Sponsor Team Hong Kong to participate in Overwatch® World Cup! [Campaign is in Hong Kong Dollar!]

Hello, all agents from Overwatch®,

We are creating this campaign because we are very desperate to get enough funds for us, Fire Dragons - Team Hong Kong, to participate in the annual global celebratory tournament, Overwatch World Cup (OWWC) 2019.

Who are we?

Fire Dragons, a brand for Team Hong Kong, is a team composed by 7 Hong Kong players:

• DPS
  1. Tsz-kit "Mikouw" Wan
     • Ex-Hong Kong Attitude, OWWC 2018 player
  2. Ivan "MoonBlue" Wong
     • Cyber Athletic Champions (Open Division North America)
  3. Chi-yeung "Moowe" Yip
     • NovaMS Esports, OWWC 2018 player
• Tanks
  1. Cheuk-pang "Amcrazy" Lai
     • Bastet Cat (Open Division Pacific), OWWC 2018 substitute player
  2. Chun-yu "Step" Lo
     • Bastet Cat (Open Division Pacific)
• Supports
  1. Kin-long "MangoJai" Wong
     • Talon Esports, OWWC 2018 player
  2. Yuen-ho "YiWind" Chan
     • Charm Junior Zoo (Open Division Pacific), OWWC 2018 player

And the team is supported by 3 official competition committees:

• General Manager: Derek "MimicOmnic" Kwok -Community Lead & Acting GM, OWWC2018
• Head Coach: Keng-chuen "HaRuHi" Lee - Head Coach, OWWC2018
• Community Lead: Audrey "ASCII" Yam

We have been a constant competitor in previous years' OWWC and this year will be the strongest form of Team Hong Kong compared to previous years with a much stronger team spirits, organization and management from committee and supporting staff. We have veterans in competitive Overwatch this year; we have professional and seasoned coaches this year; the most important thing is, players feel proud and excited to represent their homeland, Hong Kong and we all have one clear goal.

Our goal is to get a spot in Top 10 and compete with the players from the peak level around the world this year. Setting out this goal is hard to realize, it means that we have to take a win over ranked 6 - 10 teams in order to win a spot in the top 10 group stage. However, we are strongly confident with our strength and energy this year.

You may be wondering, why would we need funding? Isn't Blizzard fully sponsoring every team in previous years?

Unfortunately, OWWC this year changes drastically from an invitational tournament to an open tournament. Blizzard only fully sponsors top 10 teams based on previous OWWC results and other teams, they have to self-fund their travel to Anaheim, California in order to participate in OWWC 2019. If any eligible team with functioning competition committee and 7 final players could not afford their own travel expenses, the team will automatically forfeit their participation in this valuable tournament.

Despite being a constant participant of OWWC in previous years, Team Hong Kong, unfortunately, could not make it to the Top 10. So, we have to reach out to every single channel and seek for sponsors.

What are the costs?

We will be arriving at Anaheim, California on 28 October and leaving US on 3 November, 2019. These are our cost breakdown per player finalized (currency rate: USD:HKD = 1:7.8):

Fire Dragons members are mostly students, professional players and fresh graduates who definitely cannot afford a trip that cost 12,831 HKD. Fresh graduates from university on average earned 16,000HKD only and professional players earned even less in Hong Kong.

Why do Fire Dragons want to participate in Overwatch World Cup despite this tremendous financial burden?

Hong Kong, in fact, has a lot of extremely talented players. We are ranked in Top 20s in the world in terms of average skill rating in Overwatch Competitive play despite the small community in Hong Kong. Team Hong Kong committees at first decided to participate in Overwatch World Cup not only it is "cool" to participate in a world-class tournament. However, this is the only one tournament that we can showcase as many Hong Kong players as possible in a global scale. The exposure and scouting opportunities from Overwatch League/Contenders teams given by Overwatch World Cup are extremely important for Hong Kong players to continue or even start their careers as a professional Overwatch players.

We, the competitive committee, has been self-commissioned to encourage skilled players to play professionally, help Hong Kong players to climb to higher spot in the Overwatch's "Path to Pro" ladder and ultimately, produce our own Overwatch League player representing Hong Kong.

We almost produced one Overwatch League player last year with an outstanding performance from Moowe who won most of the widowmaker battles against highly respected Overwatch League-level widowmakers like Carpe, Linkzr and Mistakes. This ignites competition committees passion and excitement to strike for another chance to showcase our best players to the world. We strongly believe that having Overwatch League players from home will definitely attract many other professional Hong Kong players to compete within the scene.

And this year, we have more new faces willing to participate in Team Hong Kong as a player, with integration of MoonBlue and Step, plus many new players with a lot of potentials dropped from trials like Krekro, Team Hong Kong vision is proven to be on the right track.

Emily Rand from ESPN wrote this article featuring Moowe as one of the three players impressed her the most in OWWC 2018 Incheon group stage.

These promising opportunities given by Overwatch World Cup are exactly the reason why the competitive committee insists to send Team Hong Kong to the United States for Overwatch World Cup. Being not able to participate in OWWC 2019 will be a biggest regret and the worst nightmare which committees and all of our players could have related to OWWC 2019.

Why do Fire Dragons seeking for a crowd-funding solution?

We have been actively searching for local sponsors for help. Whilst we might secure some sponsors who are very kind enough to sponsor us a fraction of the cost, we still need quite a substantial amount of funding to allow us for sending our players and us to the United States and participate in Overwatch World Cup.

Seeking community support would be the last resort to us. Overwatch and gaming communities are always known for being one of the most generous communities in the world that global members are always willing to help each other out. The competition committee is always a giver and actively particpate in charity events like Mercy's BCRF charity event and other streamers' charity event. This time, unfortunately, the financial burden is too huge that we have to seek out for help.

We are looking forward to your contribution!

Each contribution from you are deeply appreciated by everyone in Fire Dragons. Your support would be a massive for many future stars in competitive Overwatch. Words cannot be enough to show our appreciation to you who funded us for participating such an important annual event in BlizzCon. Please also share this crowd-funding project to your friends and family to help us travel to the US!

All expenses will be recorded on a Google spreadsheet which will be published after OWWC 2019. All excess funds, after deduction of all costs (including operation costs), will be donated to a charity that Fire Dragons picked.

Thank you!

Competition Committee
Fire Dragons, Team Hong Kong
Overwatch World Cup 2019

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What is Overwatch World Cup?

How to contact us?

You can reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook pages and this GoGetFunding plan!