By: Coby Zucker
In week one of the College League of Legends tournament, McMaster’s team was rated 11th overall by ESPN. That’s 11th out of 350 teams across North America.
“We didn't expect it to be that high,” said coach Pedro “Photograph” Ribeiro. “We knew that we had to make a name for ourselves because a lot of teams, typically when they see McMaster, they underestimate our ability just because a lot of these other schools on these rankings do have esports programs at their schools.”
Ribeiro and the team let the pressure fuel them throughout their strong 5-1 regular season performance, only dropping games in their set loss to York University. The hiccup in their otherwise dominant season meant they had to face off against the Rochester Institute of Technology in the first round, while other playoff teams were granted an automatic bye into the second round.
“It was a pretty thrilling series,” said Ribeiro. “I've never really been through something like that.”
The first game in the series against Rochester went Mac’s way in a fairly one-sided victory. In the next game, the team’s collective focus wavered, and Rochester snapped up a quick response to level the score at one game apiece.
Game three was a 42-minute slugfest that eventually went in the favour of Rochester. After the game, Mac put in their substitute Jungler in an effort to shake something loose. The result was an assertive win to put the series score at 2-2. More than four hours into the series, the last game of McMaster’s season began.
“I don't know how to describe that final game,” said Ribeiro. “It was just a really exceptionally played game by both sides, and it was a true skill match up. They were definitely on par with our abilities which, going into it, we didn't expect them to actually put up too much of a fight. But they really did give it their all.”
The early exit for the highly-touted squad was particularly difficult as a number of players and staff are graduating this year, including Ribeiro and the team’s Support player, Marty “Diminish” Kyorskis. Nonetheless, Ribeiro thinks that the remaining players will be back with a vengeance.
“That’s unfinished business,” said Ribeiro. “They want to avenge us next year. At least some of the guys, that's what they're saying. I know they're probably going to go hard and try to make up for the mistakes and get better.”
The season might be over, but Kyorskis still has much to be proud of at the end of his collegiate career. As a progenitor of the McMaster Esports club, Kyorskis was able to help start legitimizing competitive League of Legends and the rest of the esports scene at Mac. He feels that even more can be done in the coming years.
“I think [McMaster] is reluctant to support gaming, as they see themselves as more of an academic institution,” said Kyorskis. “They think that it's going to affect their image, for example. But as the sort of train departs the station, more schools will say, ‘Okay, we need to get on this because it's a big thing’. It is a thing. And we don't want to look like that school that's stuck in the past.”
Kyorskis would encourage anyone interested to take the same dive into the world of collegiate esports that he made in his first year at Mac.
“Work hard at it,” said Kyorskis. “It's not a walk in the park. It's a serious commitment. You're going to have to put in a lot of work and you're going to have to be able to balance your life around getting better at the game and surviving school, because naturally we don't want to give up academics in favour of playing the game. The potential is there because we've set up the structure. So work for it, earn it, and you can do it.”
So what’s next for Kyorskis and Ribeiro after they graduate? Kyorskis, as one of the best Support players in North America, seriously considered pursuing a career as a pro-gamer before deciding that it was not for him. Instead he is going to work on growing his Twitch.tv following to stay involved with the game.
Similarly, Ribeiro can see himself involved with pro or semi-pro League of Legends but feels that he will more likely keep up his competitive League of Legends presence by supporting the McMaster team as an alumnus.
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There are a number of McMaster students with childhood memories of playing video games for extended periods of time.
Playing alone, with your friends on a split screen or against players across the globe, video games have made a similar impact to this generation of students as sports have. Just as professional athletes are paid to play a game they enjoy, plenty of people wish they could play video games as a living.
Enter the industry of competitive video gaming, also known as Electronic Sports, which has grown in popularity as the internet has become faster and more accessible on a global scale. With games such as League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Overwatch each having their own professional leagues with a dedicated fan base, the tag of a professional eSports player has become a reality.
Along with the professional scene, collegiate leagues have also enjoyed a rise to a lesser degree. While there is no established league within U Sports or the Ontario University Athletics conference, McMaster’s League of Legends manager Zoila Ricciardone hopes that one can be established soon.
“Over the next few years, we are hoping to gain more support from the university, both from the students and the institution itself,” Ricciardone said. “We are currently working with the [McMaster] Athletics and Recreation department so that we can be recognized as an official varsity team by the university.”
A growing number of schools are starting to take eSports seriously, meaning there is a growing possibility for the OUA and U Sports to start hosting tournaments for eSports. On March 24 in the United States, Illinois College announced an expansion to their athletic program to include eSports, which will include two co-ed teams that will participate in established collegiate leagues.
Currently, the League of Legends team at McMaster University participates in uLOL Campus Series, an intercollegiate league that includes schools from both the United States and Canada. From the preseason to the playoffs, Mac competes with other schools from October to May of every year, and is continuously ranked based on their performances. The schedule for McMaster’s League of Legends team presents challenges that are unique to eSports teams and shared with traditional varsity sports.
“The biggest challenge as a team was getting together to practice during the week,” Ricciardone said. “There are a few reasons for this, some of which also apply to other varsity teams including schedule conflicts and academic obligations. A challenge specific to an eSports team is the lack of decent internet access during the week. McMaster’s Wi-Fi is not always the most reliable, and bandwidth is almost always taken up in student housing.”
The team still manages to meet up at least four or five times a week for scrimmages against other schools, in-person meetings and regular season and tournament games on the weekend. Even with these challenges, they has done considerably well this season. The team was able to finish third in the Eastern division, playing against top teams from the University of Toronto, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and State University of New York. Their next tournament takes place from May 12-14 at an invitational tournament in Toronto.
McMaster undergraduate students recently approved the creation of a new Student Activity Building to be constructed on campus. This space could include a gaming room. If so, this would provide more opportunities for McMaster eSports teams to get better and compete with the best teams from North America, while also giving Mac students the chance to relax from school and interact with fellow students through video games.
“In the end, our main goal is to generate hype around each of our competitive teams so that we can foster a community of people with similar interests,” Ricciardone said.
Perhaps it is not a matter of whether or not eSports will become established at McMaster and the OUA as a whole; it may be a matter of when.
It started last year, with one commerce student, Eric Hill, along with his two friends and his laptop on the second floor of the McMaster University Student Centre.
Minutes later, eight other students – who were complete strangers to Hill – and an extra laptop showed up, all of whom were playing Super Smash Brothers Melee together, just outside of Clubspace.
This eventually led to the creation of the McMaster Smash group, which is run by third-year commerce student Ian Coomes, who was one of the eight students Hill met in this encounter.
The growth of the Smash community at McMaster should come as no surprise. eSports as a whole, such as “League of Legends,” “DOTA 2” and “Overwatch,” have grown in popularity at the international level, with the top players in the world competing for over millions of dollars in cash prizes, some of which is crowd-funded by the respective communities.
Fighting games such as Project: Melee and Super Smash Brawl have enjoyed similar success. McSmashter was an annual event held at McMaster that ran for four years, attracting players from all across North America and was watched at an international scale. But it wasn’t until the creation of Mac Smash in 2015 where the community at McMaster started to grow. And McMaster Smash is one group that has seen a steady rise in popularity since its creation in 2015.
“Before we started doing anything, we knew that there was some interest in Smash at Mac because of McSmashter,” Coomes said. “We thought it had already been established here. But it was mostly Americans and other Ontario students that came to the event.”
“The fact that when we got here that there was nothing established was so surprising to us, given the size of McSmashter,” Hill said.
Fast forward to now, and the McMaster Smash group has grown in popularity and notoriety within the Smash community. When the group started their weekly tournaments, they were only able to attract 10 or 15 people per week, most of whom were mutual friends of Coomes and Hill. Now, their weekly events typically see about 100 people from across Ontario, some of whom are renowned within the community as the best players within the fighting genre.
Each week’s event is labour-intensive, with tasks that include creating new brackets based on rankings and transporting heavy equipment to campus.
“We used to take shopping carts and cart these heavy TVs from my house to the event and back, until all of them made their way to campus,” Coomes said.
But all that work has paid off. More and more students come to the events, and those who cannot go often stream the tournaments online. More impressively, many of the top rated Smash players attend the weekly events hosted by Mac Smash on a regular basis.
“This year, we have had at least five of the top 10 Smash players in Ontario show up to every single weekly event we have held except for one,” Coomes said. “It is unreal that the Smash scene has gotten so popular in Hamilton, of all places.”
“I remember someone from around Hamilton telling us that our scene was non-existent and that it sucked, because he could beat everyone,” Hill said. “Now, at this point, Hamilton is probably one of the best scenes for Smash in Ontario.”
"How much can we work with other universities in building up some sort of league system? How much can we do in order to make this game really explode in the North?
Ian Coomes
President, McMaster Smash
Most of the money comes from the Smash community itself, with players willing to pay to compete in tournaments. This has allowed the group to expand their events and attract even more attention from those interested in playing Smash.
“The scene in itself for Smash Bros has always functioned on its own, based off of the community’s own merit,” Hill said. “Everyone just loves the game, and they don’t want it to die out.”
The money that players pay as an entry to compete in the weekly tournaments run by Mac Smash goes towards covering cost for renting equipment, such as older televisions. Any money left over goes towards their large yearly event, Frozen Phoenix, which takes place at McMaster from March 24 – 26.
So as the Smash community grows at McMaster, what’s next for Coomes, Hill and the Mac Smash group as a whole?
“If we keep growing, then really the next question is how many medium events can we hold? How much can we work with other universities in building up some sort of league system similar to the US?” Coomes said. “How much can we do in order to make this game really explode in the north?”
Now it is feasible to dream about the expansion of University Sports and varsity sports within McMaster to expand to include eSports in the mix. And it all started with a few students, a couple of laptops, and an underlying passion and love for the game.
Michael Gallagher
The Silhouette
Despite its growing popularity, few people I ask are familiar with the term “e-sports” and the community that surrounds it. Talk of “professional gaming” sounds like nonsense to many, and is brushed aside without a second thought.
However, when the Korean pro-gamer Baek Dong Jun, better known by his in-game ID “Dear” took home $40,000 at the recent 2013 StarCraft II World Championship Series in Toronto, I’m sure he felt quite the opposite.
Competing for $160,000 canadian pharmacy viagra in prize money, 16 players from around the world met up in Toronto on Oct. 25-27 to play StarCraft II – a real-time strategy game produced by the game developer Blizzard. With them came 4,000 enthusiastic fans, looking to see who the best player in the world was.
To put it into perspective, the combined tournament earnings of the top 50 most successful players totals nearly six-million dollars, with the highest paid player having amassed $406,788 so far. Even more impressive, according to the CEO of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime, the current global viewership of StarCraft II as of Apr. 2013 has exceeded the viewership of the NHL.
These numbers probably seem unreasonably high to those doubting the legitimacy of the game itself, but top players know it requires intense dedication.
“It’s basically like a job,” says Chris Loranger (pictured), a successful Canadian pro-gamer known by his ID “HuK” in the StarCraft II community. “I’ll play eight to twelve hours a day on the days I’m practising, which is about 300 days a year.”
So what makes StarCraft II interesting to watch? To fans of traditional sports, the concept of watching a video game must seem confusing. To help those interested, I sat down with Sean “Day [9]” Plott, arguably the game’s most successful personality to ask him why someone should check out StarCraft II and e-sports. Plott is known for hosting his own online show “The Day [9] Daily,” and has been recognized by Forbes as one of the “Top 30 under 30,” alongside other notable celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Glover.
“Ever been into football? – Like American football where I’m from? – It’s really exciting and fun, as you get into it with your favourite team or region. After you watch the exciting play, you can’t do it yourself, because you need to get a full team together. Games are something where you can hop on immediately and try it yourself,” says Plott.
This kind of accessibility has led to almost four million people playing StarCraft II, with a significant portion tuning in to watch the fast-paced real-time strategy game.
If you’re interested in delving into StarCraft II and e-sports, the World Championship Grand Finals will be streamed online at on Nov. 8-9 with players competing for a massive $250,000 prize pool.
