E-Sports Entertainment Association
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Electronic Sports Entertainment Association, LLC., most widely known as "ESEA", is an international electronic sports company that specializes in hosting organized, non-league pick-up games (PUGs) for the popular games Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.
ESEA offers a wide variety of services for members, including anti-cheat technology, a paid customer service staff, server administrators, weekly prize-winning tournaments, access to pick-up game servers for a host of games, organized scrimmage teams which compete for cash prizes each month, a fantasy e-sports league, and a team/player recruitment center for those wishing to play on or organize their own teams. ESEA also allows users to purchase lessons and guides from top gaming professionals as well as features stories and interviews with leading individuals and organization in the e-sports world.[1]
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[edit] History & Introduction
ESEA was founded in Q4 of 2003 by Eric "lpkane" Thunberg and Team3D Managing Director, Craig 'Torbull' Levine. As of August 2007, ESEA has 170 gaming servers located in nine different states in North America, with two separate locations in California, and additional servers also located in Canada. In the same month of 2007, ESEA introduced, http://www.esportsea.eu, which enabled Europe easy-access to the company by offering the same type of gaming servers and services already familiar in North America, to Spain, Germany, England, and Sweden.[2]
[edit] Anti-Cheat: The ESEA Client
In an effort to combat cheating during their hosted pick-up games (PUGs) and scrimmage matches, ESEA developers released the ESEA Client. It is designed to be a tool not only to detect when cheats are loaded on CS or CS:Source, but also to find gaming servers in which to play on, keep track of your friends, communicate with others, and allow one to view recent news articles posted on the ESEA web-page.
The success of the ESEA Client was landmarked on September 5th, 2006, when ESEA, celebrating the one year anniversary of mandatory use for the Client, announced their 1000th cheating ban as a result of the ESEA Client. Along with the announcement, ESEA also released a configuration file that one can upload to one's Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS), the server that runs CS, and automatically prevent ESEA detected cheaters from joining the server.[3]
Information about how the ESEA Client works is kept confidential in order to prevent circumvention from malicious developers.[4] Only a select few staff members are even able to view the information that the Client reports, further minimizing the risk of outside circumvention. Whether the Client can be circumvented successfully or not is considerably difficult to gauge, as this type of action, in nature, would not be known by anyone keeping statistics.
[edit] Support Staff
ESEA recently re-organized its support staff in an effort to address reported issues regarding customer service response times.[5] Their support structure is what they call a two-tier system, where game server admins (tier one) handle issues that occur during PUG matches as well as answer support inquiries via ESEA's IRC support channel. The second tier consists of previous administrators that were hand-picked as being the highest quality admins. They received a triple pay boost, as well as specialized training and access to more powerful tools in order to handle support inquiries submitted via ESEA's online support system.
[edit] Subscription/Account Benefits
| Benefits | Premium ($6.00 USD Monthly) | Regular (Free) |
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| Access to PUG Servers |
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| Premium Member Forums |
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| Live Game Statistics |
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| Non-Premium Forums |
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| Download-able Pro Gaming Demos |
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| Clip of the Week Submissions |
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| Pro Gaming Lessons |
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| ESEA Scrimmage System |
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| Recruitment Center |
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| Monthly Prizes |
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| Custom Mod Servers |
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[edit] Scrim Mod
One major aspect of ESEA is the ESEA Scrim Mod. Outside of ESEA, all types of skill levels of teams play scrims against other teams. These tend to be five-on-five, first to 16 in 30 rounds, with additional rules for overtime. (overtime consists of two 3-round halves and will be played until the tie is broken) The major advantage of using the ESEA Scrim Mod is the use of ESEA's Anti-cheat Client. Additionally, ESEA offers HL and Source TV recording of all scrim matches, box-score type statistic recording, as well as cash prizes for the top ranked teams each month from their respective division. Prize distribution as of January 2007 was:
- CAL-P/CEVO-SP - $500
- CAL-M/CEVO-M - $300
- CAL-IM/CEVO-IM - $200
- CAL-O/CEVO-A - $100
- Non-league Scrim Teams - $100
Additionally, ESEA makes the process of finding other teams to scrim easier by messaging IRC channels on the GameSurge IRC network that the team is looking for a competitor. Using the Scrim Mod is free for CS:Source players and free for CS 1.6 players as long as the team has a minimum of 3 Premium users.
