A Message To The Call of Duty eSports Community

Most of you who will see this tweet will: read the first couple of lines to see what it's about, say to yourself "shut up Trout" and click off without giving a single moment's care about it. Some of you may read this and consider it to be a worthwhile tweet. You may even find yourself agreeing with it in some way and feel like sharing it around. This tweet is regarding the support within the Call of Duty eSports Community itself. Anything and everything said in this, is purely my own thoughts and observations; they do not reflect that of my peers and colleagues.



I keep my thoughts and opinions for the majority of the time to myself these days; at least major opinions. I think it's fair to say, based on the opinions of people so far, the year ahead is looking very tough for Call of Duty. There's a major divide between Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered. We're assuming IW will be the CWL's focus, it would seem a lot of people are begrudgingly putting the time and effort into making the most of it. A lot of others are choosing to focus on playing MWR for the year, especially those who are either uninterested in competing in the CWL or realise they're not longed for it.



Last night, Alan Brice hosted his very own LAN tournament called 'A LAN' on Modern Warfare Remastered. Brice, in which he funded this LAN out of his own pocket, put up an event for the community to come and enjoy. I want to take a brief moment to congratulate Brice for an amazing job in pulling it off, it is not an easy task to do successfully. It was genuinely one of the most enjoyable COD tournaments I've been to. The atmosphere was so relaxed, the players were having friendly banter during games and the vibes of everyone in attendance were exemplary of what an event should be like. We saw new faces and old come together and enjoy playing a game that they loved. I haven't seen something like this at a COD event in years. People just enjoying their field of expertise. The only downside to this, was the unfortunate lack of attendance. Not just in person, but online as well.



I can understand 3 weeks into a game, a game we're not even sure will be supported for the year, to wrangle up a team and go all the way to Colchester is a tough ask. Christmas is coming, iSeries is around the corner; lots of factors are taken into consideration when planning to venture into an event yourself. But what I can't understand and I see to be the most disappointing, was the lack of online presence from the COD community as a whole. A lack of viewership, tweeting, mentions. Everyone plays this game day and night, yet no-one really seemed to care about supporting the event. YOUR event.



I'll let people off this time and chalk it up to it flying under the radar, most not even being aware of it taking place. But if you take away anything from this tweet, let it be this. Our eSport, as well as other eSports did not get to where it is today by just hoping it succeeded. Not by sitting there tweeting "Oh I hope MWR is well supported this year". It required a lot of hard work, dedication and support from people like Brice and those around it to make it thrive. Recently, we have not been doing it justice. It can be hard for the amateur scene if there are a lack of events, most events being 18+ and life taking unavoidable turns which force us to keep our distance at times. But that doesn't mean you can't show your support for COD and help it grow to where we want it to be.



If you want MWR to succeed this year, if you want COD in general to succeed this year; please start showing some support towards it. Just like Brice has done this past weekend. We're EXTREMELY fortunate to have someone who cares that much about you all, to throw his own money and time into the ring to have a chance to play COD. Which we're all here to do. Not to inflate our oversized ego's, not to put our twitter tourny placements in our bio. To play COD, have fun with out friends and colleagues. It's not a tall ask to stick out a tweet, stop by a stream and keep some of the chatter alive. I can promise you that if you show a demand for it, the demand will be met. It will take a combined effort between all of the community and the companies to make the effort fruitful.

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