In its first ever National Championships, Avengers, a Coimbatore based team bagged the crown and a cash prize of Rs.1,80,000. The event was held by Funizen at LXG (League of Extraordinary Gamers), a gaming cafe in Bangalore.
Joomin (Chris) Lee, CEO of Funizen Solutions handing over the trophy to the winners.
Gamers were roped in from Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Coimbatore for the competition. These were seasoned players who had won mini-tournaments in their respective zones and represented the upper echelon of Elsword players. We did notice that a lot more players turned up for the tournament from the south as compared to the other regions. Most players were quite young and the team names only attested to that fact. On their journey towards the crown, the Avengers had to beat “The Revengers”, “The Death Dealers”, “Devil’s D”, etc and a lot more teams with similarly dark themed names.
Elsword is a free-to-play 2.5D action MMORPG developed by KOG and published in India by Funizen Solutions, the organisers of the event. It’s not a new game, in fact the first server went live in 2007 but the Indian server has only recently been made live. This was the first ever national level tournament that has been held. The game has both, PvE and PvP modes, and is quite fast paced. Team Deathmatches generally follow a 3 vs 3 pattern with most teams choosing to maintain an even balance by choosing different character classes.
The event had very little lacking and seemed to be quite well planned. The venue, LXG, is a gaming cage in Bangalore which had 30 active rigs with each rig boasting of a NVIDIA GTX 760 being the bare minimum. If you haven’t guessed it yet, this was an NVIDIA Experience Zone. While rounds were conducted on the ground floor where all the rigs were kept, those who weren’t playing were kept entertained on the first floor where matches being played were streamed live. Funizen maintains the Indian server in Chennai, as a result latency issues weren’t a concern. Each match was even recorded for review purposes.
The matches started early in the day and by evening most of the 16 teams had been eliminated. All that remained were the three finalists and the last few matches lasted well over an hour of adrenalin filled madness which ended with the Coimbatore based Avengers beating their fellow Coimbatorean team, The Revengers 2-0. Though disappointed with the loss, The Revengers weren't entirely sad since they did take home Rs.60,000 as cash prize.
The two finalists moments before victor emerged.