Ready. Set. Game.

CESA Holds City Heroes 2015 Tournament, Looks To Improve Membership

SportsVince Morello — Published February 24, 2015 | Updated February 24, 2015 at 9:26pm

Organized by Concordia’s eSports Student Association, City Heroes 2015 saw players from Dawson, Vanier and École de technologie supérieure come together to play and compete in League of Legends, the popular game developed by Riot Games.

“I would classify it as a strategy game. It’s controlling objectives, it’s getting more gold to buy more items,” said Yilong Sun, CESA’s president, about League of Legends. “[There are] levels. You get more skills, more power, you get more things that you [can use to] kill the other player with.”

Players involved in the tournament competed against each other in teams of five. Each team went through a round-robin and the two teams with the most wins advanced to a best-of-three final.

In a separate room from the players, spectators watched the tournament while listening to shoutcasters give a play-by-play of the games.

“It’s lots of fun. It’s actually my first time playing a big LAN event like this,” said Lawrence Lu, one of the participants in this year’s tournament.

“This is great because you’re with your team and you show what you can do.”

Despite this event’s moderate success, CESA is a relatively new Concordia club and, much like other Concordia clubs, it’s looking to grow.

“The eSports club has been here for about four years,” said Sun. “We’re trying to make it big, trying to make the club bigger as the years pass.”

“We changed the whole management,” said the Vice President of Events, Alessandro Chiari. “We have a new president, I’m the new VP of Events, and all our offices are new because the old guard graduated and left just about nothing behind, so we had to take over.”

With new management, the club has been looking for ways to attract members not just this semester, but in the coming years as well.

“We want to present at the club fair to make ourselves known, and find other ways to reach out more people to increase the amount of people interested,” said Chiari. “We want to make it accessible for everyone. Are you a big gamer at Concordia? Great, tell us about it.”

Despite City Heroes 2015 being their last event of the year, CESA continues to operate by participating in an inter-collegiate League of Legends tournament with a grand prize of up to $20,000 in scholarship per player.

“I work with the main Concordia team for League of Legends and we go over what a regular team would in sports,” Chiari said. “We do practices, we play friendlies against other teams, and we analyze our mistakes.”

But Chiari does acknowledge that the club could be even better.

“We can do more,” he said. “We want to do more LAN events, more casual friendly [games] with Concordia students.”

“We have a website, and you can find us on Facebook if you search Concordia eSports Student Association,” Sun added. “We have a list of people that can play anytime we want and you can just contact them on the website.”

“On our Facebook page we have excel sheets full of players for League. We have over 50 players just from Concordia. [Defence of the Ancients] we have 10 players. Counterstrike we have another 10 players,” said Chiari, adding that the only issue, in his view, is that gamers don’t know about the club.

Video by Evgenia Choros