NEVER SEEN BEFORE: Jesse “Renshiro” Rissanen travels 10,000km to play RLCS from South Africa
It’s official, ROUNDS are sending Renshiro to Cape Town, South Africa for 6 weeks in search for lower ping success.
You’ve read that right, and no, we are not trolling. Rocket League champion of Finland Jesse “Renshiro” Rissanen will be taking a massive trip to one of South Africa’s capital cities Cape Town, to drastically lower his in-game latency. Cape Town houses Rocket League’s servers for the continent of Africa, which Renshiro has so far had to connect to from all the way back in Finland to play in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) division of the Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) that ROUNDS built the current squad for. This meant that he averaged about 180ms of ping, which led to less than ideal results.
What makes this feat monumental on top of the long distance is the duration of the trip. Renshiro will be spending a whopping 40 days in Cape Town, to play the entirity of Split 2 from there. It’s something really spectacular and brave, from the org as well as the player in question, and certainly something no other Finnish organization has done before, maybe even in traditional sports. Have you ever seen anything like it?
Why is this something that we wanted to pursue? There are two main motivators. First of all, from a sporting perspective this benefits the whole team, Mvrsyyy and Onizumaa included. As a collective, ROUNDS Rocket League finally gets a fair shot at making the later stages of the Opens in this Split as one of the three players in the squad doesn’t have to play ~180 milliseconds behind everyone else on the server. We actually have the chance to prove ourselves, gain more RLCS points, and potentially get ourselves closer to a Major qualification than ever before. Then, as a personal goal for Renshiro, we’ve just heard about the upcoming Esports Nations Cup including Rocket League in its lineup of games. Good results in Split 2 would make waves for Ren being picked as a representative for Finland in that tournament.
Setting the whole thing up was not easy at all. We ran into a multitude of problems along the planning phase. One of them being absolutely critical. A couple of days before the trip, Renshiro told ROUNDS CEO Jussi “dev0” Kallioniemi that his PC would not fit in the airplane’s overhead locker. Uh oh, panic? Then we remembered the existence of f9 Distribution, one of the biggest and by far the fastest IT distributor in Finland with headquarters in our hometown of Tampere, conveniently enough. The word reached f9, they heard the call, and things started moving fast. f9 and Lenovo solved the problem by providing Jesse with a Lenovo LOQ gaming laptop that fits in his backpack, travels safely to Cape Town, and actually even outperforms Jesse’s own PC. Wow! Safe to say we are super duper grateful, thank you so much f9 and Lenovo!
How does Jesse dress for Cape Town? After all, he is leaving from the middle of the Finnish winter, more than 10,000 km north of South Africa. Well, we had been in talks with Jack & Jones Finland earlier on, and they invited Jesse to visit their store in Tampere. There he received professional guidance to select a full wardrobe for the trip. We kept the whole thing as a surprise for Jesse until Saturday. Thank you J&J Finland, you should have seen the smile on his face!
You can support the most ambitious current project in Finnish esports by watching the games live on ROUNDS’ Twitch, starting this Saturday 14th of March at 17:00 EET. With full English production, as you’re already accustomed to! What a year this is shaping up to be for ROUNDS. For the history books.
Lari – finkka
ROUNDS
(co-written by CEO dev0)
