The eSports Association just opened a brand-spanking-new gaming lounge and it's open to every UBC student.
Starting October 17, registered UBC students will be able to game to their heart's desire from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. every weekday in room 2132 in the Nest.
“The plan with it was to promote eSports and promote gaming, because it’s a really good way for people to find friends and bond with people in their community,” said UBC eSports's president Victor Ho.
“I know a lot of these [PCs] can get expensive, so not everybody has a chance to play on something like this,” he said.
Here's the list of games that'll come pre-installed on the PCs:
- League of Legends
- Dota 2
- Hearthstone
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Pokemon Trading Card Game
- Dropzone
- Overwatch
- StarCraft II
- Heroes of the Storm
Ho noted that they were “probably going to install” Rocket League to play, but offered no promises on covering it as a club.
Outside the public hours, the eSports Association will use the room as an event space and training room for the competitive team.
All the PC components were provided by the club's sponsors — Intel, ASUS Republic of Gamers, Corsair, NCIX and Wangyu Cyber Cafe — and they're pretty decked out, running Intel Core i7 processors and GTX 1060 GPUs, not to mention Corsair keyboards, mice and headsets. They even had solid-state drives (SSDs), but they opted to move those to their private server instead.
Ho wants to give a “really big shoutout to everybody who came together to make all of this work.”
The eSports Association approached the AMS this summer about getting a dedicated practice space for their competitive team, but figured that they “may as well go for something that would make a bigger impact on the community” while they were at it — something like a full-blown gaming lounge, open to any UBC student who wanted in.
Aside from some longer wait times and “bureaucracy,” Ho said the AMS was “incredibly supportive” during the process of allocating the space — the biggest challenge, he said, was simply fitting everything into the room.