Copenhagen Clash -

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” (c) Martin Luther King

In this article, I will try and shed some light on the coming Copenhagen Clash, the next stop in Call of Duty 4’s revival year and although it seemed so very, very promising when announced, I do feel some wrongs are in the making.

General Thoughts

 The SteelSeries Esport Challenge has so much going for it when I look at it, especially the people backing it. The tournament is hosted by the same crew who ran the best Call of Duty 4 events in memory, The eXperience, and that alone should be reason enough to attend the event and show your support to the Call of Duty 4 cause. On top of that, the admin crew will be the same of the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7 event, the strongly pro-Call of Duty 4 Vita Nova movement, hoping to breathe new life, a second life into our little community.

The SEC will take place at the Cop3nhag3nRobot venue, which is basically a celebration of the electronic evolution and the SEC will be featured prominently between several other tournaments and initiations with gaming, music and films. The event was immediately met with applaud from the community, saying the initiative is indicative of the will and hunger of the Call of Duty 4 scene to survive its successors and become one of the main competitive scenes in Europe.

Fnatic with another event win?

And it showed immediately, the team list appeared quickly on the TEK9 forum and everybody jumped on it, even the official SEC website reported a sign-up list of over 40 teams and was thrilled with such an overwhelming interest. But quickly some problems arose, especially the Dutch community, who are still amongst the biggest in Europe, proved defiant as they preferred to celebrate their wildly popular Queen’s Day. This immediately led to quite a few teams opting out and as of right now, only MCA, consisting out of such Call of Duty 2 veterans as Nick "solz" Schurinck and Niels "zemme" van Steenbergen, are set to make the trip over to Denmark.

But we cannot put the blame on the Dutch alone, definitely not. Many of the other scenes have chosen to opt out for this event, we see no French, one German and two British teams in attendance. These are simply the largest communities in Europe and we should, in all honesty, see more teams make the move over to such a LAN. Where is The Last Resort, where is MondialServers, where is YoYoTech, where is corgz? So all in all, I personally am a bit disappointed with the scene in itself, that we, so quickly after probably the biggest and proudest moment of the Call of Duty 4 scene, rallying together for the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7, have descended into Counter-Strike: Source like habits.

The other day, I read Graham "messioso" Pitt’s first column on our sister site, Cadred.org, and although I agree with his statement that we cannot expect the organisations to recover so quickly from a financial crisis that left most of them on the dry and out with a slow road of recovery to financial health, I feel there is another solution. As the Crossfire Intel Challenge usually becomes the culmination of our international and European-based community, many of the other events have and need to rely for the major part on their regional exposure, on the local teams who like to be involved in something professional and something they are not used to, for most it will be their first event under the common denominator of eSports.

And this is where the SteelSeries Esport Challenge seemingly failed a bit, because there are 8 different team nationalities in attendance and we still only end up with 15 paid teams so far. This means either the event date was badly researched and something is hindering the teams to come out or the local teams themselves find the entrée fee and travel costs to be too high to show up. In part, the setup of the tournament does not favour the local teams because with a very low amount of attendees, the groups will be rather small and you will be paying a team entrée fee of €350 for a total playtime of approximately 1,5 hours. But the whole LAN idea and principle is based around the social factor of gaming, where teams from across Europe play some games for some money and during your team’s down time, you can check out the host country, check out some of the bigger teams playing, get to know your long-distance colleagues better and I feel the local Danish, Southern-Swedish and Northern-German teams seem to have forgotten this.

Paradox and Luboshmir to upset?

Easy Going for Fnatic?

 Is there anyone who does not see them in the finals at least? It is a given, there were signs of possible cracks at the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7 event, as they won most of their matches by a small margin, especially towards the later stages of the play-offs. But, the Scandinavian-Belgo mix came out on top each time, as if they planned to win their matches like that. Like Tom "D1ablo" Newman described in his recent TEK9 column, they have a thought-out chemistry, the little wheels fit together and therefore many teams will have their hands full if they want to topple them.  Although Fnatic are nowhere to be found in Season Zero of the Vita Nova league, most of you know that their online form is not indicative of their potential. The reason they win their matches the way they do is because they hunker down and buckle up, they know the LAN game perfectly and execute well, so I think you can count on them performing up to par. Should they not, SEC’s playing field will be wide open.

Reason up or down?

 This is a tricky question, because the team finally seemed to have found a British mix that worked and it made them come within inches of beating Fnatic in CIC7’s final, after having already secured a win against them in the group stages. But then, disaster struck as their Mr Gel, Tim "revoltz" Denton, announced his retirement. They tried to compensate by adding former MeetYourMakers strongman, Jason "lookzor" Perez O’Connor, but that plan backfired due to internal struggles according to Jason himself. The team then abandoned their plan to stay within the United Kingdom and contacted Call of Duty 2 superstar, Michael "Trigger" Sowa, a risky move in my eyes. It is not necessarily a bad move, not at all, because Michael has the experience to play at the top level, but he has been out of it for a long time and his opponents at LAN will not give him time to ease into it, it’s a gamble that could pay off or cause them to end up way lower than expected. Should they connect as a unit, they can get really far again and, with a bit of luck, they could even push past Fnatic, but right now I feel they need a bit more time to do just that.

Mixing it up

 One of the main leagues where we see the best teams in Europe play right now is the Vita Nova Enemy Down league and one of the surprising features is the fact that no one team seems to dominate distinctively, it more resembles a mass scrimmage. With a LAN right in front of us, it will be interesting to see how this randomness will translate in Copenhagen.

Power Gaming kind of walked in anonymity for the duration of the last LAN, not being discussed to great lengths and not really being part of any real controversies, yet they still managed to ‘sneak’ away with a third place finish. With the proper mindset and attitude the eager Czech-Dutch mix will have their hearts set on a Semi-Final versus either of the aforementioned, but they need to be careful of not falling early.

H2k Gaming were unfortunate to meet Reason Gaming so early in Enschede and could not muster a win. They seem to have been preparing a lot, though, and are set on improving on their results in The Netherlands. The five Swedes did not have any line-up changes and still being one of the youngest and least experienced teams out of the Cadred TOP 10, they should be able to bring more to this event and hopefully they can avoid putting too much pressure on themselves during the tournament, as I feel that will be their biggest opponent.

Team-Dignitas is always difficult to call. History shows us that they always end up with a team that is capable of so much and there have been streaks of them dominating Europe. Yet, these moments have been rare when looking at their total time in Call of Duty 4 and their performance in March was lacking consistency to say the least. With their current constellation they will be able to walk over a lot of teams by sheer force of skill, but will not be cohesive enough to upset a Reason or Fnatic. Perhaps they can find a TEK9-like approach to their team’s build-up and prove me wrong, it would be interesting.

With this rather lengthy look-ahead to SEC, I am looking forward to being there together with dfb and we will be bringing you many updates about all the goings on in just a matter of days. So be prepared and let us hope the event becomes another mainstay in our scene.