The MHS esports organization hosted a competitive event on Friday April 24, featuring three games: Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Smash), and Valorant.
This is the first month that Street Fighter has been played at the LAN event; however it had a relatively small turnout compared to Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Valorant which had around 20 players each, esports advisor Steven Martinez said.
“We’ve kind of maxed out our capacity,” Martinez said. “I don’t think that we could comfortably go higher than that at the moment, unless maybe we got more Switch 2’s, or if we made the event longer, or maybe we made the event on a Saturday.”
The Smash tournament featured a double elimination bracket of 24 players with the top three players winning Nintendo gift cards.
For the Valorant tournament, team captains drafted the teams for the lower bracket, tournament organizer and junior Long Nguyen said.
“There were two brackets – one for lower ranked players and one for higher ranked players; better players going against better players and really bad players going against really bad players,” Nguyen said.
The lower ranked players played first in a chaotic best-of-three series. Each member of the winning team won a $5 Valorant gift card.
The higher ranked match was more composed with the official MHS Valorant team triumphing over the other attendees in a 2-0 sweep; the prize was $10 Valorant gift cards for each member.
This event is the organization’s first attempt at broadcasting games, Martinez said.
”Right now we’re streaming on Twitch,” Martinez said. “We’re going to try to grow that and build that, get some bots (Twitch bots) saved; that way when we go into the fall season, we can actually stream our official competitive matches as well.”
Because this is their first livestreamed event, they’re still working on fixing bugs like audio issues, broadcasting lead and junior Finn Chadda said.
“We’re basically in phase one of testing everything out, getting our proof of concept and finding out what has to be fixed so we can make better streams from now on,” Chadda said.
Eventually they’re planning to have bigger competitions that more people can spectate in person at the new performing arts center, Chadda said.
“We’ll bring all the computers there,” Chadda said. “We’ll have a mobile broadcasting studio. We already have one in our storage.”
If people want to sign up for the monthly event, there is a Google form they need to complete, Martinez said. There is also a QR code on posters around campus and a Discord where information is posted, he added.
“I encourage people to join early because looking at the May event, we already have 19 out of 20 spots filled for Valorant,” Martinez said. “You don’t need to have a high rank or anything like that. It’s open for anybody.”
The organization struggles with getting everything done efficiently, Chadda said. Even though the event started at 4 p.m., volunteers began setting up at 2:40 p.m. due to how thinly stretched they are, he added.
“We’ll definitely have more positions, or more volunteer opportunities put out there for if people can help out, because that would make our job a lot easier,” Chadda said. “You can get service hours for volunteering for these events as well.”
The esports program is also planning another event on May 15 called the MHS esports spring social, Martinez said.
“It’s going to be more of a casual, community event — more fun, open-free play stuff, maybe some Mario Kart event, maybe Overcooked — just leaving the esports room open; people can play whatever PC games they want.”
MHS esports holds monthly tournament, pilots Street Fighter, hosts live broadcast
