Showdown Series Invitational 2025

Throughout my time at the University of Suffolk, I ran tournaments dubbed the 'Showdown Series'. Rainbow 6 Siege focused tournaments, mostly casual in nature, designed for students to get involved with Esports, make some new friends and generally have a good time. In my final year, I wanted to round off the Showdown Series with the Invitational, a larger LAN event with as much of the spectacle and atmosphere of a big Siege event that we could capture.

Naturally, being a student with no means of budget and the University lacking a dedicated Esports suite (at the time), taking on putting together an entire LAN solo was quite the endeavor; especially alongside my studies & work.

The Logistical Challenge of Transforming Two Classrooms for Esports

As my luck would have it, the University of Suffolk's Esports program wouldn't be ready until the year after I graduated, so I had to work with the facilities available.

In a typical Esports LAN, players will be given noise cancelling headphones to drown out the sound of casters & audience. However, considering those costed £1500 a pair, I could muster a single earcup maybe on the budget we had. From previous events held at the University we'd identified that players hearing the casters was a large problem so we knew for this LAN, we needed two rooms.

The broadcast room was just a typical classroom. Which offered it's own challenges. As you can probably see, in hindsight having our 'stage' be directly infront of a projector was not the wisest decision, but we'd planned that way and had to roll with it, no time to change things.

We had turned the lecturer's desk into a makeshift production station and made a casting desk directly opposite. The broadcast was then brought online, with a complete viewing experience for viewers in person and online as well. Nailing the online portion was really important, after all, the players wouldn't get to be in the room watching the stream, their only way of viewing their match back was through a replay of the livestream, so we had to get that right.

Our player room was one of the game development suites at the University. High specification PC's and monitors to give players the performance they'd expect and setup in a way where we could have players on opposite ends of the room separated by a barrier of jazz music, white noise and an old pro Siege match. Why such a weird combination? We tried our best to drown out the sounds of each teams' communications.

A nice effect of the players facing each other was that after some heated rounds we'd catch them on the player cameras standing up and taunting the other team. A nice bit of healthy rivalry.

We couldn't get into the rooms until 8am, and had a 12:30 start time. 4.5 hours to get games installed, decorate the rooms and have the broadcast tested & ready. It was a dense schedule with a tight turnaround, not possible without the help of my friends but we made it work.

Turning Friends Into a Production Crew

That leads quite well into the next chapter here, my friends aren't exactly Esports fanatics like myself. However, I was fortunate that they were willing to throw themselves into the mix and help out wherever they could.

MVP for the day was easily Rae, as having experience Twitch streaming in the past, was an easy candidate for the role of producer/observer. The difficulty of learning a very complex stream package, with a lot of moving parts and observing simultaneously was a huge undertaking, but everything went better than I expected it to. I had assets fully prepared for tech pauses, issues etc, didn't need to use a single one.

Rob approached me a few weeks before the tournament, he was a student from another course but was interested in helping out with the LAN. I needed a co-caster, he was knowledgeable about the game and we got on quickly so was a natural fit to join the camera facing side of the broadcast. Getting up and casting for the first time is hard enough as is, let alone doing it in front of an in person audience; but you wouldn't have known it was his first time, the cast was clean and built on-top of every great ingame moment.

All of the pictures from the event came from Liam, a film student and friend of mine who offered to do photography for the day. I sent him a few shots from S-tier Siege events as a rough guide of 'what to look out for' but otherwise trusted the process. The final set of images speak for themselves, lovely memories of a great day. I'd highly recommend scrolling through the photo album.

Last but not least was Eva, travelling up with me to help setup the broadcast room. In early, and a few car runs later, I left her to decorate/setup the broadcast room while I got the players' PCs ready. I came back to a room ready to run an event from and that's not even mentioning all the other things she did throughout the day to keep things running smoothly. Nothing on camera or overly glamorous, but without her help things would certainly have not been as smooth sailing as they were.

Even myself, I wasn't even a year into casting properly at this point, so then trying to teach others in such a short time was a big challenge, but outside of one small hiccup at the start of the match, the stream ran smoothly start to finish. I was incredibly proud of myself and what this team had pulled off in such a short time.

Graphics as a Non-Graphic Designer

I don't have a background in graphic design, most of the overlays designed for Showdown Series streams up to this point were Canva templates recoloured to match the University's colour scheme. For the Invitational I wanted to push a little more, try something a bit more original, go all out for our final event.

The first big change from our old graphics was using white as the primary colour, and then black and a gold (replacing the yellow) for accents. A lot was learned putting these graphics together, but the big key is that they were easy enough for folks to edit on the day with game results and veto choices and brought the whole event together. The whole room was decorated in black, white and gold bringing the whole event together.

Graphics also needed to be informational, many of the friends who were coming to support myself or the players weren't siege players. The broadcast was designed with that in mind, giving interesting content for experienced players, but also enough context for first time attendees to follow along.

Additionally, the 'Siege X' update had just dropped, bringing overhauled graphics & new mechanics to 5 of the available competitive maps, alongside an operator remaster and a series of game balancing changes. The largest change was an overhaul to the operator banning system - which for the uninitiated, lets players strategically 'ban' characters in the game, preventing them from play to limit counters to their own strategies, or to remove strong characters from the opponents. Historically, 4 bans were done at the start of a match, and that was it for the duration. With Siege X, 4 bans were done at the start of each half, with a fifth and sixth ban coming in at the quarter, before the entire system reset at the end of the half. Much more complicated, and a goliath to explain.

One Laptop With All the Responsibility

I lie, there were technically two laptops. I'd borrowed my grandparents' laptop for casting notes and to use Discord for communication with production/players. However, my own laptop was running everything, production, observing and overlays; I'm still amazed my i7-12700H and RTX 3070 kept up with it all.

Much of the production budget I had went into audio, partially because I know I'd get use out of them following the LAN, but also because when people watch the stream back they won't see the makeshift production setup, they'll hear and see the end product. Visuals I had down, so it made no sense to cheap out on audio for the casting. Two Audio Technica BPHS1 headsets for casters, and then a set of TONOR Wireless Microphones for the 'stage' - which held up surprisingly well considering they were only £20 on Amazon.

Cameras came in from a variety of sources. The main 'stage' camera was my old phone, a Huawei P30 pro, running VDO.Ninja streaming it's feed to a URL which the OBS instance on the production laptop could grab. Inside of the player rooms we had some cheap webcams that I had brought from work mounted on AliExpress tripods (which yes, both did break and had to be propped on chairs) fed into one of the University computers. I'd worked out VDO.Ninja was blocked by the University's firewall so we had these streaming to private YouTube streams which were then picked up in the broadcast room.

Ending on a High

Then we hit 'go live' and 4 hours later we had crowned ourself a champion, BDB lifted the trophy after a triumphant 3-0 victory over Geronimo. The Showdown Series Invitational was one of my biggest undertakings to date, pulling a full LAN together on a tight budget alongside multiple other commitments was a tall order, but I'm incredibly proud of how it came out. Having full creative control over all aspects of a project teaches you a lot, and I walked away from this event having learnt so much about many different aspects of Esports.

I won't put the whole stream replay here, but this is the highlights of the gameplay if you're interested in watching.

There was a lot that happened at the LAN which wasn't accounted or planned for, but maybe my favourite off-script moment was the poster signing. As little keepsakes, I got a selection of posters, pins and stickers made for the LAN which attendees could take home. On a whim, I thought of asking everyone to sign a poster for myself, and what that started was everyone signing everyone's posters. A year on and many of us still keep ours hung up on our walls as a reminder of the day. A really nice part of the event, and one of my favourite bits of the day.

Most of all, we all had a great day, some memories were made and being able to celebrate finishing University prior to graduation in the way we know best was something really special. The stars aligned to make this happen and I understand why people say you'll never forget your first. Thanks to everyone who made the Showdown Series Invitational 2025 possible.