Since we all met last time in Andong at the basic event for all our community, IeSF World Championship, we have had a lot of hot activities in our cold country. On November, starting with Ural Cup e-sports event, we have hosted conference and festival as collaborating with Universities in Russia. Also, our new web project, Russian e-Sport Portal, since July 2011, has been keeping us busy as well. We just opened the project for testing. Moreover, we have hosted other interesting events such as Miss Gamer Contest and Techlabs Cup. We will update full story of each events through several volumes of IeSF newsletter. For this month, we would like to start with the story of several events, Ural Cup, Miss Gamer Contest, and Techlabs Cup.
On the 19th of November, in Yekaterinburg, we had a small e-Sport event named Ural Cup, which took place in the Ural State University of Economics (USUE, http://www.usue.ru/en) within the framework of Young Innovators Congress. Players competed in StarCraft 2, Mortal Combat 3 (xBox360), Civilization V. Also, there was presented a non-gaming contest, such as PC assembling. About 1000 players and spectators attended the event. StarCraft 2 games internet streams were watched by 15000 spectators. One more important thing about Ural Cup is that it used to be one of the first our big competition events at the very beginning of RESF (in 2001-2005). Now it’s reviving and we all hope that it soon will reach the same magnitude as it was ten years ago.
Among weekdays full of routine (either work or playing games or e-sport training, to each their own), there should be something recreating what lets one catch a break. Spring has come (though here we still cannot see it, it’s -3°C ~ -12°C) and, for the second time, the “Miss Gamer” event took place. The idea of the contest is that each game project participating makes preliminary casting where people choose a girl, who will represent the game at the final. This time the games were: World of Tanks, Forsaken World, Panzar: Forged by Chaos, the Settlers Online, Risen 2: Dark Waters, Dofus, Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai, Mass Effect 3, BS.ru and Ridge Racer Unbounded. To tell the truth I had no idea about most of the games but I liked the final contest itself. The contest consisted of four rounds. First lady-gamers presented themselves and their games, then they competed on PlayStation 3 in Mortal Combat. After that the girls dressed in bikini presented brand new games World of War Planes and World of Battleships (WarGaming.net). And the last one was cosplay-defile. The first place was taken by Miss Mass Effect 3 Anna Moleva. Miss Risen 2 Elena Urusova became the Vice Miss Gamer. RESF provided technical support and assistance for the contest.
By the time the Miss Gamer Contest took place we had already finished online preliminaries for the most recent our competition ? Techlabs Cup. TechLabs Cup is a new event for us. History of TC counts a few years. It’s a project of a Byelorussian IT & hardware web-portal TechLabs.By. In 2011 Techlabs Cup competitions covered Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In 2012, it started with Russia. Players competed in World of Tanks 7×7, BloodLine Champions 3×3, Point Blank 5×5, Counter Strike 1.6 5×5. WoT, PB and BLC prelims were only for Russian players, CS ones were open for everyone. Teams competed were held with single elimination system till final matches. Finalists were to compete at the final event which took place on the 18th of March in Khimki (Moscow suburb). Total number of players participated in the preliminaries exceeded 5 thousand. Techlabs Cup final event also included show-matches in Quake Live, Dota 2, Counter Strike 1.6 and overclocking competition between teams from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan supported by TechLabs portal. Final match in Counter Strike should have happened between NaVi and SK. Unfortunately SK team didn’t manage to come and got technical loss, and NaVi gained the first prize. Instead we arranged a show match between NaVi and Moscow Five which actually only increased the audience and was the central happening of the event. The other match that attracted a lot of fans was Quake Live Cooller (Anton Singov) vs Cypher (Alexey Yanushevsky). Cypher won 2:1.
Photos from the TechLabs Cup:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.298946970172650.65338.185220461545302
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.298471780220169.65246.185220461545302
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.298208206913193.65195.185220461545302
We didn’t make any video about the cup but there are a lot of reports at youtube made by others.
Meanwhile RESF have opened a regional department in Khabarovsk and started making new ones in Samara and at Sakhalin. Thus, by the regular congress (once each four years) we’ll have around 55 regional departments. On the 24th of March, Russian e-Sports Federation became 12.
