GotFrag- With the absence of CAL the Counter-Strike: Source community has been desperately searching for a new free to play league, fortunately our pleas have not gone unnoticed. Since CAL's Departure from the scene there has been a rush for new leagues to establish themselves as the premier free to play league. Since the recent BOE scandal many are skeptical which leagues they can trust with there new anti cheat clients and the ability of league officials and admins to have the experience to be capable of smoothly running a season's worth of matches. I had the opportunity to interview Lopez, which you will be able to read at the end of this article.

eCompete Online is an online video game league centered on providing a free, competitive experience for our users in a multitude of games. eCompete offers a multitude of features and services that no other free league can, or has even attempted to offer. Registration in the league will allow a user to take advantage of free stat tracking, participate in fun events, and play in our leagues and tournaments for cash and hardware prizes.

eCompete Online, launched in June 2009, currently strives to be a premier name in online gaming. Founded by Heath Showalter, eCompete was designed and coded by a team of professionals who have worked for such giants as Cisco, NEC, and the United State Postal Service. It is staffed by experienced and well trained admins, many of whom spent time working as members of the Cyberathlete Amateur League's staff. Their prior experience is invaluable to our league. eCompete's main goal is to provide a positive, fun, yet competitive gaming experience for all its users, and our staff are dedicated to that idea.

We at eCompete Online believe our league is the future of gaming leagues, and we hope you, the users, will take us there.

Maplist
It will be a 10week season not including playoffs

de_cpl_fire
de_train
de_cpl_strike
de_season
de_cpl_mill
de_nuke
de_cpl_fire
de_train
de_russka
de_contra
de_inferno
de_dust2
Management & Staff

Operations
Name: Marcus Heath Showalter
Position: Owner
Name: Matthew Laubach
Position: Director of Operations/ Marketing
Name: Rafael Lopez
Position: Director
Name: Philip Chung
Position: Director/IRC Operations

Developer Team
Name: Rafael Lopez
Position: Web Developer
Name: Marcus Heath Showalter
Position: Web Developer
Name: Scott Crooks
Position: Web Developer
Name: Lucas Armstrong
Position: Stat Tracker Developer Lead

Media Team
Name: Shaun Jett
Position: Video Production

Marketing Team
Name: Tyler Quinn
Position: Marketing Assistant

Quality Control
Name: Andrew Goetz
Position: Quality Assurance
Name: Moonki Kang
Position: Quality Control

Registration
Registration to create teams will be open until August 14th, 2009
Registration to join a team will open until week 7(TBA)

Lopez interview

Could you please introduce yourself, and your position at ECO?
My name is Rafael Lopez and I am one of ECO’s directors and developers. As a director, I help manage the direction in which the league is headed, what games to offer, and involve myself in the general state of the league. I am not exactly a “game admin” and am not directly involved in any particular game. Instead I simply oversee all of them and make sure that they are running smoothly. As a developer, I help develop new features for the site. We have 3 developers at the moment: Marcus Showalter (founder of the league), Scott Crooks, and myself. Together we’ve constructed everything that you guys will be using plus the infrastructure that admins use to administrate the league.

There’s been a lot of reference to ECO being the next CAL all the way down to the staff, would you mind to comment on who is currently on ECO's staff that was previously associated with CAL?
We’d certainly love to take the place that CAL had in the competitive PC gaming community – but we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. Right now our focus is to successfully complete 3 seasons: 1 for Counter-Strike: Source, one for Counter-Strike 1.6, and one for Warcraft 3 DOTA. Hopefully we’re able to offer what CAL offered, and then some more stuff like stats tracking (we offer stat tracking for all of our games: CS 1.6, CS:S, and throneit.com is helping us with DOTA).

Addressing the second part of the question, yes, we do have a lot of CAL staff onboard. I worked at CAL from January 2008 until it’s closure in February 2009. By the time it died, I was running CAL’s CS:S Open division which was the largest division in all of CAL with almost 1300 teams. We also brought along another two CS:S admins: Matthew Laubach who was a senior CS:S Open admin, and Julian Falasca who was a regular admin but showed true potential at CAL. Our AC staff is also virtually the same as it was in CAL. We’ve hired Dan Alberswerth who was regarded as possibly one of the best AC Managers CAL CS:S ever had, as well as Michael Hone who was set to replace him. They have also brought a bunch of regular AC admins along with them, however, we wish to keep AC admins anonymous so I am unable to provide names.

Counter-Strike 1.6 looks almost identical to CAL’s 1.6. We brought along Chris Tremblay to run the game for us (Game Manager), and we told him he could bring whoever he wanted with him. So he brought along what I suppose were the best 1.6 admins to help him run 1.6 for us. He also brought his 1.6 AC Manager (Billy Figueroa) who I believe in turn has brought his good AC admins who again will remain anonymous.
I’m personally extremely excited about getting preseason started as I’ve been working on the league since very early April. Those are almost 4 long months. I know the other 2 developers have worked just as hard, so we are really looking forward to having it all be used. It’s a great feeling to know that your work will be enjoyed by literally thousands of people around the world.

A few days ago zBlock 4.4 came out which introduced a few new features, including a command to fix the bunnyhopping exploit. What is ECO’s stance on it?
First of all, we’d like to extend our sincere thanks to the zBlock team for taking their time on making a truly fantastic plugin. I’m sure they are well aware of the positive impact it has had for competitive gaming. As for zBlock 4.4: it’s probably one of the most significant zBlock updates in a long time. And frankly, I really like it. It fixes a lot of “standard” exploits, as well as fixing the defusal bug (which I think is amazing!), fixing the quick-crouch exploit (again, amazing!), and then of course the one which has stolen all the attention: bunnyhopping.

I applaud them for figuring out how to fix bunnyhopping, but second to allow leagues to choose whether to enable or disable their fix.
After a lot of discussion, our source staff chose to turn the bunnyhop fix off. There were two main reasons for it:
First, bunnyhopping has been in the game since its birth, and it had been legal in most of the major leagues so we saw no reason to change anything. The crouch exploit had been illegal, so it was great to have zBlock actually fix the exploit. Thus, had bunnyhopping been illegal in our ruleset then of course we would use the fix! But just because the fix becomes available does not mean we need to rethink the rule. Whether to make bunnyhopping legal (or to restrict it) had been discussed before zBlcok 4.4 came out, and we had already discussed most of the pros and cons of it and had decided to make it legal. So we chose to not use zBlock’s fix.

Second, we honestly just didn’t want to fight with the community. It’s our first season and we have more important things to worry about than dealing with thousands of angry players. We just want to get through our first season with as little problems as possible, and hopefully with a 100% satisfaction rating from our players 

Where is ECO headed? Will you be hosting LANs? When and Where?
Like I mentioned in question 2, right now we just want to successfully complete the online seasons we are hosting. We really don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, or otherwise we might not even make it past square one.
LANs? Yes. Our About page on the site says the following:

“We understand that a video game is only as big as its LANs, that's why at ECO we already have some plans in place to start up large, competitive LANs around the US and Canada. While we may not already have venues booked, we assure you that the LAN experience is something we place value in and will be bringing to our users in the not so distant future. Expect more updates as the league grows!”

Honestly, it says it all. We are planning on hosting LANs around North America but we really don’t have any details on it yet. As the league grows, and more importantly, as it stabilizes, we will update everyone on our plans. But again, right now our primary focus is to make sure our current games run smoothly.
Once that’s done, we certainly do have other plans in mind (in addition to LANs) so we’ll have to prioritize everything. But don’t hold your breath as I really, really, doubt that there will be some sort of ECO LAN by this time next year.