Changing with the seasons
One of the big gripes I have about my current to-do list with eLeague.gg is that I’m almost buried in the work required for developing the website. It actually genuinely gets in the way of something that I think might be even more important to eLeague’s operations – communicating with the community.
We haven’t quite explained it clearly although people can probably guess from our event naming that eLeague.gg operates on a seasonal calendar - with our BYOC acting as the ‘launch’ event of the season. Contrary to popular belief, these events are not our grand finals although they do host them, for example:
- Autumn BYOC - hosts Summer Finals, launches Autumn
- Winter BYOC - hosts Autumn Finals, launches Winter
- Spring BYOC - hosts Winter Finals, launches Spring
- Summer BYOC - hosts Spring Finals, launches Summer
With such frequent, eSport level events; there’s a lot to learn that some existing market players already know very well. Even though eLeague.gg’s focus is not on top tier teams; a lot of what we’re learning I can only imagine that the premium tournament organisers have had to go through many moons ago.
Coming from a strictly community BYOC background - means I’ve had to learn (and am still learning) the pressures of organising a consistent, regular tournaments with our community.
This includes bringing on specialist members into our team who are knowledgeable about games. Let’s use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an example as it’s our most popular title (currently).
I’ve been playing Counter-Strike a long time. In fact, I was there at release day of beta 1 some time in 1999 (I was in year 9 at high school at the time and had little else to do but play games). However, the times they are a-changing. I’ve been playing CS:GO but only occasionally, and my reflexes aren’t as fast anymore. The community’s attitudes have changed. The concept of eSports as a serious venture is now much closer than the distant dream on the horizon it was when I started doing LAN gaming.
We’ve brought on two very young members on our team, they’ve got the energy and drive to help eLeague.gg truly deliver an amazing experience for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The sensationally talented:
- FISHY well known for his contributions to LAN based tournaments at Respawn in Melbourne
- Karath a well known member of the Australian CS:GO community, he’s in fact already smoothly run our first tournament at our Autumn BYOC
And with them, a whole swathe of volunteers who are passionate about CS:GO and the gaming community to support them.
They’ve been working to develop rule sets for us, and to try and implement our first seasonal tournament that we shall be announcing over the next 48 hours! And I hope the community will, on some level, understand the stresses they had setting up a great looking tournament, while struggling with an online platform that’s literally in the flux of development and constantly changing around their organisation.
It’s been a team effort between the tech team, our CS:GO team and even our other game organisers coming up, to get things running.
There’s a great journey ahead for eLeague.gg as it continues to deliver ever evolving resources to support the community. And I’m glad that there’s a team that’s so supportive, passionate and ingenius; and a community that’s incredibly supportive, understanding and passionate - about the games we play.