Competitive Play
Competitive play occurs when two parties engage in a match with the victor being awarded a commonly desired good. The greater the perceived value of the good, the more competitive the event is going to be. Unlike the case with professional competitive sports, in JKA those goods rarely if ever include set material rewards like money prizes and are mostly centered around social goods like status, prestige and respect. The primary goal of competitive play in JKA is therefore the testing of one's merit and skills as a player or team against those of other competitors. The competitive event can take on various forms in various gametypes and although competition in CTF has a very strong tradition in JKA, competition most often happens in the context of two parties engaging in some form of saber combat. In all cases, competitive play flourishes the most when situated within a larger organizational structure, like a formal league or ranking system.
The History of Competitive Sabering
The history of competitive sabering is a cross between the history of formal competitive venues in general and the history of great clans and players in particular. Competitive events were almost exclusively played without pickups and without force powers, and were governed by a codified set of rules agreed upon by all the players.
Rulesets could vary widely across events, but the two most common for duels were: The American standard of playing a match where the victor was determined by the player that first scored 10 points, with each point being awarded for a successful kill, and the health of both players resetting after each point. The second standard was the European ESL one where the victor of a given duel was determined by the player who either first scored 10 points or ended up with the most points after a 10 minutes timelimit, and where the player scoring a point continued on with the amount of health and shields that he had left over from the previous fight.
Team Free For All matches were most often held across two rounds with either a specified fraglimit, timelimit or both, and the winner was almost always determined by counting up the scores of both rounds together and awarding the team with the highest score. The most prestigious form of TFFA competition was the 3on3 or 4on4 format, also called Team Deathmatch (TDM), but 2on2 matches were not only widely popular, they were oftentimes highly acclaimed as well.
Although serious competition was definitely possible on heavily modded servers, it most often took place on basejka or on mods that strictly preserved the original sabering environment as much as possible. The reasoning behind this insistence on unmodded servers was that the point of competitive play was to determine the better player simpliciter, that is without any qualification, whereas playing on mods like JA+ that significantly change the sabering system just adds such a qualification. A second popular argument was that modded servers inevitably made the sabering mechanics worse by (oftentimes unintentionally) introducing factors that increased the randomness of the gameplay. Whatever the case may be, the main reasons as to why competitive play never took off within communities favouring modded servers was on the one hand the lack of a central organizational structure, like a proper league, and on the other hand the lack of interest towards competitive play in general by players that frequented modded servers.
Strong Roots: Late 2003 to Late 2005
The early history of competitive play in JKA is now shrouded in a lot of darkness, because very little tangible information survived over the years. For a variety of reasons, the time period between the release of JKA and late 2005 features very little interaction between the American and European communities. This is primarily due to two factors: First, the fact that both sides had their own specialized competitive organzations, providing them with ample opportunity for formal means of competitive play, and secondly, the way internet latency heavily affects gameplay in JKA was a demotivating factor for both sides and made formal cross-continental competition more difficult.
America and BWN
Although shortly after the release of the game in September 2003 many high-profile clans had formed, like OoS, KoP, AIM and BSoV, the early period of American JKA was first and foremost the period of clan Master, a large but elite clan with roots in JK2 run by Master DarkStar. It would be Master that eventually set out to create a formal competitive venue in late 2003, dubbing it Bladeworks Network (BWN). However, although BWN provided a good competitive outlet for the American community as a whole, mostly because there was no real alternative, it lacked the necessary rigour for competitive play to truly flourish, as it had serious flaws that made the system prone to abuse and thus an unreliable means of tracking player skill. Despite its flaws, it was the only semi-formal league that the American competitive scene had at its disposal and so it attracted a lot of highly skilled players over the course of its lifetime.
In early 2004, after the dissolution of top clan OoS, WoV started becoming more respectable as a clan thanks to the efforts of Intrepid aka Kilroy, who took it upon himself to recruit a lot of top ex-OoS players. In just a few months WoV ascended from being an inactive JK2 clan to a serious force in competitive JKA, rivaling other great clans like BSoV, Seraph, JKT, DoX and Loi at that point. Master was still by far the most dominating clan though, with some of their members gaining an almost mythological reputation for their skill in combat.
Most prone to this kind of idolisation was Master DarkStar. He was at that time widely considered to have been the greatest of all players within the American competitive scene, with an unimaginable level of skill. He was the dominant force behind clan Master, both in terms of fighting prowess as well as administrative authority, and was for a year and a half the single most successful duelist on BWN. Many speculated that before the release of JKA he must have been an internal beta tester for the game, seeing as he was so far ahead of everyone else in terms of skill shortly after the game was officially released. Whatever the case may be, because DarkStar tried to maintain as high a standard of recruitment for clan Master as possible at that time, Master was thus a notoriously difficult clan to get into, with trialing periods spanning multiple months. It is therefore to noone's surprise that Master remained by far the most looked up to clan with the highest skilled members in North America, including such former greats as Sword, Predator, Psycho, SiNiStaR, Omega, Wick3D, Ninja! and Oldlady.
However, as time went by, so did WoV's prowess increase, so much so that the clan was eventually recognized as rivaling Master in terms of sheer skill. Things turned for the worse as some of Master's core members, most notably DarkStar himself, became more and more inactive towards the end of 2004 and Master suddenly and surprisingly disbanded in December of the same year. WoV used this opportunity to pick up some of the most notable ex-Masters, including former Master Viper, and became the de facto best American clan for its time.
Some of the other ex-Masters formed their own teams, as did Ironlung with Wu, Keyo with clan Prophet or Oldlady with clan Nurse, the latter of which became a temporary playing ground for a lot of former Masters, like Radman or Wick3D aka Raw. Others joined various miscellaneous clans, as did former Master LFT who joined clan YV. Most were either inactive or just simply retired, including Sword, Predator and Psycho.
It was at that time in January 2005 that WoV was becoming more serious about its aspirations towards greatness and underwent a major restructuring of the clan, forming a new rank that was reserved only for its best and most prestigious players, naming it Wovian; the initial players included were Intrepid, sh0, Sauce, Noir, Kidster, Leif, Viper, Deception and Fusion, later additions were Matrix, Ransom and Autumn as well. They sought not only to preserve their merit as the very best competitive clan within the American scene, they also, for the first time ever in the history of American JKA, actively sought out to compete against top European teams.
So it was that Wovian began practicing on European servers a lot to get used to playing with a high ping. They were very quickly recognized as a major contender to many top European clans at that time, although they were completely unaware of the ESL's existence. Wovian played Ozone in an official match on 15.03.2005, a few months before Ozone went on to join the ESL, and they managed to beat the top European clan with a score of 40-25 and 34-40. A few weeks later Wovian Ransom and sh0 would go on to play Zedi's famous main 2v2 team, consisting of Dimension and Twilight, winning
both rounds, although the records of that match have now been lost.
In the meantime, DarkStar surprisingly made a return and reformed clan Master under the guise of [Ki], which most former Masters flocked to once again. However, even though [Ki] quickly rose to challenge the top clans of the American community, it was widely acknowledged that they could not compete against Wovian anymore, which was now too preoccupied by its quest for world domination. In fact, [Ki] never bothered to formally assert itself against Wovian, being content with playing actively on BWN, and indeed, [Ki] would turn out to be very short-lived as DarkStar once again suddenly disappeared in April of 2005, leaving the clan without a leader and eventually letting it fade away into oblivion.
It was during that April of 2005 that Wovian was at the height of its power and officially challenged the very best
European team to a match: Wovian would go on to play team aXiom. On the second of April, Wovian fielded sh0, Viper and Ransom against aXiom's Dureal, Xerxes and Warp. The first round was to be played on a European server, from which aXiom easily emerged victorious with a score of 68-32. For the second round Wovian tried to counteract the possibility of aXiom adopting a very passive strategy and picked the duel map Bespine Courtyard for the match. Unfortunately, although Wovian won the second round easily with a score of 82-59, they were unable to catch up with aXiom in points, losing the match with a final score of 114-127.
Even though Wovian managed to play a good game against aXiom, their first major defeat since early 2004 was too big of a disappointment for a clan that was so used to winning every major event they signed up for and so they began falling into inactivity. The resentment that the restructuring caused amongst the members that were not allowed into the elite Wovian section was becoming a burden as well, with many important members feeling betrayed and leaving the clan out of protest. Wovian tried to counteract this development and eventually abandoned its rank structure in late April 2005, but it was too little too late. The German top clan *aiming would formally challenge the team on the first of May 2005, but Wovian was so inactive by then that they didn't even respond to the challenge.
With this onset of inactivity, some of the core Wovian members began to leave the team as well. This included most notably Matrix, who joined DoX. Shortly thereafter DoX would also recruit former KoP player subLime, who was widely considered alongside KoP's Dark_Knight to have been the best dual saberist in the entire American community. With those recent acquisitions and the inactivity of Wovian and [Ki], DoX was looking to usurp the title of NA champions. However, their aspirations would be dashed from an unlikely source. A team with no reputation at all had gained tremenduous momentum over the last few months, defeating various smaller clans, and in August 2005 they had become serious enough to challenge DoX to an official match: It was the Jedi Academy Aurochs.
The Aurochs were the first competitive NA-European hybrid team that emerged out of the ideals propagated by the Jedi Academy,
which was a school dedicated to helping new players improve in all aspects of JKA. They were also the only competitive team left in JKA to play without poke. As of mid 2005, the Aurochs' lineup included most notably such players like Tido, Jaws! (aka JKXIII), former Master Deqlyn, Sauce, Refl3x, ProXimo, Kain and Masta. DoX did not pull any punches against the Aurochs and fielded their very best lineup, consisting of Matrix, Havok, subLime and skillz. A lot was on the line. After an incredibly close and tense match, the Aurochs won both rounds with scores of
50-48 and 50-46.
The Aurochs went on to play the top clan KoP shortly thereafter and won convincingly with scores of 50-39 and 50-40. Just to make sure everyone got the message, they rechallenged DoX to another game that was held on 10.08.2005. However, this time around DoX was losing so badly that some of their members, most notably subLime in the first round and skillz in the second one, ragequit in the middle of the game, forcing DoX to substitute them with lesser skilled players like bWb and brutality. The scores were therefore appropriately convincing: 50-23 and 50-39 for the Aurochs.
For almost half a year the Aurochs, playing without poke, would remain at the very top of the American competitive scene. In fact, in September 2005 they would go on to become the first American team ever to sign up for the ESL and actively compete against the European elite.