Genshin Impact University Carnival: University of Pennsylvania

When University of Pennsylvania students, Spieler and Yudrew, roomed together – they never thought that they would compete in a tournament for Genshin Impact. The game drew each of them in for different reasons.

For Spieler, they started playing the game in November 2020, but did not start seriously playing until a month later. For the past two years, they have not stopped doing the daily tasks or keeping up with events within the game. They were drawn in by the aesthetic and to play with friends.

Yudrew started playing the game in December 2020, only a couple months after the game initially released. 

The duo learned about the Genshin Impact University Carnival from another University of Pennsylvania student on Twitter and decided to enter. The team recruited KB707, a member of the Penn Climate Ventures club, which Yudrew started.

KB707 has been playing the game since May or June 2021, when Eula came out. They had been taking a break since the summer, but the Genshin Impact tournament and Spieler retriggered their desire to play the game.

On learning about the tournament, yudrew said, “[I] never thought Genshin was a competition game since it’s both PvE and somewhat pay-to-win.”

He went on to say, “What makes Genshin great for free-to-play players is that the general skill floor for completing content is pretty low, though, so I really appreciate this speedrun competition where we can really lean into the optimizing and theory crafting side of the Genshin community.”

The newfound trio decided to enter the tournament and quickly learned that they were interested in the competitive side of the game. 

The optimization and theory crafting side of Genshin Impact, as KB707 mentioned, is key to the Genshin Impact University Carnival tournament format.

Many teams shared that a large part of their practice is finding the right team compositions for the two parts of the tournament (domains and sprinting) and optimizing based off of speed or artifacts. 

The University of Pennsylvania team’s practice landed them a 23:20.22 score, which placed them in 6th overall. This score was over four minutes faster than the other team from the University of Pennsylvania. 

With the live LAN finals coming up this weekend, the University of Pennsylvania team is already off to work preparing for the new format. 

The University of Pennsylvania will be competing in the live finals on Saturday, October 29th starting at 1pm PT. The event will be streamed live on the eFuse Twitch channel.