Tespa, who run the collegiate leagues for all of Blizzard’s esports together with Rocket League, have introduced their plans for the 2017-18 season. They’re beginning an open membership program the place college students received’t must rely on their schools or universities having a Tespa chapter to be concerned. They additionally plan to provide away over one million bucks in scholarship cash throughout six tournaments, broadcast reside video games six days every week and provides away in-game prizes. It’s going to be a giant yr for collegiate esports.
Incidentally, right here’s what’s taking place within the subsequent Overwatch patch, 1.14. Y’know, simply in case.
“It used to be that for students that wanted to participate in college esports you had to either compete in one of our leagues or you had to go to a university with a chapter,” explains Adam Ronsen, co-founder of Tespa. “We’ve had over 1,200 universities compete in our leagues, but only 220 chapters. When we looked at that we saw that there was an opportunity to better serve the students on all campuses regardless of whether they went to a chapter or not. We are essentially opening membership so any student in the US or Canada can become a paying member of Tespa.”
Why would you wish to? Well that’s the place their second improve this yr comes into play – in-game rewards. “There’s a concept of progression via participating in more local events and online competitions, unlocking cool rewards. A lot of those are in-game items, for example loot boxes in Heroes or card packs in Hearthstone but also some cool cosmetic items like card backs and portraits, that sort of stuff.”
Obviously, there’s additionally a big progress angle for Tespa itself there, bringing in additional members and cash. However, at the very least for Ronsen, it’s about constructing one thing larger than anybody group or particular person.
“One of the things we believe really strongly in is creating these enriching communities on campus. When we look at the teams that perform best in our leagues, a lot of times they are the ones that come from the strongest communities. It’s not just about that team but it’s about that entire community that surrounds them. By opening membership we’re hoping to create this environment where gamers on campuses across North America discover there are a lot of other gamers on their campus and connect them.”
From there, he desires it to explode. “Then they can begin hosting events, maybe they start a chapter, maybe they create better support infrastructures for their teams – we see open membership as really a catalyst towards building more of this long-term infrastructure on more campuses.”
Continuing from final yr, they’ll be operating Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, World of Warcraft, and Rocket League, with extra data out there over on the official site. We’ll have way more about Tespa’s plans for the yr by means of the week.
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