The Malaysian Call of Duty 4 scene

The Malaysian Call of Duty 4 community has always had a vision: to go international and be able to play overseas.

Whether for fame or passion or just the money, we are striving hard to get to a playing field where we can compete against the best in the world. But I’ll bet, everyone who plays competitively shares this dream. I hope by the end of this article, you will have an idea of how COD4 in Malaysia has evolved from the early days until today.
    
The PAM era

In the early days of Call of Duty 4, the PAM mod was adapted by Malaysia as a competitive mod. However, the local community continually changed certain elements in the game according to developments in the competitive scene. The first tournament for COD4 in Malaysia was held in a cyber café (LAN center) called Tbun, located in Aman Suria. Many other cyber cafes did upgrades to their computers and held competitions to draw in the COD4 crowd. In the PAM days, it was not uncommon to see cyber cafes packed with COD4 players and teams having LAN scrims.
Brian Chan, who is otherwise known as Esp. Death, was the sole coder during the PAM era in Malaysia. He worked to mod elements in the game such as weapon damage and perks. Such changes were decided through leader meetings where team captains of all competitive teams were invited to voice out their opinions about weapons, perks and etc. Later on, a league system was created and named ESPGL (note: this is NOT the same as the existing www.espgl.com). The league used a modified version of the original PAM402. The changes can be seen at this thread: http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/858863.

Long before Malaysia adopted Promod as the competitive mod, PAM was already been utilized to slowly introduce Promod to the community. Fearing that the drastic changes in appearance might put off most of the competitive and casual crowd, community leaders decided to slowly implement elements from Promod into PAM coding. However, the switch to Promod became inevitable when a later version of PAM made it impossible to change coding inside config files.

Malaysia has a lot to offer, but will a competitive Call of Duty 4 scene be one of them in the future?

The Promod era
A major issue about PAM was the hassle when it came to setting up the mod. The problems arose when the config files were different. Even though the same mod was being used, two computers with different config files would make gameplay different, i.e. one player having sway when scoping and the other player without sway. Fortunately, no such problems arose after Promod was used.

Malaysia switched to Promod approximately 2 years ago when the community made a huge decision to change the competitive mod from PAM to Promod. Since then, the local community has followed adjustments in the competitive mod up to Promod Live 2.04, which is the current version being used. The switch to Promod created an exodus of players away from competitive COD4. Ironically, this helped create a much more self-aware and self-sustaining community in Malaysia. Players still joined tournaments and online cups to show their passion for the game even though there was little or no prize money involved.

The community in Malaysia also benefited from support by communities in the South East Asian region. Many teams in the region utilized Fragnetics to host dedicated servers with Promod Live for public usage. Teams from all over SEA also use these servers to organize scrims. Another huge effort that helped promote Promod in Asia was the Asian COD4 Championship (ACC). This league ran for 2 seasons in and brought together over 40 teams from each year. The ACC team was lead by Ammar Lulla, otherwise known as [JEDI*] aBc` from Singapore, and had members from all over South East Asia to help coordinate and oversee matches.

Beyond Promod
It might sound surprising, but at the spur of reaching for an international standard of play, the decision to change to Promod caused the COD4 community to fall into a recession. With both a lack of interest in Promod from the public and also organizers to hold competitions, the situation looked very bleak indeed. Ironically, and now I’ll have to quote from a movie “at the precipice, we change…” is perhaps the best way to describe how the scene has begun to move forward. The answer comes along with two names that are very close to home in COD4: Vita Nova and Crossfire Intel Challenge 7.

With the Vita Nova ruleset and Crossfire Intel Challenge 7: Malaysia Edition (CIC7:ME), the scene is looking better than ever. Vita Nova has set foot on Malaysian soil and is starting to establish a structure in the COD4 scene. With not only plans for tournaments, but also the building of a team of community members who are committed to COD4’s revival and advancement, I’d certainly say that we are looking at a fresh start.

We mustn’t leave out the other parties who have shown their support, time and again, for the E-Sports industry in Malaysia. The cyber cafes that we frequent, our universities, product distributors, organizers and also the government have pitched in their efforts to help the E-Sports industry grown. Perhaps now, with the community starting to get more and more involved with the industry, COD4 can rise to greener pastures.

Hope you enjoyed the read.
Signing off
Ke Pang “Roti” Lew