How much of what you do stems from feedback and ideas given by the community? With a lot of conflicting ideas about what makes a competitive mod work, how do you pick the best options to augment or remove?

Almost all of what I did after release is on community feedback. At the start, that is how I wanted to start off. Everything after that was based off of the community. I don't only listen to the masses though. If there is a good idea that I hear, I go in and test it out privately. If it works, I put that in the next patch for the mod. For example, originally I had stopping power off, but after many complaints about how MGs were extremely weak, I tested this out and found that I agreed. So I put stopping power back in, and it is much much more balanced. The main people that I listen to for ideas are people on top teams and the league admins. Unfortunately there is an overwhelming majority of people who think that they want something weaker/more powerful. But that majority doesn't know yet what makes a very competitive game. If I hear something that a lot of people are saying but from a top player, then I will seriously look into it. I get a lot of suggestions that are for people's personal playstyle, and they are angry that it wasn't as overpowering as it was in cod4. The prime example is smg/mg strength. They are still strong, but not nearly as overpowering as they were in cod4.


It seems like there is already a pretty big division between the Euro and NA communities on the issue of competitive mods. Why do you think everyone should use your mod instead of promod or pam?

Well, I don't care if its my mod, promod, or pam that is used. What I do care about is that the *right* mod is used. It may not be DAMN, but I feel that it is a giant step in the right direction. Promod changes way too much in my opinion, making the competitive community totally isolated from the pub community. CoD still needs to grow as a competitive game, so the game cannot be vastly different from pub play. To be totally honest, I would rather that the mod being used by the competitive community is not the one I made. It is a huge hassle to keep that updated, and still practice with my team. As long as there isn't a step backwards in PAM, I feel that the leagues should use that instead of DAMN.


Some people are complaining that your mod forces things that might not necessarily be what the community want. How do you respond to accusations that this mod is only meant to satisfy your wants, rather than the community or leagues as a whole, and how might things change in the future?

Those accusations are completely unwarranted and baseless. I usually just ignore them because there really isn't a way to stop them. People will think what they want to think. I have tried to show the league admins that I will take their requests. And many have seen that I am taking the community input. I don't use my personal opinion when I update the mod. Everything that I have done post release was on people's requests, not from my own opinion. Some of the things that people say aren't good or isn't what they want is just something that they haven't tried before, and are very resistant to change.


How important do you think the development of a third party anti-cheat will be to the future of CoD5?

For any online game cheating is prevalent. A big thing that North America has over Europe is the great anti-cheat clients. CEVO's CMN or CAL's ACS is needed since there will always be people who will take any unfair advantage over other players. I have done as much as I could to prevent configging by forcing most of the netcode settings, and forcing the graphics options that remove objects on the maps. I am not too worried about the game lacking an Anti-Cheat client, since the main leagues already have their own.


Why do you think CoD has never been able to reach the same heights as say Counter-Strike? What needs to take place for CoD5 or a future release to take over the competitive FPS scene?

There are a few factors that I would say that prevented the CoD series to get as big as CS. The biggest one is that CS is the original team FPS, and that it was one of the first competitive games. There is nothing we can do to change that. CoD was never as big due to the fact that it wasn't fully supported by the huge international circuits. CoD4 was the closest that we have been to CS with the big European tournaments, but even though it was the closest cod to CS, it didn't even scratch the surface. CoD5 is starting off on the right foot with a good ruleset and a game that doesn't need many changes to be competitve. I don't see CoD:WW as the game that will knock off CS, nor do I see any future CoD game to knock CS off of its throne. The games aren't developed for competition, they are developed for pubbers on the Xbox 360. It makes great business for Activision, but we are the little guys being stepped on for that success. I see CoD having the chance of being paralell to CS if it gets support from MLG or a non-cs tournament. If IW or Treyarch sees our side of the bridge, and that if they make a game catered for the competitive community, it will be fun for many people. I hope that day will come.