Points for eSports has been a long time coming at Roses, so there was a lot of pressure on the competitors to make the whole thing worthwhile. York’s FragSoc came out in force to support their teams and a respectable Lancaster contingent turned up as well. The whole event was streamed live on Twitch.tv so people could even watch from home. All that needed to be done was to cram some nerds and PCs into some small rooms and watch the results.
The first game on the cards was Dota 2, and it was a strange one as the game in question had experienced a significant update only a few days before. The experienced teams now had to deal with game, Hero rebalances and a host of new items which could potentially upset the game. The show had to go on however, and York opened strongly, winning game one, conceding only one team fight to Lancaster. Lancaster fared better in game two, commanding the early game but falling off to the apparently more practised York line-up. Game two and the Dota 2 series went to York.
Following Dota 2 came Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) in which the pressure was now squarely on Lancaster, as if they lost this, the full four points would go to York. Lancaster were the favourites to win CS:GO but quickly conceded the first six rounds, much to the excitement of FragSoc. Lancaster regained ground after that, bringing the score of the first game to 16-11 to Lancaster after a tense final round that saw Lancaster’s Kehzuh defeat York while outnumbered four to one. Lancaster opened more strongly in game two and there were excellent shows of skill on both sides, but Lancaster were ultimately victorious. It was 1-1, with all to play for in the next series.
In League of Legends both teams pulled out all the stops, knowing that the entire competition depended on their performance here. I’ll confess to not knowing enough about LoL to go into detail here but as was the fare for the entire competition, there were impressive displays on both sides. While the Lancaster team tightened their hold on the series, York still refused to go down without a fight, risking and arguably losing game one on a Baron kill and Lancaster’s Lee Sin’s smite steal. Lancaster secured the lead even more soundly in the second game, having presence all over the map. League of Legends, and the four points for Roses eSports 2016, went to Lancaster. Commiserations to our friends from York, who put everything into making it an enjoyable competition to watch and promoting the rising star of eSports. Let’s see how they perform next year on home turf.
