The First Inter-House Contest of the Year – Valorant

IIIT’s current (soon-to-be-sophomore) fresher batch recently conducted its first intra-batch inter-house tournament – the UG1 Valorant Tournament. It was organised and conducted by Nukit Tailor, on the 21st of May, over voice channels and screen-sharing in the UG2K20 Discord server. Teams of gaming aficionados from each house battled it out for the title of UG2K20 Valo Champs, with members of their house cheering them on from the sidelines. This is, notably, the first inter-house contest for the batch, which has never seen the campus where such activities would have largely made up their first month.

The tournament was conducted in a round-robin format, with each team playing every other team once. Valorant was the game of choice as it allows players to set up custom games easily and allows for more spectators, which other games like CS:GO do not.

According to Nukit, the motivation for organising the tournament was to get people to play more games. “Most students focus on academic and cultural activities; they skip out playing games with friends and meeting new people.” He decided to organise the tournament to show others how easy it was to join the gaming community.

The tournament was great fun for everyone who participated. The tourney saw highly competitive gameplay, with a lot of fun banter as well, allowing the participants to play with and get to know new people. As a result, the tournament has successfully increased the activity among UG2K20, with many spectators joining the live stream to watch the teams battle it out and cheer their house. It has also been essential in getting more people to join the gaming community of UG2K20, with the next tournament poised to have more teams participating.

The tournament winners were Vayu house, though it is not clear if this event will be counted for the year-end house total.

Making such tournaments a regular feature – possibly for new games such as Brawlhalla, or others that can be played on most laptops and desktops – is being considered. The winners of these tournaments will receive a “rolling role” on the discord server to keep until the next edition.

Editor: Ainesh Sannidhi