From the front lines

As some of you will know (and as I mentioned in the most recent template changes post) I play in a Call of Duty league team every week (or almost every week). I thought some match reports might make a nice (if somewhat geeky) change from the angst and self doubt that fills many of my posts.

First off, I suppose an introduction and overview of what happens is required. The league is organised into several divisions (4 at the moment, Premiership, 1st, 2nd and 3rd, as with football etc). Each team in the division plays each of the others only once. We play in teams of 5 in "search and destroy" mode. The game environment (or map as it's usually called) contains two objectives (usually large artillery guns, AA guns, fuel dumps, and other such large immobile objects that would reasonably be the target of a special forces attack in a war). One team (usually but not always the Germans) has to defend these targets, while the other (one of the other 3 possible sides in Call of Duty - Americans, British and Russians) has to attack and plant a bomb at one of them. The Germans have the possibility of defusing the bomb if it's planted - but only for a short period. If the bomb is successfully planted and it's timer expires, the attackers win. If the round timer (3 minutes) expires before the bomb is planted, the defenders win. If either side is completely eliminated, then the other is the victor. This is repeated a number of times - 10 rounds for the first half, then everyone swaps sides (defenders become attackers etc) and do another 10 rounds, overall victory going to the team with the most rounds on aggregate after the two halves.

It's a simple enough concept, but victory requires that the team is well prepared with tactics suited to the map, finely tuned senses and trigger fingers, and perhaps most importantly, and ability to work well together as a team. There isn't much to say by way of a match report this week - our opponents were miles ahead of us on all 3 of these fronts. Less so in the tactics department - our team tactician, Phil, put a lot of work into finding the best vantage points on the map and the best routes to attack - we were just hugely outclassed in team working and shooting ability.

So the final score – a shameful 19-1 to them. But it’s only our first week in the premiership, and the standard here is clearly a huge step on from the 1st division where we’ve lived for the other 4 seasons, so we’ve got a lot to learn. Next week we play a fellow promotee – “Bifflan” and we’re determined to come away with a win.