CODEBREAKERS Thursday PUGs, Thursdays @ 5PM PDT / 8PM EDT. Hosted by CODEBREAKERS, a community that started as a Powershift tournament group and grew into a hub for customs, tournaments, and general Finals/Arc Raiders hangout. They run customs most nights. Thursday is the casted one. Discord | Stream

Brawlr.gg

Brawlr is a competitive platform built specifically for The Finals by pro player Etelco, launched earlier this month. Signup is free with a Discord account. Available whenever, built around three main pieces:

• Arena is Brawlr's own ranked 3v3 matchmaking, with its own Elo rating, five tiers (D through S), and a global leaderboard. Queue solo, duo, or trio. The system builds a balanced 6-player lobby, you do map bans, and play it out on a private Finals server.
• Competitions are tournaments and leagues hosted on the platform with interactive brackets, standings, and community-funded prize pools. The FINALS Masters 3v3 beta on April 25 is the first Finals tournament running there.
• Scrims are pre-arranged practice matches between two specific teams, a level of organization above ranked or Arena play. This is one of the main ways teams prepare for tournaments. Brawlr's scrim finder lets teams post match offers (availability, skill, format) that other teams send requests on.

See you in the arena, contestants!

Source: https://x.com/RealHeistGames/status/2045698855392452635

I watched through the second league day for NA in the Ape Squad Classic and pulled all the loadouts I could catch from the broadcast plus every team comp across the 10 rounds shown. This is a snapshot of where the meta has settled a few weeks into S10, not exhaustive per-round tracking (since I don't have data for the rounds that weren't broadcasted), so take the off-meta counts with a grain of salt.

Overall the meta hasn't shifted a ton since the S9 scrim meta, but a few things worth calling out:

• The 93R is the new Light top pick at 9 users and basically the only big shift from S9. The rest of the Light weapon pool is genuinely the most diverse of the three classes, with ARN-220, V9S, M11, XP-54, and even a Dagger and LH1 all showing up. The P90 seems to have dropped out entirely
• Heal Beam is basically locked on Medium, with a handful of Demat users mixing it up. Medium has also solidified around FCAR and Repeater as the two dominant picks. The gadget trio (Defib, Jump Pad, Goo) is essentially mandatory
• Mesh edges out Winch on Heavy (12 vs 9), and when teams run double heavy it's almost always Mesh + Winch together (3 of 4 comps). The SHAK might also be edging out the SA1216 as the top Heavy weapon
• Heavy was present in every single comp on broadcast. No Light/Medium-only comps at all
• The C4 vs Healing Emitter flex on Heavy seems to track with whether the team is playing more aggressive or more sustain-focused, though I didn't really track this systematically

Curious what people think, how does this compare to your experiences in ranked?