My experience - How we started the Inter-University Dota 2 League

It started off all as a strange fantasy that I'd recreate again and again on my daily commute - me, standing on a lecture theater stage at UNSW, introducing the two university teams that will participate in the grand finals (one of them being UNSW of course), before they set off to play a series of intense matches live in front of a live audience.

Or maybe that's a bit too too far-fetched...

Around February 2016, at that time I was the recently appointed Vice president (External) of DotaUNSW (soon to be renamed UNSW Dota Society), my job before that (Media director) consisted exclusively of making cover photos/posters for events. The idea of organizing a inter-university tournament was beyond my experience, and remained untold for a while.

One day I just decided to try to do it. Maybe its because my manager gave me the cliche advice "follow your passion", or that my friend Eric made me write it down on a bright pink sticky note as a new year resolution; either way I got on the computer, and started trying to find contacts who can collaborate on this idea with me.

Sometimes you just have to be brave, after messaging all the email addresses I can find, I joined facebook groups for university societies, then proceeded to ask around for an executive member who can contact me (I learned the hard way that there's also a university in the UK by the name of University of Newcastle). I also joined the COG (community of gamers) forum and continued advertising my idea and asking if people can help me, an admin of COG got in contact with me straight away and was extremely helpful. COG were happy to let us borrow their LAN event and help us with getting sponsors.  You'd be surprised how much you can do if you just go out there and ask for help.

With each day that went by, the tournament became more and more consolidated: sponsors started providing us with prizes, many people became interested in joining the tournament. Best of all, instead of me trying hard to find universities to contact, they started getting in contact with me to let them join! Nothing can describe how much excitement I was feeling, knowing one small idea was turning into a real tournament with a $1000 prize pool.

I only got busier and busier as the UNSW qualifiers started: 12 teams had signed up, scheduling matches according to people's availability became my new nightmare.

Picture above: Schedule for the first day of round robin, we had 4 games going on concurrently (Thank god there were people happy to give up a few hours of their time to help me host these, especially shout out to Tim who was already experienced in organizing tournaments, yet happy to help out a small tournament)

Did I spend a lot of time administrating matches when I could be doing other things? yes, but it was worth it in every way. I enjoyed watching the matches, especially during moments like these:

(I really like big team fight ultimates)

The tournament also gave me the opportunity to try my hand at being a caster, I felt nervous and was unable to coordinate with the Miles (the Dota coordinator of Usyd at that time, now Vice President) when it came to pair casting, but with practice I started being able to complement him as a co-caster and making it as enjoyable as I can for the people watching on twitch.

Most importantly, the tournament allowed me to meet and talk to the players and other organizers, it expanded my social circle and bought the DotaUNSW community closer together (or so I hope).
All the frustration I felt scheduling matches and doing other mundane tasks, was made worth it by moments like this:

We held the IUDL itself at cyber legends cafe, they were extremely accommodating to let us book computers at last minute notice (due to an emergency change of plans I'd rather not go on about). There were 5 universities that ended up attending the finals (UNSW, Usyd, UoW, ANU and UTS). I was able to meet the other organizers in real life, we spent half the day freaking out over the emergency situation, and the other half hanging out together, eating food and watching our teams play out their matches.

The grand finals were held online, I got to cast for the IUDL one last time and it was the highlight of my week. We had people tuning in from different universities watching the intense best of 3 series. Its not quite the glamorized fantasy I imagined in my spare time, but it was a dream come true.


I will be honest this made me laugh (its as friendly and readable as twitch chat gets)