After their defeat at the hands of Czech team Necroraisers, I sat down with Jan “sticky” Craeynest to talk about the team, the event, and Call of Duty 5.
With one loss in the group stage against Oxmoze and one draw in the second group stage against Crack Clan, this has not been the ideal event for the Belgians, but as Jan explains, they are not disappointed.
The team are in good spirits as they lift Sticky up for a photo
Hey Jan, you’ve just gone out of the tournament in 5th-8th place, losing to Neophyte, are you disappointed?
Well not really, I was hoping for a top3 spot but we only had two days of practise because we had some exams and some inactivity, so we didn’t really expect a lot from this event, and we got the draw against Crack Clan who are considered one of the best teams in Europe at the moment, so with the practise we had I think it’s a pretty good result.
There were quite a few people who considered teams like Neophyte and Crack were seeded too high, did you agree with them before the event, and have your views changed on these two teams?
Well Crack Clan has some very good players so they definitely deserved their top seed, and Neophyte have been around in CoD4 for a long time, and now with mazarini they have strengthened their line-up a lot, and they have been very active also, so more or less you could see they deserved their seed as well. And of course they’ve proven their seed on this LAN.
After your victory over EG at i34, you have as you’ve said lacked practise, will you be working harder from now on, and will we see you make appearances at CC5 and Gameland?
No, we won’t attend any CoD4 lans any more, since we have been struggling a lot with inactivity, mostly because of me having a lot of school work, and doekoe has his interim so he hasn’t got a lot of time off, he can’t take a day off work to come early to a LAN, and I have exams next month as well, and restyle has stopped gaming actively, and I still don’t know what I will do.
Obviously CoD5 beta came out a few days ago, and we’ve already seen an exhibition match between EG and Dignitas at i35. What are your thoughts on the game, do you think it should take CoD4’s spot, or would you rather stick with the game you play now?
I played the beta for a couple of hours, and my first opinion is that it’s too much of a console game that was ported to the PC. If there are going to be LANs for CoD5 and it’s fun to play then I definitely will play CoD5, because at the moment I am kind of bored of CoD4. Since there is a release every year in the CoD series, there aren’t many possibilities for the scene to grow big. If a game only exists for one year you have a lot of line-up changes and not so many big lans. We had a great summer for CoD4, almost 70,000e spread over 3 lans, but since the CoD5 release was announced no more CoD4 lans have been announced for 2009.
If CoD5 does become as popular as CoD4 is, do you see a LAN season next year as big as it was this summer?
It depends on the organisations that take the initiative to host a lan, like the Antwerp Esports Festival always take the initiative to take a Call of Duty event, and that is the oldest event for CoD, so if they host a CoD5 tournament it will be a great step for CoD5. And of course the I-Series as well, since they host a lot of lans too.
You mentioned that you feel CoD5 feels too much like a console game, a feeling that has been echoing around the scene, can you elaborate on what you mean by this, and what you’d like to see changed?
What’s bad about console games is that you sense a little bit of lag when you move your mouse, but that could be a bit because of beta, also the environment you play in, too many details, the graphics are typically console style. What I want to see changed is a PAM or a ProMod, with some good competitive rules in it, and make sure that the guns are balanced, and that all the bugs that are in the game will be removed.
Finally, looking at the CoD5 maps, three of the five “small” maps have been released, of which only one is Search and Destroy, meaning a maximum of three possible competitive maps – do you feel these “small” maps are too large anyway, and do you think the lack of competitive maps could harm CoD5?
Yes for sure, it could harm CoD5 for sure. The only good map is castle, and it’s not too big, in my opinion, it has a pretty good balance I think, and if we only have like three or four competitive maps it’s just too few, like for example in CS you have 6 or 7 maps, so there you can really see the difference between a team’s good map and bad map, but with only three maps you’ll be playing the same map over and over again, and it will just get boring after a pretty short time.
I know I said “finally” for the last question, but this really is my last question. You’ve talked about your inactivity relating to practising, and that you won’t attend the final two CoD4 events of the year (and possibly ever). Will we see LLL splitting up any time soon, or will you stick it out and see where you end up?
I’m pretty sure that some members will quit gaming, so we will have to find some new players, but the LowLandLions organisation wants to keep a call of duty squad, we will have to talk about it with the team, about our future plans, together with the manager, but they are matters for the beginning of 2009.
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Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:18:32 +0000
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