Students on campus gathered to compete in a League of Legends bracket tournament.
Web Hed: League of Legends tournament pits OU students and nationalities against each other
Each day, there are 27 million gamers who play the video game League of Legends, making it the largest gaming audience in the world.
Ohio University’s Chinese Culture Exchange Association hosted a two-day League of Legends gaming tournament over the weekend pitting 11 teams against each other for two days with teams representing the United States, China and Korea.
Team PawPawPawWow won Sunday garnering the grand prize of a $150 game card and a trophy. The team was led by Hongrui Chi with team members Hao Zhang, Kaiwen Zuo, Jianan Chen and Zixuan Wang.
Team Ohio 1234 and the Korean team Samsung Yellow finished runners up, also winning trophies and game cards worth $100 and $50, respectively.
“The competition consisted of games counted in victories and losses,” said Zhou Chen, a senior studying marketing and an organizer for the event. "There were five American teams, five Chinese and one Korean team that competed."
Various rooms were occupied in Copeland Hall and Grover Center with laptops and computer monitors. A control room oversaw all the games simultaneously.
This ever-expanding game is a multiplayer battle arena that supports up to five players on a team. It’s a highly competitive game that has grown in popularity over the years garnering huge televised competitions with bigger prizes.
“The object of the game is to destroy the other player’s base,” Zhou said. “You can do this by killing their soldiers and gaining coins. You then spend the coins on armor to make you stronger, and ultimately destroying the other player’s tower and base.”
The gamers dedicated all of their time to the weekend’s tournament. The semi-finalists on Sunday had a gaming session lasting six hours with another eight hours spent gaming on Saturday.
“A typical game can last about 40 minutes,” Zhou said. “Although, I have watched a championship where the game had gone on for over 90 minutes.”
The purpose of this tournament was to pull together some similarities between the various gamers.
“I think this is quite a smart idea,” said Jiaoying Jiang, a senior studying political science and economics. “Those kind of online games are so popular in China, and American students also love playing those games. We built this platform and have this event for American students and Chinese students where they compete with each other.”
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