Competitive Play
Competitive play occurs when two parties engage in a match with the victor being awarded a commonly desired good. 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, it 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 reliable ranking system.
Competitive sabering has had the most powerful legacy within the game. It is almost exclusively played without pickups and without force powers, and is governed by a codified set of rules agreed upon by all the players.
Rulesets can vary widely across events, but the two most common for duels are: The American standard of playing a match where the victor is determined by the player that first scores 10 points, with each point being awarded for a successful kill, and the health of both players resetting after each point. The European ESL standard where the victor of a given duel is determined by the player who either first scores 10 points or who ends up with the most points after a 10 minutes timelimit, and where the player scoring a point continues on with the amount of health and shields that he had left over from the fight.
Team Free For All matches are most often held across two rounds with either a specified fraglimit, timelimit or both, and the winner is 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 is the 3on3 or 4on4 format, but 2on2 matches were not only widely popular, but also quite acclaimed as well.
Although serious competition is possible on heavily modded servers, it most often takes place on basejka or on mods that strictly preserve the original sabering environment as much as possible. The reasoning for this insistence on unmodded servers is that the point of competitive play is 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. Nevertheless, the main reasons as to why competitive play never took off within communities favouring modded servers were 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 frequent modded servers.
History
The history of competitive play is a cross between the history of formal competitive venues in general and the history of great clans and players in particular. For a variety of reasons, the early history of competitive play in JKA features 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.