The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely the authors and do not represent Pandemic LLC. or their sponsors.

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually summed up the general CoD scene so I figured now is as good a time as any considering NERV is only a few days away. For some reason, there has been all this talk, whispers and rumors of Call of Duty 4 dying. I’ve seen more and more forum posts alluding to this subject and even more comments across IRC. Earlier this week, a post on the CAL forums sort of brought this from the shadows to the front of everyone’s mind. I was half amused and half upset that we are in this state where people actually think CoD4 is dying. CoD4 isn’t dying, the community is killing it. How you might ask? What are we doing wrong? You asked for a list, and here it is (not really a list but who’s counting anyway?).

Let’s first start with the North American leagues: CEVO, CAL, TGL, and FGL. For some reason a few people have this notion that more leagues is a bad thing. Wrong. Having more competitive outlets breeds a yearly circuit of online events that keeps teams interested in the game and reduces the offseason inactivity. The second topic I need to bring up concerning the leagues is their rulesets. Frankly, it doesn’t really matter what they use as far as ruleset settings, but make no mistake, if the leagues don’t start working together to at least get a unified North American ruleset across all of the leagues, we might as well call it quits now. I’ll put it a simple as this; no unified North American ruleset equals the death of CoD4 lasting any long period of time (2+ years) as a competitive game. As for the exact settings for a unified ruleset, like I said, it doesn’t really matter much. Take the majority’s choice and make it the standard. It’s as simple as that.

The next area that needs to change is the entire media scene. I’ll start with all the casting companies. I know you all think you’re way better than each other and so on and so forth, but quite frankly, that is exactly what is hurting this game. You’re spending too much time looking in when you should be spending more time looking out, at the community. This isn’t CS, we don’t have HLTVs, so unless you broadcast matches we’re stuck with post-match scores that nobody bothers to check anyway. The second problem that concerns all the casting companies is the casting schedule. If we are lucky, the community is able to find out about a cast the day before it happens. Most of the time, however, match castings are really only found out the day of the match. I don’t know how many of these casting companies have people actually working in marketing, but I’ll give you some free advice. The sooner you announce your casts the more hype that can build (which is good for the community) and the more viewers you can get (which is good for you). Now I’m not a complete fool, I know the leagues and even the teams themselves aren’t exactly always on the ball as far as scheduling matches, confirming match times, and figuring out server info (something both the leagues and teams MUST work on), but that is absolutely no excuse to at least announce your casting that specific match with a date/time TBA.

Continuing on, I have to first say I have a lot of respect for my good friend Kyle “Hackett” Feeley from GotFrag, probably more than most people in the entire community, but the fact of the matter is there needs to be more content on GotFrag. Media content builds hype and drama around the community, gets people interested in what’s going on, and exposes the top teams as true professional teams. A single post with scoreboards and a few paragraphs of a preview just doesn’t cut it as far as coverage. Now, I don’t blame Kyle, he’s a one man army (Trust me, I know how it is), not superman. He’s a busy guy with work, his own team and other real life obligations. How can he do it all himself? This brings me to my next point. We need more people stepping up to providing written content. If we have 5 people at GotFrag helping Kyle we can have at least 1 article a week from everyone, giving us a new article 6 days of the week. Not bad. Additionally, my departure from the major media scene such as GotFrag doesn’t help the situation, but on occasion, I myself can provide more content via Pandemic’s website and contribute to GotFrag (yes, you read right, I just called myself out).

Another big area that needs changing is IRC. Now, what do I mean? Well, last time I checked (and believe me I checked) there are not 200+ people on CEVO-P, TGL-P and CAL-Main teams. Interestingly enough, however, there are that many people in #codinvite and #codprofessional. I’ve said this even before CoD4 came out that the IRC channels need to be organized, and not by some CAL-Open random people who care more about themselves and their e-fame then the community they are supposed to be helping. We need actual invite, main, open channels for scrimming instead of #codinvite etc where teams such as Pandemic and EG have to shift through all the scrims to even get a scrim with a team near their caliber. If you want an IRC channel for the general competitive community, that’s fine, but take it up in #competitivecod4, not #codinvite and the nine million other “invite” and “pro” CoD4 channels that should just be moved into one channel to begin with.

Now I know we all love trolling around the CAL forums thinking we are super cool, but do me a favor, the people who don’t play this game, hate this game, continue to post negative comments about the players/teams in this game, as well as post random useless stuff all over our forums, get out. Now. Stop wasting your time telling us how we are wasting ours. I’m sick and tired of scrolling through the thousands of useless and negative comments in a single thread just to read 5 comments that are actually about the thread’s topic. Additionally, like IRC, can we please get separate division discussions going? I know we all think we’re amazing and therefore EVERY post we make obviously goes in the CAL-Main sub-forum, but when I go to the forums and find one thread of actual CAL-Main topic on the first forum page something is definitely wrong. Am I saying you can’t post in the Main sub-forum, no, I’m just saying let’s try to get some relevant topics going for each appropriate division forums. (And those of you continuing to post about ruleset changes, this, that, and the other thing, give it a rest. Unfortunately you can’t always get what you want. If you don’t like it, don’t play.)

Finally, the last aspect of CoD4 that needs changing is essentially the community itself. (I know, I laughed myself when I wrote that.) Let’s not kid ourselves, the majority of the people who play this game are young males, and therefore, everyone thinks they are a gangster and has less maturity then my 6 year old cousin. I don’t expect that to change, look at Counter-Strike, it’s even worse! What I do expect, however, is that our professional and more established teams carry themselves with a little more maturity and respect. I can count the number of teams that truly act like “professionals” on one hand. Let me put it to you this way, act like professionals and you will be treated like professionals. And of course when I say ‘treated like professionals’ I’m talking about major LAN event support.