Garena HoN has been something that has continually grown since it's inception. The competitive scene in SEA has blossomed into an array of sponsored teams and large prize pool tournaments. Last month the Garena Star League Tournament was carried out at the Thailand Game Show (TGS) and featured the best teams from South-East Asia.
From the international community's perspective, most of these teams are unknown expect for the few that often participate in the international online tournaments such as DuskBin, Orange eSports, MuFC and Impunity. The Star League tournament itself was huge, it featured over $26,000 as a cash prize and had a really cool castle set-up in the expo. The organization behind the tournament 'HoN Thailand' provided the community with a lot of great content including teaser videos released about the event. One is shown directly below:
In the end, the Singapore based 'Team Impunity' won the event by convincingly beating DuskBin eSports in the Grand Final. Impunity went through the entire tournament undefeated and walked away with the $13,000 first place prize. Although we don't see this team that often internationally anymore, they have been carving up the SEA scene winning a multitude of tournaments including the neo Cafe SG Qualifiers and the ESTC 2011 HoN event late last year.
Impunity was interviewed prior to the event mainly focusing on how they were feeling going into the event as well as what they thought of the Thailand based teams of which remain fairly segregated to the rest of the SEA Garena community. The interview is shown below:
Duskbin eSports walks away with the second place prize of about $5,000. They showed strength in the group stage of the event however were not able to consistently perform to their best abilities. The roster of the DskB team has changed to what most of the International scene followers might remember and they discuss their roster in their interview prior to the tournament:
The third and fourth places went to the Thailand based 'Baby Build House' and the Malaysian 'Orange eSports' respectively. The prizes were $3,250 for third and $1,700 for fourth. 'Orange eSports' is a name that may be familair with followers of the international scene as they have been performing quite well in some of the 'Its Gosu Cups'. Aside from this, the teams ranked between fifth and eighth all received $800 in prize money.
Team Impunity - 1st - $13,000 (Middle)
DuskBin eSports - 2nd - $5,000 (Right)
Baby Build House - 3rd - $3,250 (Left)
Orange eSports - 4th - $1,700What this event showed was progression in the scene. With the segregation of the communities International/SEA/CIS in HoN a lot of the wider International scene tend to look at the SEA scene as only having a few good teams, those that they have seen but this is not the case. There is a number of issues that prevent teams in the region from competing internationally such as Server Access, Lag issues and Time zone differences.
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It was the biggest most awesome tournament yet! The atmosphere was electrifying and there were literally hundreds of people watching and cheering the players’ every move, be it a kill or death!” The SEA community should hope for more tournaments in the not so distant future and if the prize pools remain as high I would expect to see some International teams make their way to SEA to compete for them. The Garena Star League got an array of positive feedback from the community and one can only hope tournaments like this continue to happen well into the future.
Links
Rapture Gaming - Impunity Wins Garena Star League
Garena - Garena Star League Website
