Student League of Legends gamers flocked to Student Activities Center Ballroom A on Oct.1 to “battle for the brook.”
Gamers from around the world compete in League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena video game.
Prize pools in past tournaments held by the developer Riot Games, have reached millions of dollars.
Stony Brook’s League of Legends club held its own tournament, “Battle for the Brook.”
Students from Stony Brook and a team from Five Towns College, located in Dix Hills, brought laptops and desktop computers to compete for prizes, fun and glory.
“We all just really love this game,” Prapti Vayda, senior psychology major and the club’s vice president, said. “It’s fun, it’s life consuming.”
League of Legends was ranked the number one most played PC video game in 2015 by Raptr, a social-networking website for gamers, and had 67 million monthly players in 2014 according to Riot Games.
Players were separated into high and low experience brackets, with winner and loser brackets for each.
This makes it so a player is not eliminated by the loss of one game, Vayda said.
“Everyone’s coming out trying to win and there’s a lot of competition,” Omar Amin, sophomore computer science major, said. Amin is ranked 44 in North America at the time of publication.
The tournament had shoutcasters giving commentary on the battles being projected on the big screen in the ballroom.
In previous years, the event was held in the Center for Global Studies and Human Development but the space was too cramped for the 16 teams competing, Elias Jalili, senior biology major and former vice
president, said.
The League of Legends club does not yet have funding, due to several failures to submit the club’s constitution. The Weekend Life Council and several other sponsors contributed to the event.
Redbull provided a number of prizes including hats, event tickets and five Amazon Fire sticks.
“We couldn’t have done it without them,” Jalili said.
The prizes were raffled and awarded to winning teams.
Team Syo spent nine hours at the tournament and came out with a win.
“We’ll be winning again next semester,” Chris Wang, Syo team member and undecided freshman, said.
