Bennett CS: GO Event (A Rs. 50 venture)
College life. Assignments, projects, examinations! Damn! This is not what we signed up for. We always thought college life was going to be full of fun activities; something more than the monotony of rote learning and other boring stuff. Well here at Bennett we got it in the form of some entrepreneurial venture. Yes, we were taught entrepreneurship right from our first semester for 3 semesters which was pretty cool. So our professor gave us one project which was damn fun and full of learning. He asked us to open a startup in our campus itself with investment being no more than Rs. 50. Yes you heard it right Rs. 50 only. So we had limited options. We were supposed to run it for 7 days in the evening. At first we were kind of tensed and considered it just a waste of our time; an activity organized just for the sole purpose of writing digits against your name that are supposed to decide your future (OK enough of the complaints, let us get to the fun part). We were supposed to form groups of 5 people (our co-founders and partners if you will; hehe). We were also kind of overwhelmed when we heard about other people’s ideas. They were opening waffle stalls, pani puri stalls, stuff which was going to make a mint. But we thought about it the wrong way initially. It wasn’t about making money this time but about learning how an entrepreneur is supposed to come up with new exciting ideas and make them work when they don’t seem to be profitable at all and look the least feasible. So I being a passionate video gamer decided to go ahead with organizing a gaming event in college with some of my fellow batchmates who were equally passionate about it. And it turned out to be pretty well. After all entrepreneurship is also about following your passion and making others see the fun parts of that stuff.
Overview of our event
It was supposed to run for 7 days straight from around 8 pm till midnight. Well we organized other gaming events as well for video games such as FIFA 18 and non-virtual games such as Rubik’s Cube, Lawn Tennis to suit all people’s needs. But since I enjoyed Counter Strike: Global Offensive the most, I decided to organize that event instead of others as I was quite passionate and excited about it.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive (The Game I Love To Death)
Now what is this game about? This game was released back in 12th August 2012 and is the fourth iteration of the long running Counter-Strike series which debuted back in 2000 with the release of Counter Strike 1.6 which itself was a modification of another popular PC game called Half-Life. It is one of the most popular games in the world for which many competitive gaming events are held worldwide. Though this game hosts various game modes such as Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch etc. it is mostly played for its Competitive Game Mode. In this game mode, we have 10 players in total with 2 teams consisting of 5 players each. There are 30 rounds in this mode which last for around 2 minutes 30 seconds. There are two factions: Terrorists and Counter Terrorists. Both consist of 5 players. Terrorists have to plant bomb at one of the specified locations and counter-terrorists have to defuse it within the allotted time with each member of each team trying to eliminate members of opponent team along the way. The round can also be won if you are able to completely eliminate other team with at least one member left alive in your team.
The Event
Many students came forward and participated in this competitive event. As many as 5 teams participated (50 players in total). We collected Rs. 100 from each team as registration fee which doubled as funds for our prizes and profits. But then we encountered one big issue. Last time something similar was organized, it didn’t go so well because it wasn’t smooth; by smooth I mean there was a lot of latency involved while playing the game. Latency is measured by ping which tells you how responsive and smooth your game is. The lower it is, the better. And if many players are connected locally over WiFi the ping shoots up which is bad as we want to have as smooth of a gaming experience as possible. So we weren’t left with any choice other than to get this issue of ping resolved otherwise the event was a big NO. But as passionate entrepreneurs we were ready to tackle that obstacle. So I went to one of our seniors for advice and they suggested tons of solutions of which only one was a plausible way out of our current predicament. The idea was to connect all laptops via an ethernet cable so that ping gets reduced to 0. But even achieving that turned out to be a great challenge. For connecting that many PCs we needed some device that could connect all of them simultaneously. So we started browsing Flipkart and Amazon for such a device called switch but all of them were out of our budget. But one of our seniors told us that our college’s IT Department is having one. We went to them to borrow switch but from their side came nothing but a barrage of Wh questions: Why do you want it, How would you use it, What will you do with it etc. with their faces telling us that they were in no mood of fulfilling our request. Then came IT department’s head who unlike his subordinates turned to be pretty friendly and allowed us to borrow the device provided we were able to get an email sent from our subject professor to him answering all of their queries such as why are we borrowing it, how we will use it and if something happens to it who is going to take the responsibility etc. They were sent the mail but this exchange of emails lasted for a long duration before we were finally able to get it in our hands along with 12 ethernet cables. But since we were very curious as to why it took them so long and what was its worth, we googled this device and exclamations such as “Shit!, Woah!” came out of our mouths.
Why so? Because the device was worth Rs. 2.5 LAKHS. With such an expensive device in our possession, came the burden of responsibility. Now that we had every necessary equipment with us, it was time for setup. The gaming event was supposed to start in an hour or so. We were very tensed. The teams came, took their places. The event was to be conducted in our old and biggest mess. We also made arrangements for the audience by casting the event on TVs so that our spectators also get to experience the event in full glory. The event started at around 8pm and got over by 2 am in the night each day. It was a tiring event. Nevertheless each day was filled with much more excitement than the previous one as we were nearing the final match and were curious to see who was going to win. In the end, it was a very fun and learning endeavor; a venture with minimal investment but the most amazing rewards in the form of learning and earning (lol).
