We're proud to announce the University of Southampton Video Games and Esports Society as our society of the month! SVGE did a fantastic job running their annual SouthLANder South Coast varsity competition, with support from the Intel Event in a Box scheme.
We spoke with Hanno from SVGE to ask for their thoughts and experiences through such a complex and successful event. Here's what they had to say!
"The first day of the event began with an all hands on deck setup in the early hours of the morning and with the effort of many SVGE members and the Student Union technical team, setup was completed in just a few short hours – in time for the first game scene to try out the LAN experience. Students from the SVGE CS:GO, Rocket League, Overwatch teams and more from the society were able to play an exciting few hours each, trying out the Intel event in a Box setup and experiencing a LAN environment for the first time! The event ended just after 9pm for most, although a few on the technical side spent their entire night preparing some additions to the production side that they were so passionate about.
League of Legends
The Sunday kicked off with the League of Legends final between the University of Portsmouth and the University of Southampton. Portsmouth started off strong with an early fight going their way, despite the Southampton toplaner Ikhorae (Irelia) finding first blood with the help of their jungler. Following a miracle solo-kill during a 1v2, the Southampton side suffered heavily in the early game with Irelia and J4 being shut down during a toplane 2v2. This was amplified by an early gold lead acquired by Portsmouth through their excellent mid lane farm and Belveth managing 5 successful takedowns in their ganks. The game fell further into Portsmouth favour until a pick by the Soton botlane landed 1000g into their ADC’s pocket and a comeback started to mature, with a dragon – 2 more picks, a drake and then a catch onto four members of the Portsmouth side near baron pit resulted in a huge swing in gold down to only a 2k old lead for Portsmouth. Portsmouth managed to outmanoeuvre every engagement afterwards, winning every teamfight from here on in, helped along by their scaling as Veigar and Varus provided huge damage which when paired with the excellent catch ability of the Portsmouth Rakan, ended the game at 33 minutes in convincing fashion.
Game 2 began with Southampton swapping sides to try and find an advantage – however the game progressed in a similar fashion, Soton found first blood but the prowess of the Portsmouth jungle and mid laner were too much to match as they claimed huge gold leads through farm and ganks. Despite Soton being up in kills for almost the first 25 minutes they were always lagging behind in gold and with the Portsmouth side having a clear advantage again in scaling through their draft the later the game went on, the harder it would be for Southampton to find a victory. With a few clean sweep teamfights and some excellent work by the Portsmouth support, they claimed victory over Southampton 2-0 and have reclaimed their title of SouthLANder League of Legends Champions.
CS:GO
CS:GO was the latter of the two games at SouthLANder this year and again a team was fielded by the host university. Podbots (who later went on to win the BUEC NSE finals at Insomnia 70) were playing a brand new Bath side (the Bath Boomers) for the trophy. Bath was captained by a returning player from SouthLANder 2021 – ADN, who missed out on the finals last time narrowly losing to Bournemouth 2-1. The veto resulted in Vertigo (Bath’s Pick), Inferno (Southampton’s pick) and the decider of Mirage. Vertigo began with Bath finding the pistol and the conversion, however Podbots quickly asserted themselves back onto the map with the first rifle round of the game and chained together 6 in a row. The rest of the first half was back and forth ending 9-6 in favour of the home team. Despite impressive efforts from the Bath side across the board and an exceptional performance from KicA they lost their map pick and the first map of the series 16-11.
Map 2 was Podbots pick and a known favourite of theirs – Inferno, and they proved very quickly why they are considered to be such a dangerous side. With a 9-0 T side lead straight of the bat it was looking very rough for the Bath Boomers however they performed an excellent turnaround in the remaining six rounds, winning four of them and putting themselves into a much more comfortable position going into the second half. During that first half Podbots player Arctic sported an impressive 109 ADR, but was edged out on kills by star player Frosty at 15. The second half began with the game looking done and de_dusted as the Soton side claimed the pistol and conversion, putting themselves up 13-4 and sure to close out the game in quick fashion. Bath chose not to be taken down lightly and pushed themselves into an incredible streak of 6 rounds helped by some excellent entries from captain ADN and KZYN. Both teams then traded round for round until Bath yet again found their groove in the crucial moment - just as Podbots hit match point Bath managed to turn around and find three in a row to put the scoreline 15-14. The last round began and Frosty found an early pick into second middle, putting Bath on the back foot immediately and the round is closed out after a Ting & Kezham crossfire on the B site proves too much for the bath side to push through, ending the series 2-0 in favour of Podbots.
SouthLANder ended with Southampton claiming their first win at their own LAN event after failing many times before and Portsmouth walking away with their 2nd SouthLANder League of Legends trophy.
SVGE would like to thank NSE hugely for providing the Intel Event in a Box scheme for this event, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to hold without the support they offered. The SouthLANder team would also like to thank everyone who took part in helping at the event including our production team, our committee, referees, casters and everyone who contributed to making SouthLANder 2023."
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