NZ High School Esports Championship

Available for all New Zealand High School students.

Make sure you have a team from your school of at least three eligible players for Rocket League, six players for Fortnite and a teacher who will support your team throughout the event. Both students and teachers need to register.

For your best chance of success, as a team you will have to invest a little time into practice and preparation. If you haven’t played together as a team before, communication is most important. You will need to be available to play from 4.30pm to 5.30pm each Wednesday afternoon for 5 weeks from the start date of the event for Rocket League and for 7 weeks for Fortnite.

No, Rocket League and Fortnite are free to play (download and play for no cost). These events are also free and are designed to enhance your teamwork and esports potential.

The event schedule is:

The main competitions are leagues and two rounds will be played of the league each Wednesday from 4.30pm to 5.30pm each Wednesday following their start date until the end date as mentioned above. The minor competitions will be one day events, started and finished on the dates above. The Armageddon event will be in person at the Winter Armageddon Expo.

Three high school students for Rocket League and six students for Fortnite. You will also need one teacher from your school to register and support your team.

Your team needs access to gaming consoles or PCs that have high enough specifications to run Rocket League/Fortnite and access to a stable internet connection.

For detailed minimum PC specifications for Rocket League please follow the link here.

Rocket League and Fortnite are free to play on PC and most major gaming consoles. They are also completely cross compatible. This means that no matter what you are playing on, you can compete.

A selection of games will be cast and streamed every Wednesday afternoon of the competitions on the University of Waikato Esports Twitch account, which can be found here.

Teams can stream their own gameplay on whatever platform they wish, as long as they adhere to the terms and conditions stated on that platform. It is recommended that if you are streaming Fortnite, you should put a delay on your stream.

Each week of competitions starts at 4.30pm on Wednesday and will aim to be finished by 5.30pm.

Rocket League will be run as a 3v3 swiss tournament for the first 4 weeks where each round will be best of 3 games. The 5th week of the competition will be left to determine our winners and runners up. Depending on how many teams we have in 1st-3rd place after the 4 weeks of Swiss format league, we will decide the fairest way to determine our winner and runners up teams (1st, 2nd and 3rd place) and will conduct this during the 5th week.

Fortnite will be run as six person teams. Each week of the competition will be either solos, duos or trios and the points you win (kills and placing) each week will go to your team’s overall points. There are seven weeks of competition. Six weeks will be Arena solos, duos and trios and the seventh week (most likely in the middle week) will be No build trios. The two top teams will be awarded prizes. If we have a tie, a tiebreaker round of three rounds of Arena trios will be played.

We have access to two custom lobbies, so we have a maximum of 200 players. Each week we will aim to run two rounds of games. If we cannot fit two rounds into the 4.30pm to 5.30pm game window we will change this to one round each week.