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.
The Mythical Past: Late 2003 to Late 2005
America and BWN
Europe: Zedi and ESL
Highpoint: Late 2005-2006
America: n0² and the Jedi Academy Aurochs
ESL as an International League
Transformation and Renewal: 2007
The State of the American Competitive Community
The Beginning of the End: 2008-2009
What Remains: 2010-Today
The Big Four Hypothesis
The history of competitive sabering has shown that the amount of clans that truly deserve to be called great can be reduced to four. There has been a number of successful but short-lived clans, and sometimes the success of other clans was due to refusing to play the bigger fish on the ladder. Therefore, what determines the greatness of a given clan is due to its consistent and long lasting success against every clan in the world, including the ones with the highest level of skill. This kind of consistency has only been seen in four clans: *aiming, no.Limits, Ozone and aXiom.
The striking difference between those clans and other top teams in the world can be made apparently by taking a closer look at how they did playing against the Big Four. For example, clan TuA is widely considered to be one of the best competitive clans ever conceived, harboring many excellent players like Hell Raiser, and TuA has not shunned away from challenging the Big Four many times over a timespan of roughly four years. They played *aiming 6 times - lost all of the games. They played aXiom 5 times and have yet to win a single match, and they played nL 6 times, losing 5 out of 6 games. And yet again, it doesn't look any better for other top clans: 333's record against Ozone is one loss, zero wins; against *aiming it's one loss, zero wins too, and against no.Limits it's 4 losses and 3 wins. The top German clan corona has a record against no.Limits of 5 losses and 1 win, against Ozone it's 2 losses and no wins, against *aiming it's 9 losses and 7 wins and they drew against aXiom with 2 losses and 2 wins.
Ontop of that, the Big Four were tightly knit invite-only clans that rarely accepted new members and rarely had anyone leave their clans for other team - unlike the case with many other top teams like corona or TuA. So the Big Four was an elite group, harboring not only the very best JKA players in existence, but also staying far above the rest of the competitive world in terms of sheer skill. Everyone knew that when a clan of the Big Four played another Big Four member, the resulting games would be stuff of legend. But how well did the four clans do against one another?
Team no.Limits joined the ESL ladder in mid 2005 and left it in late 2007. After a year long break from competitive play, they rejoined the ladder in late 2008 and stayed for another year till August 2009, when they finally retired. In that time, no.Limits played *aiming on many occasions, starting as early as August 2005, where they won both rounds with scores of 58-41 and 62-59. Although no.Limits would go on to win their next encounter as well, their win-loss ratio evened out in 2006, where victories would alternate between the two teams. Their final match would take place in January 2007 and would see no.Limits victorious with a score deficit in the first round of 27-35 and a victory in the second one of 53-41. no.Limits would beat *aiming with a record of 5 wins and 2 losses.