SDoS I – “Having enemies only means that you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life”

The prelude

Originally, the first SDoS event was set to start at 5pm UTC yesterday.
Despite the adverse conditions and circumstances, everything looked like we were finally in for some fun and competitive games again.

The signups were impressive, in both quantity and quality.
Around 50 people signed up. Among them some oldschool allstars such as tenshi, ConMan and degrave but also some of the more recent top players like notas, Acuerta and kuzen.
(Complete list here)

The first try

Due to the immense time pressure for the server coders, some technical aspects did not go according to plans. The servermod for SDoS had to be built from scratch, with barely any stress tests to work with.

On top of that, some retarded fag with no life (we’ll be referring to him as SRFWNL from now on, you all know him anyway) connected to the server and managed to inject malicious code that would make the server go down.

A few days prior to the games, the admins noticed that SRFWNL had signed up for the tournament (as V|Kellogs) and initiated email contact with him.
In the course of the conversation SRFWNL agreed not to try an attack on the SDoS server since his business with SWL was something personal and SDoS was in no way involved in any of it.

Well, so much for that.

Moving on to private servers

The inconveniences (delay, changes of plans, server tests) both players and admins had to put up with at this point were immense.

However, it speaks for the strength of this community that the admins still found a way to provide at least a little insta (fun)tournament by moving to private servers.

The tournament was the first to introduce a double-elimination bracket-style system and, due to the server change, much of the work that was supposed to be done automatically had to be done manually by the admins.

The games

After everything was set up, the games could commence!

Considering the fact that the server was private and not so easily accessible, the participation was so much higher than anyone could’ve expected. (all-vs-all screenshot)

The all-vs-all served to determine the seeds for the brackets, which can be found here.

After 4 hours of intense gaming, SDoS I Insta had its winner, Apollon (bounty), referring ConMan and Acuerta to the 2nd and 3rd place respectively.

Addendum: download all demos here!

(Note that due to the server change the anticheat client could not be checked! So it may be wise not to give too much weight to the results this time.)


Closing words

SDoS is the living proof that sauer is as far from being dead as it could be.
Given the difficult circumstances, the workload they’re taking on is much more than anyone could expect.

Let’s honour their effort appropriately and help however we can!

• Come to #sdos with your real nick; authentication will make it easier for admins to recognize you as one of the good guys (SRFWNL has been trying to sneak into #sdos several times)
• Don’t share sensitive data on servers! Invite trustworthy people to come to #sdos instead and have them ask for it themselves! If you share information publicly you’re endangering the whole tournament!
• Help with server testing! Relevant information will be posted here, in #sdos, on dos.sauerworld.org and probably via mail!
• Next event (teamplay, ectf) may take place in 2 or 3 weeks, stay tuned for that! 

Big thanks go out to all the players and admins who didn’t give up, in particular to the whole SDoS crew (mefisto, Chasm, echo-echo, bbk, notas, misc, pix and Acuerta) !

Read the official statement here.