(At the time of writing this I was) …currently living and going to school in Orlando Florida. The plan was for me to come home to Los Angeles for a short summer, and attend E3 and MLG. Upon talking to my friends in So Cal eSports about this, they were disappointed that I would not be able to be attending the GESL. I was super lucky and able to extend my stay in the city of angels in order to attend the event. Big thanks to Prima for really pushing me to come, and giving me the job description “Reddit Guru.” The title still makes me chuckle.
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Pictures & Stories

One corrupt SD card later, I lost quite a bit of pictures from this weekend. QQ TT

This was my first time at Cal Poly Pomona, even tho I have lived in the area for the majority of my life. The campus was really nice and peaceful. Green poster board lead everyone from the parking lot to the Student Center.

The top floor was lined with posters and sponsor booths as you made your way to the main hall. TV’s displayed graphics of the days schedule. Everyone was walking around with their goody bags and free t-shirts. Entering the main hall, many more sponsor booths were present. GESL had more sponsors on sites with booths than any other event I have been too. He is the Gigabyte booth:

All of the on site sponsors also had an hour in a private hall downstairs to host workshops. Here the companies would do some educating and selling of their product. The real reason people went was so they could win some free stuff. Here is a picture of the Newegg workshop. People packed in as newegg gave away a ton of great stuff. I got a free 750w PSU myself. Other workshops got crazy. In the Enemax show, the girls hosting simply said “First one on stage wins X.” Someone might have gotten trampled to death in that room.

Also downstairs was “The Game Room.” They are a preexisting business in the building that has TVs, arcade machines, pool tables, bowling, air hockey, and all that fun stuff. Mad Catz took over the game room with some fighting game competition, but a lot of people were also gathered here just to hang out. The projectors were often playing whatever was not featured on the main stage at the time. Also near by, Red Bull set up a nice lounge for the players. In that room they had food, drink, and a PC with couches.

There were two rooms dedicated as practice areas. One for star players, and one for league players. This is where the players spent the vast amount of their time practicing, hanging out, and playing the matches that did not require a trip to the Red Bull booth in the main hall.

GESL packed the house in front of the main stage. I was rather surprised with the great turnout. They all got pretty hype with all of the free stuff being given out.

Speaking of free stuff, the raffles were the huge draw every day. Every person packed in to see if their lucky number got called out by Rachel. $25,000+ worth of stuff was given away in these raffles over three days. Many people won consecutive raffles, taking home hundreds of dollars in equipment. Some lucky folk even won complete gaming PCs, complete with monitors and peripherals.

Even Zig’s, a young LoL pro, mom won stuff. In fact having TD’s moms there, with their own jerseys, and doing interviews, was awesome.

Speaking of Team Dynamic, they are some cool cats who showed up at both MLG and GESL.

Rachel did an amazing job hosting. She is also very easy to take pictures of. Here are just a few of what I got.

Rachel, I’m Sorry. <3

Hosting also involves doing some interviews. Here is Rachel with Violet after he won his first set vs Illusion.

How about some player pictures? I have a bunch in the album, but here are some of my favorites.
Chris, Illusion, is someone who I really like to watch play. I really want him to break out and win something. Hope I’m at that tournament to give the man a high-five, and buy him some dinner. I need to make an effort to talk to you more Chris, I just dont want to bother you :3

Razer asked to use some of my pictures on their facebook wall, I was quite honored. #humblebrag

Violet

Monster

Golden

KawaiiRice. <3

Caliber

Flo was not playing at the event, but she was there cheering her Quantic brethren on.

Beastyqt

Axslav

Demuslim

Ryung, watching two streams at once like a boss.

Sleep playing, with Violet looking on from behind.

I became a fan of mystik this event. I did not watch him play much; but every time you are around the man, he is always smiling. It is infections

GESL got quite a bit of flack for not having an “A List” caster line up. Obviously this is becoming a more and more important part of events. Personally I enjoyed hearing casters who are up-and-coming. I do not enjoy how people will be flat out malicious towards these people. I have more caster pictures in the full album if you are looking for some more pictures of yourself men.
Gwin

Axeltoss

Azel

Thundertoss

and my personal favorite, Derp Wombat.

A big thanks to GhostClaw for also talking pictures. Doing a much better job at it than me. And updating liquipedia. And being a boss
.

And finally PrimaDog, who is mad that I have a picture up here of him. But he did a shit ton of work to make this thing happen. Saying that I do not wish to diminish all of the other volunteers who worked on the event. A lot of people worked really hard this weekend to make a great event.

You can find my complete imgur album for the event (and all of my other event photographs) here.

The community; cutting off its nose to spite its face

I let my jimmies get a little bit rustled this weekend. Sigh.
On Sunday I made a post in /r/starcraft, and then cross-posted it in /r/leagueoflegends. The post was me compiling all of the (many) sponsors for GESL so that we can try and thank them for their support. A decent amount of these sponsors have not had too much involvement in eSports before this event. The sponsors at the venue were happy, they all made a ton of fans there. However with the online experience of the tournament not being able to hold a candle to in-venue, many of people speculated as to what a shit event this was; and that the sponsors should be shamed.

This argument in and of itself is okay to debate. Everyone knows that the broadcast event was not the best thing in the world. The starcraft viewer count was relevantly low, and a lot of valid complaints were had.

There was a considerable amount of negativity in these threads. Things and actions that can only hurt us. Posts like :

I appreciate compiling all of the sponsor information. I will now go through and let them know that I will not be buying their products in the future because of the whole destiny debacle. Thanks!

The real thing I learned from these threads is how malignant the league community could be. Some of the things being said were just flat out false, and people were rallying around these points. Here are some of the quotes:

• It’s really a shame that those sponsors chose this shitty tournament to show up for. It is by far the worst run tourney to date in League of Legends history. Hopefully the sponsors are smart enough to hook up with a real tournament in the future because this one is an absolute joke.

• Sponsors were pretty bad to say the truth. i didnt like the presents at all, and even the people walking up to the stage to collect their presents seemed sad as fuck. Giving away random components like that just isnt rewarding, you dont feel like you actually won anything since you still have to invest a pretty considerable amount of money to make any use of your present. Would have been way better giving away like 20 gaming laptops for example.

•  fuck gesl, screwed over a lot of players, made me watch 1h + of give aways i could not enter. you seriously think they gave out 250 thousand dollars worth of stuff? are you fucking high? it was prob shit they had laying around cause no one wants their shit.

After this experience I am more grateful for the SC2 community. Although things like this still happen, we seem much more mature than our league counterparts.

Crucifying something for being sub par, and attempting to drive sponsors away, is petty. It only hurts everyone. And that goes for everything, not just this event. We can not cut off our nose when we all still need to be growing eSports.

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Thanks for reading. I appreciate any feedback you have for me. If you enjoyed this I would love a follow: @leafeator. And if you ever see me at an event, please dont hesitate to say “Hi!” I love giving out some high-fives.
~Joey “Leafeator”