League of Legends to top last year’s tournament this March

Jose Maldonado/ Contributing Writer

news@fiusm.com

FIU League of Legends community prepare for Panther’s Rift.

Over the past few years, E-Sports have steadily gained popularity around the globe due to competitive multiplayer games such as League of Legends and Dota 2. Last year alone, the League of Legends 2014 World Tournament was streamed by 40 private broadcasters in 19 different languages and had over 27 million viewers.

With its popularity among FIU gamers, it is no surprise that FIU will be hosting its largest League Tournament ever named Panther’s Rift.

The tournament is a joint effort between STARS and Association for Computing Machinery, both of which are under the School of Computing and Information Sciences, to promote programming education among FIU students.

The tournament itself began preparations early spring semester among a group of students from both organizations lead by STARS President Gio Peralto-Pritchard, whose vision of the event is to bring together a community with a common interest.

“Students have actually sent me emails and messages saying thanks for hosting this tournament, this is a great idea. The positive feedback has proven to me already that this is a good idea,” said Peralto-Pritchard.

“Originally, I aimed for a 40 person tournament because that is what Riot Games requires for sponsorship for an event, but the day after we opened registration we had 40 people and we felt we could make the cap larger.”

The tournament consists of 16 teams of five that will battle through a first phase elimination qualifier March 7 and the main event on March 21.

Semifinals will be best out of three and finals will be best out of five.

All standard League of Legends rules apply to the tournament. There will be plenty of space for spectators and the team is planning to stream the tournament on the popular streaming site Twitch for outside League fans to see.

The tournament as of now is going through its final preparations. STARS and ACM members have assembled a Solutions Engineering team specific to solving the technical and logistic issues of holding an event of this magnitude such as creating algorithms to evenly distribute individuals to teams, handling online participant registration and create live video streaming solutions for the event.

“It may not sound like a big deal, but when you get to the fine math of it we have to incorporate a lot of mathematical/computational theory and efficiency,” said Peralto-Pritchard about the work his solutions engineering team has been doing.

One big difference between Panther’s Rift and ordinary League Tournaments is that it will incorporate an evenly distributed team selection which places competitors in teams by rank evenly.

In other words, no team will have all pro gamer or all casual gamers, but rather an even mix of skills between all teams in an effort to make the tournament fair.

“We have 80 people in our tournament, and we have to take 80 people regardless of their rank. We said anyone could enter this tournament and for us to say something that broad and that bold means that our algorithm [computer system]  needs to be secure and meet our need,” said Peralto-Pritchard.

In the end, Panther’s Rift could bring more than spawning a new community of gamers and free goodies like Teemo Hats.

Establishing a relationship between Riot Games and FIU could create a pathway for internships and opportunities for students within the company, as well as establishing a greater E-Sports culture on our campus.