Since 2002, The Syndicate has been hosting an annual guild conference and charity event known as SyndCon. This year marked the 9th annual event which just concluded in San Diego. Thanks to generous corporate sponsorship, an all-star cast of software developers and hardware manufacturers and a first class series of tours, panels and events this year boasted more than 200 Syndicate members and invited guests.

The capstone event takes place on the 3rd night of the conference and that is a large charity raffle. Items up for raffle are all donated by sponsors and they range from high end laptops, to signed artwork and other gaming memorabilia, to gaming consoles, to mountains of TShirts, games, posters and mousepads, to more one of a kind items such as a Lord of the Rings movie life sized replica shield. This year's event raised about $8,000 for our two chosen charities which are Youth Opportunity Unlimited (an organization that supports inner city youth with a variety of after-school programs) and the American Cancer Society (in honor of our members who lost their battle with Cancer and in support of those currently fighting the battle).

Another feature of SyndCon is the Alienware LAN party. A number of networks Alienware M15x laptops formed the backbone of this year's event along with custom gaming mice, keyboards and headsets. That combination provided an exceptional gaming platform and many hours of tournament fun for conference attendees.

In addition to those fun events, SyndCon featured tours of gaming studios, upcoming gaming demo sessions, closed door meetings about yet undisclosed titles, feedback and testing sessions on games and an annual meeting with a variety of industry legends as speakers. SyndCon reinforces the value of having a strong, unified online gaming community not only within the games we all enjoy and play but also to the development process.

Planning for SyndCon 2011 is already underway and will mark the 10th annual conference and the celebration of the 15th anniversary of The Syndicate.


The Syndicate is a proud partner of Bigfoot Networks. Bigfoot creates top end network interface cards (NICs) and The Syndicate provides testing and feedback on upcoming products. Bigfoot released an article HERE describing the formation of that relationship. While Bigfoot products are very nice and thus the majority of the feedback is positive, the Syndicate's role is also to seek out issues and bugs so they can be corrected before the product hits the shelves. In the case of the 2100 test, there were many very good things to say about the card and also some important things that were found and corrected. If you are looking for a little boost to your gaming, a Killer 2100 is a good card to give you that edge.


Earlier this year, TenTonHammer asked if we would be interested in doing a series of articles for them. That article series began in mid-April with the following theme: Join The Syndicate's Sean "Dragons" Stalzer twice a month for D-Mail, a look at social and player organization trends in today's online games. Sean is Guild Leader and CEO of The Syndicate, a 630+ member multi-game guild currently in its record-setting 14th continuous year of existence. The Syndicate is committed to gaming excellence in every stage of game development, maintaining a consulting and testing presence with game development companies and co-authoring nearly a dozen Prima Games guides as well. A complete listing of all the D-Mails can be obtained HERE and they touch on topics such as Community drives revenue; preventing knee-jerk reactions that destroy communities and quality recruiting practices.