MW3 & 6A – The Beginning

by witts02
in Community
February 6, 2012 at 10:51pm.

At the time of writing, I am not inebriated or affected by substances in any way, shape, or form. 

Activision, in conjunction with Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Gaming, and Beachhead Studios, has been reaping the rewards of its latest release – the financial and entertainment juggernaut that is the Call of Duty franchise – for nearly a month now. The seemingly unstoppable production line of FPS titles, churned out in November of each year since Infinity Ward went all Dr. Victor Frankenstein on us and ejaculated their baby, Modern Warfare, into the atmosphere in 2008, has shattered all time records for the most profitable gaming launch year after year. There are actually no statistics for revenue gained from sales of Call of Duty games, but to put things into perspective, Call of Duty MW2 passed a staggering $1 billion dollars of revenue in January 2010. The latest version – MW3 – did three quarters of that on its release day alone. Keeping in mind that those figures are, generally, without counting money made from the sale of downloadable content (hereafter DLC), and Activision has tapped into the psyches of young men and occasionally (and sexily) women everywhere, who are really powerless to resist the mass marketing and market saturation that CoD brings. Why, oh why, do all these people flock to FPS games like never before, like flies to shit, like pre-pubescent girls to a Justin Bieber concert? Mostly, for the game’s addictive, frustrating, much-maligned, at times unbelievably rewarding and ultimately dividing multiplayer mode. It is also this mode that we choose to focus on now here today now. (One internet to anyone who gets this reference, although I do not expect anyone to. It is also possible that I botched the reference.)

Nobody asked for this.. wait, what?

The website which this article will hopefully appear on is based around the Call of Duty series. I speak, of course, of sixaxisgaming.com.au – spawned out of the ashes of clancentral and various other mishap-ridden iterations. Successful and thriving, with sponsored gaming tournaments across all genres and games, 6A (as it is colloquially known by its members – mental asylum of straitjacket-wearing nuffies they all, to a man, are) represents the finest that the gaming community in Australia has to offer, on PS3 at least. It stands to reason that the general population of 6A, along with other gaming websites across the internet and the world, would be anticipating the release of MW3 like a young person eagerly awaits their first touch of a woman’s body. Sexual, I know. If you have a boner right now, you are not alone. In any case, the release of MW3 saw a spate of Sixaxians attending midnight releases all around Australia. I personally attended my midnight launch in Melbourne’s CBD, which opened my eyes to the almost unfathomable range of nerds that inhabit the virtual world that CoD has to offer. I am aware of the hypocrisy of this statement, but given that I went to the pub for two hours before the launch actually commenced, I believe I am exempt from any “nerd” tag applied or about to be applied to me. Screw the lot of you.

Like many others, I played the game into the night and a lot of the next day. Unfortunately, life (the eternally annoying interruption) needed to be lived, work needed to be completed and thousands upon thousands of women needed to be sexually satiated. So it was off with the PS3 and back into my crushingly lonely existence. But that existence was not without a certain level of observation into the community’s thoughts on MW3, which streamed along like a river of sewerage, with the tide changing nearly hourly as the more dedicated among us played almost 24 hours straight, eyes bloodshot and strained, energy drink cans littered at their feet and the controller synthetically attaching itself to their sweaty palms. We’ve all been there, whether it be with Call of Duty or another recent release (Skyrim), so there is no need to judge pichoch for his sins. Exploits were found, the game was abused then apologised to like a drunken Dandenong resident does to his live-in defacto partner when sliding in and out of a heroin-induced haze, and most importantly for 6A, the merits and rules for a competitive scene for MW3 became the topic of fervent discussion on the forums. 

Before I launch into my take on the essentially two-month-long involvement that 6A has had with MW3, a smidge of background is required. 6A has successfully run tournaments across all modern-day versions of the CoD franchise, involving teams of players (more commonly referred to as clans) fighting against each other often for little more than bragging rights and notoriety amongst the community. Lately, as the website has expanded and evolved, sponsors have provided lucrative prizes for the more individual ladders and tournaments, adding incentive for the less competitively-inclined to participate. As a result, 6A has grown and thrived not only as a website but as a business, and established itself as the premier site for competitive PS3 gaming in Australia on the internet. Woo-hoo. 

Sixaxis all over them $10 bills.

However. If you are reading this, then you are more than likely an avid fan of the Call of Duty series, which means at some point during the last twelve months you have picked up a controller or placed your hands on a mouse and a keyboard to play Call of Duty: Black Ops in some way, shape or form – whether it be competitively or in a public match. And if you are as avid a fan of Call of Duty as you claim, you will no doubt understand the negative impact that Black Ops had on the overwhelming majority of the community, who were shocked to find that it was a veritable mess for competitive gameplay, leading several clans to boycott & forfeit their finals games. Fail. (Oooh-err.) In any case, BO (how fitting) basically ruined competitive gameplay for many of the site’s great players, which led to a hesitant approach to MW3′s competitive chances on the site. However, the plan was always to have a tournament (at least one) for the new game, as is the custom for 6A. And for a tournament, on any Call of Duty, you need a ruleset.

For the more ignorant among us, a ruleset is a set of rules. Holy derp. You need this because without one, players will use “overpowered” weapons and perks, which in turn weigh the odds of a clan war or a tournament game heavily. The idea of a ruleset is to ban the more effective things, leading to an increase in fairness and evenness on a virtual battlefield. The subject of MW3′s competitive ruleset was, and remains to be a heated one. Weapons such as the Type 95 and the ACR are obvious exclusions, but more contentious bannings like the P90 submachine gun and the complete disallowance of any attachment other than sights were and continue to be debated by the devoted players the rules were created for. Eventually and tentatively, the ruleset has come out looking something like this. It is in use for several tournaments currently being run across the site. Discussion about what should be in, what should be out, and what should be covered in a prophylactic is ongoing. 

Currently, there are two active tournaments for MW3 – a 4v4 tournament and a 5v5 tournament. Sitting atop the virtual pile of rag-tag crews for the 5v5 MagicMod tournament with the enviable perfect 7-0 record are the Kings Connected clan, with Exkalibre and his faithful band of brothers having dispatched teams of heathens including Genocide E-Sports, the powerful Immortality clan, Violent Resolution & Team Sheen. Their current active challenge and potentially their biggest challenge yet is provided in the form of one half of 6A’s most recently shoutcasted war – a team known as Frenetic Array. Generally shortened to Fray, they boast a stable of champions who have decided to dabble in the 6A competition after razing all and sundry from a rival website. Lead by Blurz, SWFT, SourLights and Slay, with Cartzy, Slayronik & others adding valuable experience and knowledge, the kC vs Fray war is one that is anticipated by the entire community, as the top two teams come together.
The 4v4 tournament is also dominated by Kings Connected, with another perfect record (6-0). Heading all comers and having already done away with the second place team (vR – Arise) and a team that many would consider a huge chance of winning in Carnage, kC are white hot in all forms of the game at the moment. Currently unchallenged in the 4v4 format, it will take a mighty effort to knock off a team that, every time it posts a results thread, seems to effortlessly breeze past any and all contenders.

And now we reach the less competitively inclined section of this article. For those who simply want to jump onto the game and “pwn n00bz”, 6A’s forum offered thread upon thread of juicy tidbits, exploits & information about what gun was useful and which perk was shit. Over the month, a thread which has now been deleted was set up to “name and shame” those who performed poorly in the game and deigned to quit because of it. Those more dedicated to padding their statistics were duly named and duly shamed. The gaming addicts among us were exposed, and ridiculed to the point of being blasted with a fire hose then covered in powdered sugar and forced to parade naked through a police station. Another thread allowed members to guess which player would be first to reach the prestige point. It turned out to be Ess-Tee, who at last update hadn’t been seen outside his house in nearly a month. Paramedics were called to his house were working feverishly to remove the controller from his hands. pichoch gleefully stormed his way to a top 100 ranking for Headquarters worldwide, LeBron_James_23x pubbed harder than the English rugby team did after being eliminated from the World Cup by France, and the rest of the site immersed themselves in Infinity Ward’s world, at least for a little while, in order to fully understand and explore the nuances in this new and exciting thing. 

 You can only have sideburns if you are this man.

In a lot of ways, IW has succeeded in creating another successful version of their baby. The game, personally, enjoyable. They added a new idea in Call of Duty: Elite, which I will cover in a later article. While the system was unworkable in the first few days due to unprecedented demand, the update was swift and the system, upon exploration, is deep and extremely useful. The maps were panned widely by all and sundry early, but the criticism has settled down. Plans to release DLC are eagerly awaited, with a lot of people hoping for remakes of previous CoD games’ maps. The guns, the perks, the killstreaks – all generally balanced. Where the game falls down is its connection and matchmaking system. Something that has apparently always been a problem for IW is their servers and their ability to connect one player to another, and 11 other players to a capable host. MW3 is plagued by issues surrounding the host and the game’s compensation for laggy players, leading some to reach to the extraordinary lengths of deliberately lagging their Internet connection in order to receive the almost unfair advantage of IW’s lag compensation. However, IW appears to have, at least partly, learned from their mistakes in neglecting the community’s cries for assistance when CoD4 and MW2 were at their height of popularity. Hotfixes to stop minor exploits, and full downloadable patches are dribbling through and slowly improving the experience. 

In a particularly recent case, a glitch was discovered which allowed the player to accrue unlimited prestige tokens, which most used to rack up days upon days of double XP. The glitch was reported to Infinity Ward’s community manager via social media in all its forms, and Robert Bowling went to work infuriating all who had exploited his game. Swiftly doling out the fierce hand of justice, Bowling posted a picture of IW’s banning program, adding that ANYONE, yes, anyone who had performed the glitch, would have their in-game statistics (with the exception of deaths & game losses) reset. At the time of writing, the update which contains the nuclear warhead-like b4nh4mm3rz has not yet been implemented, but Bowling has promised it is coming. In this way, it is useful to have a fanbase of nearly 6.5 million players – glitches and exploits are discovered and dealt with at a rate not seen before in the online gaming community. It also displays IW’s complete lack of acceptance of any trickery involving their game, and their particularly hardline stance is pleasing, if a little late. (No plans are in the works to patch CoD4. Bastards.)

We love you the most.

Clearly, sites like Sixaxis are driven by this all-conquering franchise. Call of Duty promotes discussion, starts arguments, causes rifts, brings clans together, frustrates, elates and generally elicits a wide range of emotions. It has done wonders for the online gaming community, and at the same time almost destroyed it. It currently holds a monopoly over the gaming world much like Alexander the Great did over the known world at his peak, and games such as the Battlefield series seek to be the CoD killer year after year, and continuously fail. 

At the time of writing, there are more than 750 threads with a total of 12,000 posts pertaining to or related to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. There are two tournaments with a total of 87 teams competing. That’s at least 426 people competing for prizes and glory and bragging rights.

And we’re just finishing the seeding tournaments.