Community Spotlight - Syndicate Competitive League

Introduction

Tournaments in EVE Online have a long history. Since the earliest days, the EVE community as well as CCP organized spectacular, very popular tournaments where groups of players compete against each other in a well-defined environment to determine the most clever and skillful group or person.

Beckoning with fame, prizes and challenging opponents, tournaments attract experienced PVP groups as well as new, eager teams trying to prove their value.

Over the past we have seen CCP organizing the popular Alliance Tournaments as well as the recent New Eden Open Tournament; tournaments organized by the EVE community itself are beyond count which proves again the high popularity of this game play style.

This time however, the proven idea of tournaments is taken one step further and converted to a full scale league with regular matches and tournaments. We are excited to present you in this Community Spotlight the Syndicate Competitive League!

The Syndicate Competitive League in detail

The Syndicate Competitive League (SCL) is planned as a long running series of tournaments, organized and commented by veteran tournament experts, streamed live in high quality via twitch.tv.

During each of these tournaments, which are designed as full-fledged standalone weekend events, eight teams will fight for victory in a double elimination process. In addition to those normal tournaments, each season will conclude with a championship tournament between the best performing and most consistent teams.

The eight participating teams will accrue points depending on the place they finish in each tournament. Those points go towards their total Season points, which will affect seeding in the championships mentioned above.

The community will be also integrated in the tournaments and league because spectators of the live stream will be able to win prizes. Furthermore, betting on matches and the tournament will be supported by some of SCL’s sponsors, such as Monocle Madness.

Although the organizers of the SCL are passionate and have invested a lot of effort into getting the SCL started – which once more shows the incredible enthusiasm of EVE Online community members – the SCL prize pool required the help of sponsors, including gambling heavyweights such as SOMER Blink, Monocle Madness, EVE-Bet and Wonder Bet. However, the SCL is still looking for additional sponsors to help fuel tournament prize pools.

The SCL team

EVE Online is an incredible open sandbox game: you can have an idea and – if no game rules are violated – just go ahead and start implementing that idea. Dream and make your dreams become true.

Being passionate about tournaments and then believing that you can set up an awesome PVP league all on your own for the benefit of the whole community – that is true EVE Online spirit and not possible in many other places.

But who are the people behind the SCL, who are these brave souls being so passionate that they spend large amounts of free time to set up the SCL?

Let’s have a look at the original SCL staff list:

Dradius Calvantia is the SCL Production Lead. He has experience from helping Apathetic Brent running the Syndicate Alliance Tournament and, to a lesser extent, participating in actual tournament teams.

Apathetic Brent is the SCL Broadcast Lead and also commentator. Brent and Dradius have been flying together for over a year now, and both flew together in Alliance Tournament X and the New Eden Open.

GunniiH is the SCL Web Admin and Web Developer and responsible for many interesting and useful features on the SCL website.

Seldarine is the Team Coordinator and also Commentator. He takes care of the SCL art assets and has accumulated a massive amount of tournament experience throughout the years.   

Lazarus Telraven and Bacchanalian are both veterans in EVE Online and well known in the EVE Online community. Their knowledge and experience gave them an excellent reputation both as pilots and commentators.

It is impressive to see such massive combined experience and knowledge bundled together with passion and dedication. We would like to thank the whole team for organizing an initiative as wonderful as the SCL.

Asked about their motivation for starting the SCL, the team explained that they see a need for a more consistent and accessible competitive environment for tournament format play. The team intends to satisfy this demand by hosting frequent events with a focus on developing the competitive EVE community – in short, the team organized the SCL!

SCL Open on February 23 – 24, 2013

The inauguration tournament of the SCL, the SCL Open, will be held on the 23rd and 24th of February 2013. The team prize pool for this weekend tournament consists of 50 billion ISK and 30 PLEX. An additional 5 billion ISK in ships and prizes are reserved to be given away to stream viewers during the weekend via community competitions.

The SCL Open will feature the highly popular and customized Action Tracking Interface which was also used by CCP during their New Eden Open Tournament and in a first, more basic version during the Alliance Tournament X.

Broadcasted via twitch.tv, the SCL Open will be commented by Lazarus Telraven and Bacchanalian; both have an excellent reputation and are quite famous amongst the EVE Online tournament enthusiasts.

Glorious stars – the SCL teams

What would a tournament be without participants, without champions to root for or to challenge, without favorites and underdogs? As in EVE Online, the participants themselves create all the content – the organizers can only offer a high quality framework for exciting events to unfold.

Who, then, are the SCL teams and how are they organized?

The SCL contains 8 teams and each SCL team consists of 8 characters, and up to 4 alternates. Team rosters may be altered at any time leading up to the start of each tournament with the sole requirement that the team captain remain on the team. Any player participating on a team may do so with any character they own (provided it is on the roster), but may not particulate on any other team with any character he/she owns during the course of a season.

The teams can participate, or not, of their own volition. With that in mind and to keep the SCL as competitive as possible, the organizers might cycle out the bottom one or two teams for new teams if necessary. Already there are replacement teams on the sidelines, but only time will tell if they will enter the SCL at some time.

Let’s have a closer look at the teams now!

Warlords of the deep

Warlords of the Deep is mix of Hydra Reloaded pilots and a few friends. Hydra Reloaded is a small gang PvP alliance which mostly roams lawless 0.0 space and occasionally low security space. Tournament achievements of Hydra affiliated teams in the past include second place in AT8, first place in AT9 and a top 5 finish in the NEO.

Deep water

DeepWater consists of players from the Black Sharks Division Corporation. Most pilots come from Russia and the Ukraine. While currently roaming 0.0 and appearing in the Syndicate region, this team is very eager to expand their tournament experience.

Test Alliance Please Ignore

This team is the official team of Test Alliance Please Ignore, currently the largest alliance in EVE Online. The team members have a wide range of experience, from having captained tournament teams multiple times prior to having only experienced EVE PvP a few months ago. This team is not only excited to show their quality, but also to join SCL.

Scrumptious Ocular Secretion Collectors

This team might be considered a mixed bag of pilots from various organisations such as BLOMI (Blow Me), Fate, Boosters Anonymous, and Last Huzzah. Each individual pilot in this team has their own background and set of skills, but they are all united in their love for PVP and fierce space pixels explosions.

Dreads Rule

Dreads Rule is a group of friends who have known each other for more than one year. The pilots of this team came together from fleets ran on the test server and then decided to let other people join in on the fun that was had. While this team supports no official Corporation or Alliance, it would be a mistake to underestimate its abilities.

The Reputation Cartel

The Reputation Cartel is a team hailing from the “Failheap Challenge” forums and consists of pilots from New Eden Renegades, Rote Kapelle and various other corps and alliances. After a very successful NEO run, this team is interested in EVE tournament play once more and has entered the SCL for its inaugural tournament. Although team members would class their tournament style as "organized chaos", "the fail-whale brigade" or as "habitual fingersmiths", past events reveal the danger of this team.

ExoDunks

ExoDunks is a team of pilots put together from the Exodus alliance. While not much information about this team has been revealed yet, we are sure that each single team member is eager to test their skills and show their quality in the upcoming SCL tournaments.

Insurance Fraud Inc.

Insurance Fraud Inc. is an old community focused on having fun on the Singularity Test Server by exploring and testing various, often PVP related game mechanics and attending mass tests. To its members, Insurance Fraud is an alternative universe, where friendship and cooperation is possible between otherwise unlikely parties on the Tranquility which has led to many interesting fights and alliances. Now, Insurance Fraud pilots have gathered once more with intention to provide the same service to all SCL teams.

Future plans

The SCL organizers (together with us) are already quite excited about the good quality of service they have in place to comment and broadcast the SCL Open. However, the SCL Open is just the first tournament of this league and the next steps reveal already exciting further improvements.

A lot of quality of life improvements over the normal CCP ran tournaments (such as the Alliance Tournaments) are either already in place or still in development, but they should be up and running by the second tournament.

These improvements include

• Easily trackable teams
• Team descriptions
• Pilot descriptions
• Dedicated Killboards
• Easily trackable videos
• Archived match results that link to past matches

One thing must not be forgotten though when comparing the SCL to CCP’s professional tournament productions: CCP has a lot of experience with organizing more than ten tournaments, while this is the first time for the SCL team; also, the SCL team has considerably less resources available as they are just a group of players. But all these challenges are overcome by the incredible passion of the whole SCL team and they are committed to provide the utmost quality they are capable of.  

While we are looking forward to seeing further great things from the SCL team in the future, we also would like to mention other excellent tournament initiatives from the EVE Community - for example the New Eden Spaceship Tournament organized by German EVE community members.

Watch out for further updates in the news and on the forums!