What about PAM in CoD: World at War ?

_{Written by Jockyitch on}_{bashandslash.com}

With CoD: WW not set to release until November 11, it may seem premature to talk about modding this new game from Activision, but trust me, there are many in the CoD community who are already talking about doing that very thing - sight unseen! One of those is Bulletworm, who is famous for his CoD4 competition mod: PAM IV.

"Worm's" PAM IV has had a tough time in CoD4 after he decided to take a significant hiatus from gaming this year. During this sabbatical, his supremacy in building competitive mods seemed to transfer to a community upstart, Raf1. Raf1 aka Ryan, a young Brit developed the antithesis to PAM IV: the one-ruleset S&D gametype, "open-source", Promod.

I asked "worm" if he thought he could learn from Raf1's vision of a unified ruleset across the world for CoD tournament play. Would worm bring a unified ruleset to the competitive community for World at War?

Bulletworm:

About the rulesets, I WISH I could get away with a unified ruleset. That would make all the insanity of these rule files obsolete. I would estimate a good 20% of the mod has to deal with the non-unified rulesets in some form. But here ends up being the problem:

Different leagues literally serve different functions and cater to different 'customers' (for lack of a better word). Some cater to hardcore, practice-5-nights-per-week teams, others to the casual gaming clan who enjoys a fun match every now and then, and there are many shades in between. Each league wants to set up match play according to how their type of 'customer' wants it. Even more, the different CULTURES around the world serve to drive the rules apart. Some cultures inherently have more PC game playing time than others. Or some cultures have players playing mostly from their home PC while others are limited to specific time frames holed up at internet cafes.

Here is the real deal. If the great majority of players went to the leagues and said, "we, your customers, want a unified ruleset between such and such leagues", they can FORCE the issue, or at least get the rulesets so close together that the differences really don't matter. To me, the fact that this push has been made unsuccessfully means that the demand just was not there, or at least not big enough at least to get results. However in some cases it has, as I remember CAL and CEVO rules essentially coming together at some point after the players demanded it.

It isn't unheard of for there to be cultural differences in professional sports' rules. In fact, the ONLY reason there is a difference between the American League and National League rulesets in American baseball is ONLY because they wanted to have a way to differentiate themselves from each other, which I am sure plays a large role as well in online gaming league's rule sets. Baseball is even worse now that I think about it, there are even different rules for different ballparks!

So I WISH I could just throw in a unified ruleset and be done with it, I just don't see it being what the leagues themselves want at this point. However, what is possible is that somehow CoD players could come up with a way of setting up a unified ruleset commission, and I could make a "unified" rule set rule file, and leagues who want to go with the unified approach could all choose to use that rule set. Then, instead of the individual leagues changing the rules, the commission of people (players presumably) responsible for making the rules would submit the changes instead of the individual leagues.

But the problem always boils down to who has the knowledge, moral authority, and right to set the rules for everyone else. Who chooses who that person is, or those people? My bet is that two, three, or more groups would pop up all wanting their own unified rule set, and right back down that road we go again... lol.

Frankly, this is sad news.

Promod ushered in an era of unification: one S&D tournament ruleset across the CoD4 world. It was received warmly by an always cynical competitive community. Promod's creators took the moral authority of developing one set of rules unto themselves. While this continues to ruffle feathers, their "the end justifies the means" methodology may have on the surface been harsh and arrogant but it has won over the hearts and minds of the competitive community. Rather than being crushed by haters, Raf1 was commended for his efforts because as a competitive gamer himself he is a player first - a modder second. He had the street cred to do what he did. As well, his Promod brethren *did* consult fellow gamers and get their inputs.

Promod was written for the player and spectator - not for the tournament organizers.

PAM IV catered first and foremost to all the major tournaments and allowed each one to tweak the rules and gametypes. Worm has never denied this. As a modder, it is obviously easier to deal with a few major players than a whole community and completely understandable.

How Raf1 has been able to withstand the bombardment of player-suggestions for every dvar change he has made to CoD4 is hard to understand. But he has.

In the end, Promod for CoD4 has a laser beam-like focus: make the game appeal to pro gamers. Promod did not just deal with rulesets, it sought to change the game itself in an attempt to turn CoD4 into the next CS in terms of popularity.

In the short time Promod has been around, one ruleset has meant consistency, uniformity and a level playing field. It made players stick with CoD4 and they have been getting great at this game. Greatness brings in spectators and money.

On the opposite end, PAM IV created a great deal of chaos for the players as each tournament could choose its own unique gametype and ruleset. Players found this daunting as they would find themselves practicing for a limitless number of gameplay environments. These variations have led many "pros" to give up CoD gaming and ply their trade solely in Counter-Strike where things are predictable to say the least.

The popularity of Promod and its philosophy speaks for itself. If you don't believe me, here are server stats for the CoD community (taken on September 23rd, 9:00 pm EST).

Game-Monitor.com

Promod:

108 out of 10,992 (0.98%) players on 663 servers.
PAM IV:

34 / 6,787 (0.50%) players on 377 servers.

GameTracker.com
Promod has approximately 450 servers to PAM IV's 300 servers.

Within the span of two months, since the summer LAN season in Europe, Promod has gone from being on no servers at all to the most popular mod in CoD4.

Surely we do not need to have to yet again go through all the hand-wringing exercises this community went through to get Promod. The single ruleset path is the obvious choice for everyone involved.

The only downside is that, as worm mentions, the "serious" tournaments will have a hard time distinguishing themselves. Heck some tournaments will not even want to play S&D. That's not the issue here. When I say serious, I mean tournaments that have CS-style S&D gameplay: like CEVO, CAL League, TGL, major LAN events...etc.

There will always be a need to give the mom-and-pop leagues and minor tournaments different ruleset capability in the mod. But for the main, large-money, tournaments one ruleset must be the way to go.

Will this happen for CoD: WW?

One can only speculate what will happen, but as of this writing it looks improbable that Raf1 and Bulletworm will be making one unified mod (PAM+Promod).

A unified mod would have been a perfect world. Raf1 could have incorporated his Promod ruleset for the big tournaments and worm would have been able to give the mom and pop's their a-la-carte rules.

No one could argue that Promod as an add-on to PAM IV would have been better than as a separate mod.

A Promod incorporated into PAM: WW would have been a win for everyone.