So! The massive spate of summer LAN’s has finished! But what has changed in the community? In this fools opinion - a lot.

The extremely surprising results of AEF, The-Experience and i34 have left many top players high and dry; whether it is because their players have gone to other Organisations, or because their entire team have been removed from their own.

There has been no properly consistent team throughout Call of Duty 4’s brief, yet living, lifetime; nearly every team’s result going up and down more than a yoyo. This inconsistency is too consistent and lasting to simply be teething problems you see at the start of a new game. No team that has gone from top to bottom and back has ever been able to describe properly why this is. They mostly remark with things such as ‘I don’t know. It just didn’t happen for us on the day’. The main reason I believe is due to Call of Duty 4 being described by many as ‘Random’. Many of you unfamiliar with the gaming may mumble to yourself, ‘random?’ It is a word used regularly in this community. I will attempt to explain. I think the word random is used because nobody can accurately describe why everything from performances to the actual games inner workings cannot remain consistent. But the evidence speaks for itself, the game is truly random. No comprehendible clause has been found that aptly describes the happenings. All I know that it is that it makes the game truly intoxicating!

Because of this, many teams and players are being dropped. Neither player, nor team can find consistency. Big organisations do not want their teams to win then fade away; they want them to win, and win often. This however, has been proved to be nigh-on impossible in Call of Duty 4. The blatant misunderstanding of how the game works has seen numerous Organisations drop the entire squad, or even drop Call of Duty 4 altogether! I do think this is incredibly short sighted of them and they should try to understand that this is the way this game is.

As I come to the end of my first article I cannot help but be excited about the times to come. All of these organisations without teams and teams lacking the full-five is going to give birth to a new generation of players, players who otherwise may not have been tested. We have had nearly all the same names at the top since Call of Duty 2 and even Call of Duty 1, it would be excellent to see unrecognised names team-up alongside the legends of the series. I hope teams take risks with players and organisations risks with teams.

Also opening doors is the implementation of Promod. Its epic game play changes and ingenious fps tweaks brings the game to a whole new level. Because of the changes Promod inflicts players who would have previously thought twice about taking Call of Duty 4 up are starting to play the game. Promod isn’t just good because it makes the game play better; it is good because it is a mod made by the community. We control the fate of the game; we choose what we would like to be changed. For this we can only thank the mod’s dedicated team of developers and testers.

All of these details add up to new holes forming in the community. The extra Frames Per Second Promod provides sees people whose hardware would have been previously unable to render Call of Duty 4 sufficiently. The team situation brings new players to the top because of more experienced players moving up the skill ladder, leaving gaps in their wake. All these growth factors can only be beneficial for the community.

The impact of the Summer LANS on Call of Duty 4 from a community point of view is most certainly a positive one.

These are exciting times to come.