BYOC 2012 : Rollercoaster of Indian E-Sports!
The previous weekend kicked off with a striking blow as the most awaited gaming event in India was fired up and met with a phenomenal response. This year’s summer event was held at Ambience Mall Gurgaon and drew gamers from all across the nation. Like ever year it was focused on everything you can do with computers, Internet and digital entertainment and the gaming cult. A lot of large tournaments and competitions were held along with companies like MSI, ASUS, Nvidia, WD,ChangYou, Msi, Cooler Master,Zotac,Zavio and Avermedia as their main sponsors.
The event was organised by Xtreme Gaming. The event was fun and without doubt was one of the most adrenaline fuelled gaming marathon in recent times. The gamers returned with their nuclear powered rigs and were once again here to compete with the best and brightest in India.
The gamers were in a much different place and had much more time on their hands on awesome events for all those competitive souls to enjoy. We have had a great staff to help us in this and we have definitely struggled to find people to take up leadership roles to put on our events. We just want to play games and have fun here and BYOC did just that. The event overall was a blast along with the exception of few minor hiccups the outcome was a great.
Basically given where BYOC has been standing, we are just interested in delivering a quality gaming experience with our close friends. The games line-up this time was the usual titles like Counter Strike , Call of Duty 4, Need For Speed: Most Wanted ,DOTA(Defence of the Ancients),Tekken6, Fifa 12 and a fine addition to this year’s Byoc was Battlefield 3. Battlefield nearly drew attention as much as the rest of the games. The competitions were intense and every gamer out there weather competing professionally or gaming casually had fun.
Various sponsors organised their respective stalls demonstrating various new technologies and promoting new products, for example Nvidia showcasing gameplay on the new Kepler Architecture With powerful graphic cards like the GTX 670 and 690.
Asus also showcased the new mobile gaming platform the Asus G75, among the stalls were also fun giveaways that were organised by many sponsors that attracted a lot of attention.
Now, talking about hiccups, you can always expect a turbulence in the professional tournaments, not because of the management or schedule, but due to gamers themselves. This time, there was some misunderstanding between ATE Gaming from Mumbai and Xtreme Gaming. ATE turned up on 2nd day of the tournament and demanded entry in the tournament bracket. Now since the tournament was already in full pace, it was hard for the organizers to integrate a new team in the brackets, and as a result, the organizers denied. Moreover, according to ATE, the only reason why they turned up on 2nd day was due to some train reservation issues and they had already informed Xtreme Gaming about their late arrival and even got a confirmation from the organizers that they will be allowed to enter the tournament on 2nd day. Xtreme Gaming denied having the whole conversation and stated that they were not informed about their late arrival. Xtreme Gaming had no clue whether the team’s gonna participate or not. We had a word with Ajay Gupta (Director-Xtreme Gaming) and he states :
ATE came on the second day stating that they want to register and at that time, there were already 8 clans that were competing, so I could not allow them to get registered as it would disrupt the on-going event tree and it would mean unfair for the competing Counter-Strike clans to redistribute playtimes in the allotted schedules.”
Moreover, XG even told ATE if they wanna play, they should seek permissions from the teams participating in the tournament.. As expected, the teams denied. Ben Varghese (ATE Gaming) states that :
We talked to XG guys before coming and at that time, they were okay with it. Apart from that, I have no comments to make.”
There were other teams from Mumbai who were participating, not only they reached on time, but they registered online a month ago and happily took back the cup with them. If we talk about improving E-Sports in India, we are the ones who need to follow the rules and make sure the tournament doesn’t lose its professional feel in any way possible. Team ATE is well known for their national achievements, but this doesn’t make them or any other team eligible to mould the tournament in their own way.