Blog about WESG Grand Final presented by Alipay

Hi everyone! A couple of days ago, I returned from the World Electronic Sports Games tournament, which was held in Olympic Sports Centre, Changzhou, China from January 12 till 15. The matches were played in four disciplines: Dota 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, HearthStone and Starcraft 2. I was a manager of Ne Rusb Dota 2 team.

Our esports journey started from a flight Kiev-Beijing-Shanghai, and then we took a bus to move to Changzhou. It took about 24 hours to get to the location of the event, so we were pretty tired. We traveled together with both Team Ukraine rosters, a HearthStone player neirea and SLTV staff. In bus, we met Comanche and Fantastic Five Dota 2 teams, and Team Russia CS:GO roster. We stayed in Happiness Hotel, were Dota 2 teams and press. CS:GO, SC 2 and HS players stayed in в Мarco Polo Hotel.

After having a short rest, we decided to take a lunch. Our first thought was to go to McDonalds, but after 2 hours of searching with GPS using Google maps, we understood that we could not find it, and went to KFC for the first and the last time in China. On the next day, just before the venue, we faced another challenge – most of the websites that we’ve got used to visit were prohibited.

When we came to venue, we had a meal, then turned on our computers and started to handle Steam Guard and register to Perfect World servers. On that day, most of the teams had photoshoots. In the evening, we returned to the hotel. We had a rehearsal planned for the next day, some trainings, and also players dinner party, where the organizers told something on Chinese.

January 12 and 13 were the playing days of the group stage. Unfortunately, my team did not pass it. In fact, this event has explained that one of the most important facts that help teams to success and pass to the following stages of the event, it the time of how long the players have been playing together.

On the next two days we were looking around the town trying to buy souvenirs, but it became another challenge for us.

On Monday, January 16, we left the hotel at 10:00 AM and after 31 hours I returned to home.

Now it’s time to sum up the results of Chinese tournament. Considering the fact that this is the first season, there were 4 disciplines, and the total number of players was 336, the organizers deserve 4+ out of 5 points. Among the drawbacks of the event were an awful Internet connection even with VPN and absolute non-understanding of local people who did not speak English at all. Among the positive sides of the events were the so-called babysitters speaking different languages. It was rather pleasant for all teams. During the tournament, it was announced that this is the first event in the series. The organizers plan to host about 5 tournaments of such format that remind the competition among the national teams, just like Olympic games.

Thank you for reading this blog. If you have any questions, please comment the post, and I will try to answer them in the soonest time possible.