I’m so rushing this blog post as I have to be at my band’s gig tonight within an hour. Anyway, I just arrived home from Level Up’s Ragnarok World Championships Celebration Eyeball event, which was held at a local mall. The event is basically an anticipation event for the Philippine’s biggest online gaming event for 2008, which the Ragnarok World Championships 2008, wherein competitive Ragnarok Online teams from different countries will fight over the championship title of Ragnarok World Champion for 2008. For my non-gaming readers, Level Up (LU) is the country’s leading online games publisher and they have been in this business since 2002 (or is it 2003?).

Anyway, my award-winning cosplay group, The Frost Jokers was invited by Level Up to reprise our winning skit that we performed at last year’s Level Up Live event. And I’m glad that they did because it was also a chance for our group to have a reunion. It’s been a while since we cosplayed as a group since we became busy with our careers.

I was very satisfied with how LU recognized that we, as cosplayers are also talents. There have been certain cosplay incidents in the past I have blogged about that certainly I did not agree to. As I have said in that post, some companies and establishments “invite” over cosplayers to be talents but they do not compensate them enough.

LU provides cosplay talents an honorarium ranging from PHP500-1000 depending on how demanding their roles will be. But these roles are usually minor photo ops with the audience. But as for our part, we did that, and performed our skit onstage as well. And aside from that, we were given basic stuff such as food, dressing room and proper storage. This is not a professional fee, and cosplaying is not our real profession, but this is a more proper way of compensation than tokens and freebies, which, most of the time, are items not everyone really needs.

I hope other companies can learn from LU’s generosity and work ethics towards the rapidly growing cosplay community.

Now, due to the insistent demand of Frostjoker Diana, we took advantage of the fact that we were on a mall and headed to a professional photography studio to have our pics taken.

There are other good pictures not taken by the studio as well but they will be posted in another entry. Overall, the event was attended by around a 500 or so Ragnarok players from multiple servers. Although it was not much of a major event, it still proves that the Ragnarok community is strong as always. Posting this now at cosplay.ph.

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Related Links
Cosplayers Being Abused
Frost Jokers Wins Level Up LIVE 2007 Group Cosplay!
Frost Jokers Wins Again!