An in-depth look at competitive Call of Duty

Danny Kremen

When people think of or see the game “Call of Duty”, the vast majority of people think of a laid back game and a casual game just to have some fun. Its popularity has grown more and more over the years and that has brought new players to the Call of Duty community. You will have your run-and-gun type players, who like to use speed perks with a submachine gun, getting from one spot to another as fast as you can to take out enemy players. But you can also have a player using an assault rifle, a lightmachine gun, or even a sniper rifle who prefers long lines of sight to get the kills. But there are also the people who use these same guns, sit in a corner, and just waste away their time until a player happens to pass by them every two minutes.

As a heavy gamer who likes to constantly move, the game became frustrating to play after a while. I started playing Call of Duty upon the release of Black Ops in November 2010.

As I became better and better at the game, it became more frustrating. I wanted to get the most kills in each game, whether it was Team Deathmatch or an objective gametype like Domination.

The next Call of Duty was Modern Warfare 3. I stopped playing the game after a while because it just was not nearly enjoyable as Black Ops.

In November of 2012, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 came out and while it was much more fun, I felt like I wanted something different. You can only win so many matches before you feel like trying something new. This led me and my other friends to find a small part of the Call of

Duty community: the competitive scene.

Competitive Call of Duty is so much different than your standard game. For example, the most popular game mode in a typical CoD game is Team Deathmatch. In this, six players are matched up against six other players and the goal is simply to get kills. The first team to 75 kills wins the game. As I have said previously, different players have different ways of getting their kills in the game. There are a wide variety of guns, different pieces of equipment that will assist you in getting kills and killstreaks. Killstreaks are rewards players get when they get multiple kills without dying. The game also offers objective game modes, like Domination, where the teams try to hold down three flags; Capture the Flag, where there is one flag in each enemy’s base, and the other team tries to grab it and run across the map back to their base; as well as others. To the casual player, this is the most fun way to play the game. But for someone like myself, the game became stale after a while.

In competitive Call of Duty, only the strong survive. Almost all killstreaks are wiped out, equipment such as motions censors claymores become banned, the teams are now four versus four and only objective game modes are played with slight modifications to the way they are played in public match. Here’s an example. In Call of Duty: Black Ops, if you entered a

Domination game, the teams play until one team reaches 200 points without intermission. When

Domination was played on the Black Ops Circuit, there are five minute rounds and the teams switch sides after each round. The team that scores the most points between the two rounds wins. In a way, it is more fair for each team, because certain maps have certain sides that are better than others.

Getting back to the original story, the first tournament I watched for Black Ops 2 was

MLG Dallas. MLG stands for Major League Gaming. Black Ops 2 offers three different gametypes to play in competitive. Those three were Hardpoint, where one team tries to hold down a hill for 60 seconds before switching to another, first to 250 points or the team with the most after 10 minutes wins; Search and Destroy, where a player only has one life per round and the team’s goal is either to plant a bomb or defend the bombsite, depending on which team it is, first team to six rounds win; and Capture the Flag, where players have to get into the enemy base and get their flag back to the team base.

Only the best teams went to Dallas to compete. Some of those teams were OpTic

Gaming, Team EnVyUs, Complexity, UNiTE Gaming, and the top team at the time, Fariko

Impact. Optic has always been a fan favorite, consisting of Will “BigTymer” Johnson, Joe

“Merk” Deluca, Seth “Scump” Abner, and “America’s favorite gamer” as coined by cod caster

Chris Puckett, Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag. So when my friend told me to watch this tournament, we both assumed OpTic was the best team and that they would win.

In the third round of the Winners Bracket, OpTic went up against the second seed

UNiTE. I knew nothing about this team and quickly learned that they were really good. UNiTE had one standout player, James “Clayster” Eubanks, but the majority of people in the community call him “Clay”. Clayster was on another level and quickly turned into my favorite player to watch. He helped lead UNiTE to a 3-0 victory over OpTic.

Despite how well UNiTE played, as well as being regarded as the second best team in the game, they were no match for Fariko Impact. Impact, which consisted of Christopher “Parasite”

Duarte, Damon “Karma” Barlow, Adam “Killa” Sloss and Marcus “Mirx”, pronounced

“miracles”, Carter, had one of the most dominant runs during this tournament, only losing two maps the entire tournament while winning 15 of them.

While Impact would go on to beat UNiTE, there was one play that Clayster made that made me want to start playing competititvely. It was Search and Destroy on the map Raid, and he was the last player up for his team in the round with three players still alive for Impact. Clay would snipe one player before running around to the other side of the map. He would pick up a no scope, or a kill with a sniper without aiming down sight, in a close quarter battle and kill the last player on Impact with his pistol to get the 1v3 clutch. The crowd in attendance went crazy.

It was such an exciting moment, and it’s still possibly my favorite moment from any tournament, even after following the scene for a year now.

The next tournament was the biggest tournament of the year, the annual Call of Duty

Championship with $1 million prize pool, first place taking home $400,000. Impact would go on to take the championship over EnVyUs. OpTic would take third place and Complexity would get fourth. The members of Impact took home $100,000 each while the members of Team

EnVyUs won $50,000 each. Just by playing a video game.

At this point, I started to dip my feet into the water of competitive CoD. Black Op 2 offered a mode called “League Play”, which was based on competitive rules, maps and skill- based matchmaking, meaning you would be matched up against players of the same level. Pro players barely play League, as they opt for team scrimmages or other online tournaments, but

League Play was a great way to get introduced to playing.

I quickly learned that there is a boat load of things to learn in order to be successful in competitive. In a normal public match of TDM, a player can get away with mindlessly running across the map and shooting anything that gets in their way. No one can get away with that in a competitive match.

There’s also a lot of jargon to pick up on. A player must learn every map that is in the competitive playlist inside and out. Every spot on a map will have a certain callout. For example, the map Slums, which is a map for Hardpoint and Capture the Flag, players learn the following callouts: back statue, laundry, junk, red van, garage, graveyard, blue, bricks, white van, middle, cop car, café, double d’s, double d stairs, blue stairs, and back anchor. Some maps are harder to learn the callouts than others.

Learning callouts can be difficult. Each callout has its own meaning. Blue is short for

“blue building”, junk is short for “junkyard”, double d gets the nickname because there are two dumpsters. Typically, most building are called out based on color. On standoff, some callouts consist of yellow, green, red, and brown. Once you start learning the map, it becomes easier to pick up on why certain callouts have their own nicknames.

Players have to identify what players are at what call out and learn where they are going to spawn. More about spawns will be explained later. In regards to enemy positioning, using

Slums as an example, if an enemy kills you by middle and starts to go to the second hardpoint, you would call out “mid, pushing double d” or if you get shots in a player and need support from a teammate, you could call out “he’s one shot blue, I need support”.

The gamemode Hardpoint has set hills and it changes every 60 seconds. Team not only have to have one player inside the hill in order to get points for the team, but they also have to manipulate the map so they have map control and force the team to spawn further away. Using

Slum as the main example, the hill locations for slums are middle, behind blue, junk and garage.

Junk and garage are virtually next to each other, so those are the two most important hills to get control of. One player would go to back statue to anchor the spawns, one player would be inside the hill and other two players might stay around the hill or the anchor to help slay, or get more kills. Each map has multiple anchor spots for specific hardpoint hills, and controlling the anchor spots will make teammates spawn closer to the hill and make the enemy spawn further away. If your team can hold down the anchor spots when needed, it greatly improves the chances of winning.

Search and Destroy requires a ton of strategy. Players only have one life in each round, so they really have to make it count. One team is on offense and the other is on defense and they switch after each round. On offense, one player will grab the bomb and the team will work towards one of two bombsites in hopes of getting the bomb down or killing everyone on the other team. On defense, teams won’t be very aggressive and will wait to see where the offensive team is going with the bomb. It’s all about predicting what the other team is going to do, but there are so many things a team can do.

In Capture the Flag, it’s all about rotations. Each player is constantly moving fighting for map positioning. Certain maps have good sides and bad sides. On Slums, the good side is laundry spawn. When one team is on that side, their goal is to push up bricks, graveyard and blue while trying slay out the other team. Once the team gets three dead, players can push up through blue and block off that spawn location and force the enemy team to spawn behind café.

At that point, one player can go behind cop car and spawn kill while another player grabs the flag and take it to the base to score a point. It might sound easy, but it is incredibly difficult.

Keep in mind; this is just how it works on one map. Other Black Ops 2 maps consist of

Standoff, Raid, Yemen for hardpoint only, Express for Search and Destroy and Meltdown for

Search and Destroy. Each map requires a completely different strategy, and it takes time to learn them and make them effective. Practice makes perfect.

Professional level teams have to constantly practice. Whether it be online gamebattles tournaments, team scrims against other top teams, or watching gameplay to see how the team needs to improve, teams are always looking to better themselves. Professional level teams are considered the top 8, even though there are tons and tons of other teams out there competing in online tournaments and LANs for cash prizes. MLG hosts the majority of LANs tournaments, however other venues such as UMG and Gfinity in Europe will host for top teams to compete.

A LAN is the best way to truly tell which teams are the best. Call of Duty online has so many complications that will be explained later on. LAN stands for local area network. At these kinds of tournaments, teams are flown out to play side by side without relying on who has a better connection. Everyone is now on an even level playing field and will rely solely on their gun skill, reaction time and team work. Tournaments typically last three days, starting on

Fridays and ending on Sundays.

Top players can actually make playing competitively their full time job. Between the money they receive from tournaments, sponsorships, streaming on either MLG.tv or twitch.tv and making videos for Youtube, assuming they have a partnership and can monetize off videos.

Several players are taking semesters off college so they can play more and broadcast more.

Following Cod Champs, Impact would win the next event and there would not be another event for an extended period of time. A lot of teams took a small break following so much practice leading up to Champs. Complexity, who finished fourth at Cod Champs as well as

MLG Dallas, wasted no time making a roster change in an effort to better their team. The team dropped “Tuquick” and picked up Clayster from UNiTE. Clayster’s main reason for leaving was because of the ages of the other members on UNiTE. All three of his teammates were under the age of 18, which prevented him from going to Cod Champs with them and other tournaments later on. Complexity would now consist of Clayster, Patrick “Aches” Price, Tyler “Teepee”

Polchow and Ian “Crimsix” Porter.

One problem with competitive is that most teams do not have contracts. Players can join and leave teams as they choose for the most part. Players who excessively leave and join teams are often referred to as a “sketch”. This also leads to mass roster changes on certain days that will completely change who are on certain teams.

Complexity quickly became a dark horse team to dethrone Impact, who left the Fariko

Brand to pursue their own. I would always watch Clayster stream on Twitch.tv and it seemed like they just could not be beat. Impact really started to fall off. The team was constantly arguing with each other, and every time they lost, everything would go downhill fast. However, most teams do not believe playing online is a viable way of telling who is superior or not.

Some players are better online than on LAN. Online can be an enigma. It’s all about internet speed and location. Online matches are played in private match and one player is given host, meaning that everyone in the game is playing off of the host’s connection. Typically, the player with the best internet speed will be given host. Another major factor is location. If the host is in California, a player from east coast will be slightly behind players that are on west coast. Players are forced to rely on crazy internet speeds, like having less than 10 millisecond ping, over 50 megabit per second download speed and a high upload speed. For a player with fast internet like that, the bullets out of his gun will register faster than someone like myself. I have over 30 ms ping, three mbps on a good day, and 0.5 mbps upload speed. It’s a severe disadvantage. One other advantage that top players have are custom controllers and top of the line headsets. The most used controller by pros are Scufs, which have paddles on the back so players are able to jump and knife without sacrificing taking their thumb off the analog to aim. The top headset would be Astros, which gives you the ability to hear just about everything. If a player reloads their gun or pulls a grenade relatively close to you, you will be able to hear it.

Complexity would enter the next LAN, MLG Anaheim with high expectations. After a rough start, nearly losing in their first round match, and they got it together and started making teams look silly. They would make it to the winner’s final for a match against the four time defending champions Impact. They would beat Impact 3-1, sending them to loser’s bracket finals. Impact would make quick work of OpTic gaming to get a rematch against coL, but nothing was going to stop the fall of Impact. For the first time in months, a new champion was crowned. The addition of Clayster put this team over the top. And this was only the start.

This was the start of a dynasty that still extends to this day. The next tournament was

Gfinity in Europe and Complexity would take home their second straight tournament win. This would be Impact’s last tournament with the same roster they had from Cod Champs. Karma would leave the team to join Team EnVyUs, which would spark a major rivalry at the next LAN,

UMG Atlanta.

The three remaining players from Impact would join Epsilon and pick up “John” as their new fourth. The two teams would play on day two, and saying Killa was hyped up for the match would be an under-statement. Trash-talking is extremely common, whether it’s online or at

LAN, but Killa was determined to rattle Karma as well as the rest of EnVyUs. “I’m in your head boy!” He would scream across the stage to ensure they hear him. “You left for this Karma?! You are nervous boy! I seen it!” He would also make loud “Woo”ing noises, sounding similar to a train. The crowd would become disgruntled and that was when Parasite and Mirx would begin to lash out at them. “You sitting there watching!” Parasite yelled towards the crowd, “You watching me play!” Mirx would continuously tell them to “Look at my bank account” referring to the $100,000 he made at Cod Champs. Epsilon would go on to win the match but in the end,

Complexity would secure their third consecutive tournament victory.

Following that tournament, Parasite opted to leave Epsilon and join UNiTE with a brand new lineup. Parasite joined Anthony “Nameless” Wheeler, Marcus “Mboze” Blanks and

Richard “Ricky” Stacy. In their first tournament together, they won Pax and knocked

Complexity off their throne. After the tournament, the team made one of the most questionable moves in competitive CoD history. UNiTE decided to drop Mboze and pick up Killa in an attempt to improve their Hardpoint game following a tournament victory. The bold move would not pay off, as Complexity ran the table, winning every LAN for the remainder of Black Ops 2.

This leads to the newest Call of Duty: Ghosts. Ghosts was made by Infinity Ward and

Black Ops 2 was made by Treyarch, so the new game feels completely different. Not only does the game feel different, Hardpoint and Capture the Flag were removed as gametypes, much to the outrage of the competitive community. At first, pro players thought they would only be able to play Search and Destroy competitively, but it was decided that it would be S&D, Domination, and a new gametype, Blitz. In Blitz, there is a portal in each enemy’s base, and the goal is to get into the portal. The team with the most captures wins. Domination had not been a competitive game mode since the first Black Ops. Despite the game feeling completely different, Complexity would continue their dynasty by winning MLG Columbus, the first tournament in the game’s life cycle. After that,

Complexity would shock the world and announced that the team would be dropping Clayster, despite having won seven of the last eight tournaments. The reason was not performance based, and the captain Aches decided that he just wasn’t fit outside of the game. They would immediately pick up Karma from EnVyUs, who was regarded as one of the top Black Ops 2 players and coming off a great showing in Columbus. Clayster would join Team Kaliber, who formed late in Black Ops 2 life span and finished second at MLG Columbus and is now on

OpTic.

Dropping Clay would not stop coL from winning. They would go on to win UMG

Philadelphia, Pax, and the big one, the third annual Call of Duty Championships. Karma’s former teammates from Impact, who reunited on Curse Las Vegas, did not qualify for the tournament. They would split up after losing a placement tournament to qualify for Champs.

Ghosts has now been out for a little over six months now, and you can ask all CoD pro players how they feel about the about the game, and the majority will give you the same answer: they don’t like it. Nadeshot, who is by far the most popular on the circuit, has voiced his displeasure with the game over twitter as well as in an interview Red Bull eSports. “Call of Duty

Ghosts is the worst Call of Duty in the franchise,” he said in the interview published on Red

Bull’s website, “There is just a lot of things they did wrong. They’re stubborn about it.”

For me, I may not be a pro player, but I agree with the mass majority of people. I absolutely cannot stand the game. The only reason pros play it is because they can make money off of it, whether it is from tournaments, sponsorships or streaming the game online. But for someone who is getting their feet wet into the competitive aspect of the game, it is incredibly user unfriendly. There is a mode similar to League Play in Black Ops 2, but it’s not skill-based matchmaking, and it does not penalize people for leaving in the middle of games.

The only real way to start a competitive career on ghosts would be either through

Gamebattles or through the new UMG version of Gamebattles. You can create or join teams and go against others, possibly for money. But it is so hard to become great at the game, and the only way to get good would be to take some beatings from some of the better teams out there.

If you do decide to take the road to becoming a professional Call of Duty player, these are the challenges that await. In an interview with MLG, Clayster gave some advice to all aspiring competitive players. “It took me five years to get to where I am at today,” he said “you have to be determined, you have to be motivated, you have to be hard working to get here because it doesn’t come in a night, it doesn’t come in a month, it doesn’t come in a year.” It took him multiple years of grinding the game to get to the level he is at, just like other pro players. It is just a choice you have to make to get to the top of Call of Duty eSports.