I’m writing this column the day after the ‘Bash the summer away’ first rounds, what should have been an easy to run 32 team competition was anything but. Llittle did I know quite how far certain segments of the CoD4 scene had descended in chaos and how something must be done quickly to prevent the death of online competition.

The last online Call of Duty competition I ran was the CC5 qualifiers and it was a doddle, but that was primarily because I knew all of the players in that tournament. Times have changed and I am much more disconnected from the community these days so when last night every other match had accusations of cheating in it, it was an absolute nightmare to deliver.

This culminated in me sitting in on a match between 41/2 men and ATX and bringing along my good friend Rob Wiz to watch the match specifically to watch both Ryan and Whoop of ATX. Now spectating players to see if their hacking in a game where you can shoot through every wall is pretty challenging, in ET for example if someone is shooting at a wall to hit the player on the other side it means he can see through it in CoD it doesn’t.

However after a while it became apparent that Ryan was either a better sniper than Stevy and Blackmane or that something was ‘shady’. There were certain tells, such as walking into areas that he was totally confident there weren’t opponents in, or leaving himself exposed to areas that you regularly wouldn’t do just in case there was an enemy there however this isn’t evidence that would hold up in court, this just educated guessing. Whoop was equally ‘shady’ flying round corners prefiring and generally looking like he knew more than he should about opponents locations, or having the reaction times of a cat.

4.5 won the match in two maps, but it was 13-11 on map one and ATX took a 6-2 lead (approximately) on the second map. I was worried that I was going to have to make a call and ban a team off a demo however fortunately 4.5 made that easier for me.

However in another case (I’ll leave out the names), one team match conflicted saying their opponents were using a merc. After 45 minutes of arguing it turned out the team complaining actually had a merc themselves, after been told where to go when I discovered this they then proceeded to message the other teams telling them saying their opponents were hacking. So whenever anyone played them the other teams were caught up in the hysteria that team X were cheating, I’d turn around and ask for proof and the reply I got... “this other team told me they cheated” – that’s not proof that’s hysteria and paranoia and to be frank those two things ruined last night.

To draw comparisons to another community I know well, this has ALL happened before in ET. Punkbuster stopped detecting cheats, X-Ray proved unhelpful and there was no other solution than to accuse everyone of cheating when you lost. Trust me when I say cheating in ET has been 100x a bigger problem than it is right now in CoD, what solved the problem? The reality that cheaters never win.

One legitimate ET team were so convinced that most Polish players were cheating they decided to use hacks against Polish teams. This got them banned from CC5 and at CC5 about 10 or so Polish players turned up all with big question marks next to their names and they all owned and got recruited into bigger teams. After that point cheating wasn’t such a hot topic anymore, because people either came to LAN or didn’t and that created a two tier society almost because no cheater has ever won anything in the game.

Thats not good scenario but its a better one than in CoD right now, last night showed me that people are so afraid of cheaters that they let that situation beat themselves. You cannot live in fear, because it will consume you. As CoD players you have to approach every match knowing that there is no effective anti cheat in your game and that either means everyone hacks or everyone doesn’t, you cant let it effect the way you approach your play.

The hysteria last night got to the point where a couple of teams at the beginning of the night who were clearly new to the competitive scene wanted me to kick qwertY from the tournament because someone told them he hacks. These guys had the idea that there were hackers out there and wanted blood just to vindicate that fear pointing in the direction of anyone that was good. Is that the way you really want to play your game?