I'm sure its not a surprise at this point that I would say the season didn't exactly go the way everyone had hoped. We had good activity, yes, but one of the lessons I learned was that a ladder system and prize pool don't mix well. Players being disqualified is not something anyone likes to see. And there was a lot of other questionable activity from nearly everyone in the top 10. But I don't blame the players; they responded to the money incentive which was the intent. I'm sorry that I didn't organize this better and/or listen to the calls to require a tournament from the very beginning as some had suggested. The last tournament didn't go well and I foolishly thought that having one again would only complicate things, but it turns out that nothing could have been more wrong.

In any case, its time to move on. In the future, any seasons with prize money will be required to have a tournament in some format.

Xtre-X is the winner of SCW11 and has been paid $500.

There will be a bit of a break until the next season. I will need some time to reflect and think how to run things better.

Due to a determination that GoldSCV and J.H have been abusing the ladder with illegitimate games in order to boost up J.H., their games have been removed and they are not allowed to play against each other ever again.

Their games have been re-weighed to prevent significant inflation of the standings.

This is the second time this has happened (first time was two seasons ago). With so much prize money on the line, any foul play that might lead to an unfair result will not be tolerated. This would call for a suspension, but GoldSCV confessed to all of this, so they are allowed to play, but are disqualified from winning prize money for SCW11. If either or both finish in top 3, the same prize pool will go to the next-in-line in each case. Season winner status will still be awarded should either place first.

GoldSCV and J.H will be eligible to win prize money next season, if they choose to play fair.

As announced at the start of the season, the top 4 will complete in a tournament for the 1v1 title and prize money. The higher ranks will have an advantage in the bracket as usual. All matches will be bo7 except for the finals, which will be bo9:

https://i.imgur.com/fKSKt59.png?3

Play your games as soon as possible

Someone can probably make a prettier bracket (premier?)

SaDiStiC)DiaBlO is suspended for 10 days in light of evidence of abuse using observer mode, including giving and receiving help during league games. There will likely be more suspensions coming pending review of further evidence

Congrats to SCW9 winners fourdrones and Xtre-Mamba. SCW10 will start on Saturday 1/19, at 12:00 PM EST. There will be a tournament for top 4 at the end of the season. Any donations for a prize pool are welcome

Due to what I still suspect was problems on my host's end, there were filesystem and/or possibly hardware errors that caused the site to go down last week. Even though the site came back online, the problem was not fully resolved, and fast forward to yesterday; there was a server reset which caused a loss of recent data. Fortunately I had a backup saved on 12/9, but nothing more recent than this. The underlying problem that caused this is now resolved, but unfortunately the site has been rolled back to the state that it was in on 12/9, including all posts and replays.

Given the situation, I should have been saving backups daily, to avoid situations such as this one, but I was confident that things would be stable. Things have run relatively smoothly for more than a year since the site was originally deployed, but this disaster is the first time that something like this has happened. I screwed up by not having more frequent backups, but from now on I'm going to have automated daily backups, and push replays to an additional server, to ensure that something like this never happens again.

Fortunately, since remastered, the game automatically saves all of your StarCraft replays in a folder called AutoSave. To have all of your games re-added in bulk, please zip up the folders which include every game since 12/9 and email them to scwreplays@gmail.com. I will run them through a script which will automatically re-add every game, with correct winners and points, to rebuild the ladder as it was before the crash. To ensure consistency and to give everyone time to do this, uploading replays will be disabled until 9 PM server time today (12/15). At that point I'll reupload every game that I received by email in the order in which it was played, in order to rebuild the ladder and points gained as it was. You don't need to worry about non-games (because the script will filter for maps played on the SCW9 map only) or old games that are already on the server (the script will skip replays that are already added, and will not add duplicates) or games that you lost (the script will determine winner by looking at the replay). You can literally copy the entire contents of those replay folders to a zip and send to that email. The AutoSave folder is organized by date, you can copy the sub-folders that correspond to the dates including 12/9 and later. This will work for both 1v1 and 2v2. If you only played a few games and you would rather upload them yourself manually, you can do that also, after 9 PM. I'll also be accepting bulk email replays after that time, but the sooner you send them, the more accurate the points will be.

Within a day everything should be restored to the way it was yesterday - this could have been a lot worse. Thanks everyone for your patience.

If anyone fluent in Korean and/or Spanish could translate this post and reply to this topic with the translation, that would be super helpful, so that members of the site that speak those languages can read a copy of this message in their language.

Will start next saturday 10/13 12:00 EST. Whether or not there will be a tournament and the rules of it is still to be determined, pending the results of the discussion in this thread. Prize pool is $200 at this point, donated back from last season

I discovered a security breach that involved spam redirects inserted onto every page. For everyone's protection I disabled the site until I found out what had happened. Most likely, the security breach was caused by vulnerabilitie(s) in a wordpress site hosted by this server, which has now been permanently disabled. It appears that as a result of the intrusion, files under the webspace were modified to include the spam-redirect code. All of these files have been restored; there is no evidence of any other files being modified or of anyone's information being accessed, or of root access to the server being gained. In all likelihood the intrusion was automated by a bot, which ran a script that injected the spam and moved on to other targets.

I do recommend, though, that everyone clear their cookies.

You may upload replays from when the site was down.