My state of the union(call of duty) speech for this week

My fellow Call of Duty Players, I sit before you today a worried man, trying to set forth what is right and good in this world.

Around this time last year, people were steadily growing tired of CoD4. Modern Warfare 2 was on the horizon. A sign of new life, a sign of hope. We as a community were stoked. The thought of a new game, fresh tournies, a fresh breath of life and outlook on CoD. In the end, we were greatly disappointed, getting a 60 dollar single player "movie" and something that was useless to us as competitive players. We opted to stick with CoD4 as a necessity; we had no choice. With the exclusion of record and no private servers MW2 was not a viable competitive choice for those of us that don't like to settle for less. Our entire community was shunned, and we were left with a bitter taste in our mouth for infinity ward.

Fast forward a year. CoD4 is on its last leg again. We're lucky to get 60 teams a tourney when we were once getting 100+. Announcements are out about blackops. We will be getting record function, dedicated servers, and an awesome cinema/theater mode for watching match playback. What a sweet victory for us. We rejoice, hailing treyarch as the saviors of our community and hoping there is still a chance for CoD.

And then we get the game. Holy hell it was a shock. Our little competitive car had just been rammed in the side by a semi-truck known as treyarch. 60 fps for majority of the community. major issues with lag and stuttering and the server rate. No ability to access anything server side by gameservers (they said treyarch would not let them.) The developers at treyarch have basically built us another 60 dollar single player movie and are insulted that we would want stable fps to play online competition. They scoff at the idea, the game was set to run at 60 fps and how dare we try to screw with their visual masterpiece. We manage to recover a little bit. We find a way to config around and get 100 fps (at least some of us do. The quad core gamers. The game STILL rapes people on dual core.) Sigh of relief. Lets start seeing what happens.

You'd think the sun is fixing to shine through on this ugly storm but no. From there we find out about glitches to 3rd person and radar. No sound on the plant for SD. Whats worse is one team has already used said glitches in radar. We're in disarray. We're worried. I'm worried. The state of things for this game is starting to not look good.

Fast forward briefly a bit to yesterday.(odd choice of words fast forwarding to the past. Anywho.) A new patch is out. YES! they've listened to an extent. We can now hear the bomb jingle for sd. They've fixed the radar and third person glitches. The stuttering is not as bad. The game still rapes dual core players though.

We're now 5 weeks into the game. We've had one ctf tourney go off, one multiple gametype bo3 tourney, quad's tourney coming up, and alienware arena has announced their tourney.

And honestly, sitting here looking at it, I'm concerned. I really am. At this point of the game during cod4 we had a roughly 400 team tourney (xfire) going on and the cevo finish the fight tourney signups flourishing. CG's tourney struggled to have 32 paid. (For the record after deadline time they did have a couple more teams wanting to sign up, so more like 40) ESL's free tourney (notice how i bolded free for emphasis) got 32 teams. I'm not sure if they capped it at 32 or what but still. And to be fair those have just been small test tourneys for settings, not a full blown one like it should be. Unless I'm not looking at the right thing quad has 32 teams signed up. On a plus side newegg wanfest has 150 + signed up @ready, and 170 or so more signed up but still trying to get five. (but its a 4v4 event and I question how well it will run, I feel sorry for the headaches its going to give keyhunt. and lets be serious, how many of those teams will actually play and not be forfeits.)

Thats where we're at at this point. To say I'm worried would be an understatement. The community is currently split between gametypes. A lot are lobbying for CTF. And yet last night after the patch all I could find were SD scrims. I'm hoping that people were just playing sd to see if the game was fixed in any shape form or fashion. I mean sure, I like SD but lets be serious here there's not even a point in planting the bombs. Its slightly ridiculous. I still think CTF should be the way of the future for the game. But I digress, I'm not ready to get into that arguement just yet. We'll put that on the back burner and touch it later. As I said I'm concerned about the number of teams showing up for the tourneys currently. And as a head of game and so called "community leader" (I know some of you scoff/use that term loosely with me) I take it as a challenge to myself to see how we can improve on that. The other heads of game out there should be taking it upon themselves too. I'm sure after talking with both john clark and chris hill that it is something on the back of their minds. How do we get more teams signed up and continually playing?

We need to find those community hubs out there. The "codsources" of other games if you will. I know CSS uses netcodeilluminati. TF2 has a few places. I honestly have no clue about mw2, where there competitive communities thrive at, but we need to find them to and alert these teams to whats going on with our community as a whole, and get those teams to start playing here and leaving their games. We have to do something, or else I'm worried about the competitive future of this game. And I actually LIKE this game so that worries me. We as "community leaders" need to take that upon ourselves to start getting out there, spamming for and finding these teams and alerting them to our tourneys. If anyone knows where these community hubs are I'd encourage them to enlighten me so I can go out there and find them.

Ok, now thats certainly not all thats wrong. And certainly probably won't help totally. Treyarch is in the middle of slipping us a roofie and taking us to a dark corner and raping us. The gametype argument is hurting us too. Some people want SD, some want ctf, a minority want domination. (Lets be serious domination while fun is like that one cousin at family reunions that nobody wants to play with)

We need to be making a decision on the gametype stuff soon in my opinion or risk causing more of a split. My ballot has been marked for ctf. We'll see what this brings for everyone else. While I'm certainly open to change if need be (if the vocal majority of the community still wants sd, I suppose we'd go with it, although it hurts my heart to say that.)

Ok I'm to the point in this blog where my mind starts wondering and I can't keep focused. That generally means that I'm coming to an end of my rant. Few quick updates - BAMF in hardcore twl finals tonight on e-rev.tv. Make sure you watch it! Hopefully we'll be playing promod finals sunday or monday pending dispute results (no we didn't dispute we got disputed.) Cliff Lee is a philly. What a helluva starting lineup. Its a good punch line. How many cy young winners does it take to win a series? lol. I'm disappointed that he's not a ranger but two things, I'm happy he's not a yankee, I'm happy they've been screwed on every free agent they've went after, and I'm happy we didn't put 6 years towards him. I've got trans siberian orchestra tickets for saturday night in little rock. Christmas and bowl season are the two single greatest things about the month of december. So I leave you on those notes, excited but cautious. Here's looking towards the future everyone. =)