Following a four-month-long regular season, the top four teams from each region met in a simple knockout bracket to crown the Cyber-athletic Championship Series Season 3 champions with a total prize pool of $6,000 up for grabs.
North America
After the 14 weeks of online play in which each team played every other team twice, the four teams of Disrupt Academy, SiNister Academy, Team SiNister (ex-Motiv8 Gaming) and Carnage n Chaos qualified for the playoffs.
The standings at the end of the North American regular season of CCS Season 3 via Liquipedia
Semi-Finals
The first semi-final was between SiNister Academy and Team SiNister, a peculiar matchup which forced Team SiNister to play under the name of Mowt3nDooDs for the game to avoid confusion. While Mowt3nDooDs would have been the favourites as the ex-Pro League and current Challenger League team, SiNister Academy had previously found a lot of success in CCS finishing second during Season 2 (behind SK Gaming) and had bested Mowt3nDooDs in 3 out of 5 maps this season so far.
Mowt3nDooDs, however, wasn’t about to let this game slip and continued their 6 week CCS winning streak in straight maps against SiNister Academy. Talon led his team to a 6-1, 6-3 victory on Coastline and Oregon to book themselves a place in the Grand Finals while SiNister Academy was forced down to the 3rd place playoff.
The second semi-final was an equally dominant affair as Disrupt Academy played against Carnage n Chaos. Disrupt Academy is probably best known as the team that defeated Evil Geniuses, Cloud9 (then known as beastcoast) and Team SiNister (then known as Motiv8 Gaming) at DreamHack Austin to finish in fourth position, an outstanding performance for an underaged team with limited high-level experience.
The game was an unsurprisingly short contest ending at 12-1 across the two maps. The only round won by CnC was the penultimate one while down 6-0, 5-0 saving the team from a complete sweep.
Grand Finals
Disrupt Academy: Yoggah, E-X-0, Hyper, Beaulo, Sweater and Dot
Team SiNister: Talon, Billboard, Yellow, CookieZ and Chapstick
As one of only two teams to have beat Disrupt Academy in the regular season, Team SiNister would have gone into this best-of-5 map final with a fair amount of confidence that they could take this title, however, Disrupt ensured this was not to be. Disrupt took the current 4th placed Challenger League team down 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 across Border, Consulate and Clubhouse in a very convincing victory. While no singular map was too one-sided the overall scoreline of 3-0 shows Disrupt Academy was clearly the best team in this season of CCS and so goes home with the Season 3 title!
Europe
After 14 playdays in Europe the top 4 teams of Team Empire (previously known as Edenity), Mock-it Academy, Forever Gaming (previously known as Method) and FitnaBoyZ (previously known as Planetkey Dynamics) all qualified for the playoffs with Team Empire going in as the clear favourites.
The standings at the end of the European regular season of CCS Season 3 via Liquipedia
Semi-Finals
The first semi-final of Team Empire vs FitnaBoyZ was, unfortunately, a forfeit victory for Empire as their opponents couldn’t field a full roster.
The second semi-final, however, was played between Mock-it Academy and Forever Gaming. The game was anticipated to be a close one as the two teams had ended the regular season effectively equal in the standings (just a round difference of 10 between them) and had gone to three close maps on both their meetings so far this season. Forever Gaming, however, had obviously been preparing for this matchup extensively as they defeated Mock-it 6-2 on Oregon and 6-0 on Consulate to set up a meeting with Team Empire in the finals
Grand Finals
Team Empire: Shockwave, ShepparD, JoyStiCk, karzheka and Scyther
Forever Gaming: TankNinjaz, Jugger, Kaktus, Kendrew, TangyD and Meadzzz
Unlike the NA finals, this matchup was a really close game. Both of Empire’s regular-season defeats had come against Forever and so, despite Empire currently sitting on top of the Challenger League leaderboard and so were on line to be promoted to the Pro League next season, Forever had a real shot in taking down the Russian champions.
While not a single map out of the five played went to overtime, the teams traded maps back and forth constantly ending in an incredible 6-2, 2-6, 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 scoreline in favour of Team Empire, 3 maps to 2. This 43 round game is the joint second longest in competitive Siege history behind only the Nefarious v Planetkey Dynamics 46 round matchup earlier on in Season 3 of CCS EU. This marathon of a victory means Team Empire is crowned CCS’s very first European champion!
While a 3rd place match up was planned for both regions both FitnaBoyZ and Carnage n Chaos both forfeited their games and so finishes in 4th position giving Mock-it Academy and SiNister Academy the 3rd place finish.
And so concludes CCS Season 3! You can watch the highlights of the playoffs on the CCS eSports YouTube account or catch up on the VoDs straight from the CCSeSports Twitch account and keep on eye out for more information on the upcoming Season 4 of CCS right here at SiegeGG!