From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

E-Sports Entertainment Association, LLC., most widely known as ESEA, is an American electronic sports company that specializes in hosting semi-organized, non-league pick-up games (PUGs) for the popular game Half-Life: Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source.

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 Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, 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 feature stories and interviews with leading individuals in the e-sports world.

Contents 1 History 2 Anti-Cheat: The ESEA Client 3 Support Staff 4 Premium Vs. Regular 5 Scrim Mod 6 External Links

ESEA was co-founded in Q4 of 2003 by Eric "lpkane" Thunberg and Team3D Managing Director, Craig "Torbull" Levine. As of January 2007, ESEA had 140 servers located in nine different states in America, with two separate locations in California, and additional servers also located in Canada.

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 as a tool to find servers to play on, keep track of your friends on ESEA, communicate with others, and allow one to view the current news post.

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.[1]

Information about how the ESEA Client works is kept confidential in order to prevent circumvention from malicious developers.[2] 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.

ESEA recently re-organized its support staff in an effort to address reported issues regarding customer service response times.[3] 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.

The ESEA community is a mix of Premium (pay-to-play) and regular users.

Premium users, as of January 2007, pay $6.00USD each month to achieve Premium status. This allows them access to:[4]

• ESEA hosted PUG servers (5 vs. 5, 30 round matches)
• Fun servers (CS modifications giving a fresh, entertaining format)
• Aim servers (non-organized aiming practice servers)
• CSDM (unorganized, non-stop, deathmatch format)
• Scrimmage Servers
• Weekly Premium tournaments for prizes
• Access to the Premium forum section

Regular users are not required to pay a monthly charge and anyone is welcome to sign up. They are allowed access to:[5]

• Regular user forum section
• CSDM server access
• Ability to play on a Scrimmage server if on a team with three Premium users (CS)
• Ability to play on the new CS:Source Scrimmage servers

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. 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 GameSurge.net 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 as a minimum of 3 Premium users.

• E-Sports Entertainment Association
• Team3D Homepage