CEVO Articles

It sure has been a while since the CoD community had something to look forward to. The last time I remember the community this active and involved was right before WSVG Dallas. Despite the doubts many had about all the pre-launch hype that surrounded Call of Duty 4, I think I can speak for anyone who has played it in saying it was well worth the hype. From top to bottom, single player to multiplayer Infinity Ward has really delivered. With the game being out about a month now, top teams are starting to emerge and the competitive community is starting to get a grasp on the best settings to be used in competitive play. The major issues that have been surrounding the community these past few weeks is the appropriate ruleset to use as well as speculation of the future of CoD4.

Unlike CoD1 and CoD2, Call of Duty 4 has a plethora of options, guns, attachments and other things that must be taken into account when considering what is best for competitive play. Within the first week of the game being released, however, the community saw the first competition mod as well as a ruleset produced. Despite some criticism, the mod and ruleset proposed in the Xfire tournament wasn’t all that bad. While the mod lacked the functionality of PAM it did the trick by allowing teams to actually scrim and see how the game plays competitively. Here at CEVO, we hosted a number of community meetings between a number of top players, media and other important members of the CoD community to discuss the best settings to use in our tournament. I was surprised how well these meetings ran, nothing like the meetings of COD24WSVG. Interestingly enough, the CEVO meeting was the exact opposite. In just two meetings (one before the game was released and one a week after) those present were able to propose settings to be used in the tournament.

Around the community there still seems to be a lot of talk on the issue of rulesets and settings, as everyone seems to have their own opinion on how the game should be played competitively. Basically these opinions can be broken down into two categories, ideas that try to keep the game as open as its stock play while staying competitive, and ideas that limit a lot of the choices and customization that is found in stock play. The European scene has taken the route of removing a great deal of things the North American scene is keeping in for competitive play. In the end, everyone has their own opinion to how the game should be played competitively, however, I feel removing these things that make the game unique: perks, attachments, etc. will greatly hinder the potential of the game. As I have said on numerous occasions, CoD4 is not CS in any variation. In CoD1 and CoD2 we tried to force a game to become like CS, and it didn’t work. If CoD4 is to become a truly competitive game it needs to stand out from other team based FPS such as CS and TF2.
Anyway, moving on from that boring talk, things have certainly heated up as our Finish the Fight tournament has finally gotten underway. With a little over 200 registered teams it is definitely going to be interesting to see how things pan out. Already we’ve seen a number of intense matches and surprisingly results. During round one, Death is not an Option took on a highly talked about HOT team on Crash. I have never played HOT in a scrim or match; however, I was told they were very big on stunning and rushing into a bombsite, which I was intent to see on a map like Crash which lends itself so well to the use of stun grenades. While the first half was relatively close with both teams trading rounds back and forth, the second half was quite the opposite. Surprisingly enough, DNO really pulled through against HOT, bringing home a 13-8 victory in convincing fashion. Another featured match that was the first casted tournament match by our friends at Gamefire was between End-Effect and Nothing to Prove. Much like DNO vs. HOT, e2 and n2p played on fairly even ground in the first half as e2 took the Marine side. Despite the close 7-5 halftime score, End-Effect really went to work on defense playing aggressively and shutting down n2p’s rushes by flanking around the map. Unfortunately for n2p, they just couldn’t adapt to e2’s aggressive and ever changing defense that seemed to always be in the right position at the right time and lost the match 8-13.

As week two of the Finish the Fight tournament gets underway and round 2 and 3 matches are played out, we will finally get the chance to see which teams will emerge as top competitors from their group and advance to bracket play. Despite in the final month of CoD2 many teams weren’t very active as far as practicing, things have certainly tuned around. With over 700 idlers in #cod4scrim at peak times and the ability to get a scrim at any time (Yes I mean ANY time!) it certainly seems like the future is bright for Call of Duty 4. If you want to see more CoD4 blog content including interviews, match recaps and more, let us know! Leave a comment here or drop us a message on our forums as we would love to hear your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 2:12 am and is filed under CEVO Featured Articles, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.