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CPL Europe

Friday, 20 July 2001 -
The CPMA Guru... ? $comment_count ?>
Challenge Pro Mode / Challenge Pro Mode Arena (CPM / CPMA) (official website: www.promode.org) has generated a lot of debate in it's short lifetime. Born of an ambitious plan to remake Q3A into some sort of ultimate competitive gaming challenge for expert players, the whole idea really pissed some people off while for others, they found it actually "worked".

The mod has been very "underground", with a number of players saying they enjoy it but don't play it competitively largely due to the fact it is not supported by the CPL and other important leagues. But every now and then we see it in action (most recently the Face|Off "Clash of the Titans" (USA) and "CPMA AllStars" (EU) events).

Recently (past 12 months or so) CPM transformed itself into CPMA, which has "multiple arena" support (like RA) as well as many other things. The mod also became far more closely integrated with OSP development. During this time there was a noticeable shift in the perception of CPM among many Quake players. With all of these changes, probably the single most important causative factor has been the impact of just one guy - arQon - who is the subject of this interview.

Sure there were other factors which were leading to CPM gaining some sort of wider acceptance as a mod - people were getting over some of the initial hysteria, the rise of CS and the (temporary?) slump in VQ3 (particularly in the US) encouraged a more objective reassessment of CPM's merits. The recognition for CPM maps such as CPM1a and CPM4 established legitimacy, the emergence of CPM "stars" such as ven0m, xfoo, krg, matr0x, and more recently, Apheleon, rat, and czm, conferred credibility to the CPM gameplay, and careful re-positioning of CPM as a "modest alternative" to VQ3 led to fewer non-CPM players being defensive about the mod.

But what arQon brought to CPM was a combination of things - first-order skills in programming, enormous energy and dedication, and probably most importantly - he is based in the US and constantly active, both on IRC and on the servers.

As a result, CPM / CPMA has developed into a mod with a LOT of powerful and compelling features, features which are difficult to discount. The gameplay has also been further refined and some of the more "radical" aspects toned down. This was still achieved through an independent design process, but arQon's pro-Q2 background and his critical views on QW have undoubtedly had an influence.

I believe these factors have probably had a lot to do with our recently seeing a range of VQ3 players in the US playing, and enjoying, CPMA. Among these players - czm, c3, bitchslayer, even Moonshine who was a tough critic in the early period. At the CPL 4 Year event Zero4 played CPMA, and enjoyed it. Recently Matador, another early critic, acknowledged that CPMA had its place. While these players do not see CPMA as a replacement for VQ3, they do increasingly acknowledge it as a viable alternative - producing a fun, fast, action-packed gaming style which is enjoyable to play and spectate.

At the same time, the 'arQon period' has witnessed some alienation of the original hardcore Polish CPM community and one or two members of the CPM team left (or went inactive) because they either were unhappy with the direction CPM was taking or they felt (rightly or wrongly) they could have no influence over its future direction. The most notable of those was RooS, who also just happened to be the most pro-QW CPM team member.

On to the interview. I didn't really have time to ask detailed questions, so my questions tend to be brief and to the point, leaving arQon to the "detail". The interview was conducted over the space of a month or so, with me adding a few more questions.

NOTE: The interviewer, Hoony, is also the creator of the CPM mod and remains active on the team (as team leader). That makes the interview "biased" so bear that in mind.

Interview with arQon

Hoony: Tell us who you are, what you do, etc

arQon: My real name's Kevin, I'm English, and I'm currently living in Tahoe, California. After 14 years as a developer on Wall St and in Silicon Valley, I figured I deserved a break, so I took a year off to snowboard and work on fun projects. Unfortunately, that year is just about up, so I'll be looking for a job in the very near future. :(

Hoony: Where did your 'nick' come from?

arQon: It's a Quake-friendly version of "archon", which is a Gnostic term roughly equivalent to an Archangel. I've had more nicks than I can count over the years, but this one came about in a pretty bizarre way. Many years ago, there was a Commodore64 game called Archon. Great game, and I've toyed with the idea of writing a 3D version for a long while now but never had the time. Back when the Q3 game tools were released, I thought that it would make a sweet mod, so I adopted the name so I'd be reminded of it every time I played. About a year ago, I actually had the time to work on it and even got as far as the design and starting to code it, then something else came up...

Hoony: How did you get involved with CPMA?

arQon: In a fairly convoluted way. :)

I used to play Q3 a fair bit with Natestah (who's now a level designer at 2015.com). One day he messaged me something along the lines of "OMG! You've GOT to try this mod. This is how Q3 *should* have been." I started playing; I got utterly thrashed (this was no big deal - Nate can 0wn me in QW, Q2, VQ3, and probably Pong as well); and I got hooked.

Around the time that Nate moved to Omaha, Khaile was considering natedm1 for the next map pack but couldn't reach him because his email had changed. Khaile and I got to talking, and one of the things that came up was ProMode support in RA3. He mentioned that they'd tried talking to crt but he hadn't bothered replying, so it didn't look like it was going to happen. I already had multiarena code from the work I'd been doing on Archon (though the implementation was slightly different) and I time to spare. Three days later I had a ProMode Clan Arena mod that could handle RA3 maps. A little while after that I joined the ProMode team for real: this was just before CPM1.0 came out.

Hoony: What is your role?

arQon: My work on ProMode is essentially worrying about the OSP and multiarena aspects of the code, as well as implementing most of the gameplay changes since CPM1.0. Along with that, I do everything I can to kill bugs and add useful features without bloating the code with gimmicks. Contrary to popular belief, I'm NOT the development lead for the mod. I did do most of the design and code for CPMA, but that's simply because I have more free time than the rest of the team.

Hoony: How much time have you spent/ do you spend on CPMA?

arQon: Tons. More than I really care to think about. :)

I treat it as a job almost, just an extremely enjoyable one. If you factor in all the IRC/forum/email time as well I probably spent about 80 hours on it some weeks during the "worst" times (gearing up for the original release; the merge with OSP), but a LOT of those hours were spent "playtesting", which is to say 4-hour marathon CA and TDM sessions with my clanmates, which I don't think really counts. :)

Typically, it probably averages out to about 20 hours a week, and obviously there's a lot less NEED to spent much time on it nowadays, with the mod pretty much done.

Hoony: Why do you do it?

arQon: I love designing and writing code. If it wasn't working on CPMA, I'd be putting that time into a different project anyway. That's what this sabbatical was really about for me anyway. Since I get so much enjoyment out of *playing* the mod, I'm happy to spend the time that I do trying to improve it. I think that when you actually play the games that you develop, any bugs irritate the hell out of you if you end up losing a frag because of one; and you find yourself thinking "Hey, it would be really cool if it did xyz". Every gamer's had those feelings, and I'm in a position to actually do something about it, so I do.

* * * * * * *

Hoony: What's the story with yourself and OSP?

arQon: Erm... not entirely sure how to answer that. The mods just kind of grew together over time, really.

If you really want the details:

Rhea and I had been talking about stuff for a while and sharing bits and pieces of code since ?August? for cheat protection, enemy models, that kind of thing. Then when the ProMode rules were updated for CPMA and the doublejumps were cleaned up we shared that code as well, and a bit later we started talking about OSPMA (OSP 2), which would basically be me giving Rhea the MA framework code and helping him add it to OSP.

A few months later, it was pretty clear things were never going to work that way. There was just way too much of OSP that depended on the basic structure of the "raw" Q3 code not changing much, and I'd pretty much redesigned and rewritten the base package to get the flexibility that I wanted for CPMA.

After a bit more thought, it just made more sense to merge the OSP featureset into CPMA instead since that could be done in stages. Adding CPMA to OSP would have had to be done in one shot, which would mean no other OSP development for several months - not really an option.

The biggest problem with mod development is that not many people really have the skills, time, and dedication to do a decent job of it. If you look at how many mods got as far as "here's some screenshots" and then vanished before they even had a decent alpha you can see that pretty easily. With OSP/Q3Comp even a "decent" job isn't good enough - you need to be a perfectionist, and you also have to worry about trust issues when expanding the team, since these are the competition-class mods that leagues and money tournaments use.

When you have so few people that meet all those criteria to begin with, it's just stupid to have them duplicating each other's effort when they could be working together instead, so that's what we did. It also means that the mod doesn't just stagnate if Real Life interferes, as there's more than one person that can move it forward.

Hoony: How closely do you and rhea work together?

arQon: Very. We have full access to each other's code (including checkin privileges), we're constantly talking in IRC, etc. We've been working together since OSP 99f (wow, that was a long time ago...) and we actually met IRL a couple of weeks ago when I was in Seattle, which was great - it's nice to finally meet someone face to face when you've spent so much time talking to them online.

Hoony: When will OSP and CPMA finally 'merge'?

arQon: Heh. They're very close right now: there are a couple of OSP features still missing from CPMA, but probably 95% of it is there. CPMA has *always* been "OSP 2.0" as well, so we really need to lock down OSP 1.0 first. Although we're running out of letters, Rhea can't bring himself to actually bite the bullet and freeze the mod. Every time we get close to it, something happens. We say "okay, we'll do this next build and call it 1.0 once it's had enough playtesting and we know it's solid". Then Rhea finds a new shiny thing that's irrestible and adds a feature, or something needs to be tweaked for a league / ladder / tournament / point release / etc and we're back to square one. :)

Hoony: How much is left to do on CPMA?

arQon: That's a tricky question. With the addition of ramp jumps, we're pretty much done from a gameplay standpoint. For the mod itself, I think we've proven with OSP that there's always something else you can do if you look hard enough. :)

Hoony: When will we see "version 1.0"?

arQon: I knew this was coming...

I really don't know. I realise that a lot of people put stock in nice round numbers, but I find it hard to get too concerned about it myself. OSP is technically still in beta, but has been used for $100K tournaments and is required by every league around the world. Other mods whose first release was "1.0", with a ton of hype and fanfare, were so buggy that you had to grit your teeth while playing them. I think CPMA's in a position to be called 1.0, and even if we did that tomorrow it would be the most bug-free 1.0 in the history of gaming, but since we keep the version numbers pretty much synced with OSP I'd be reluctant to suggest changing that policy until OSP itself has a 1.0 release.

Hoony: Will we ever see spectator features (eg QTV/GTV and commentary) built into CPMA?

arQon: Built into, I doubt. Co-operating with, certainly. The biggest constraint here is Q3 itself: without full access to the source, it makes a lot more sense to just write a proxy to handle that sort of thing than to try and wrestle it into a mod where you're so limited in certain ways. Operating within those kinds of constraints makes the job twice as hard as it really needs to be. Once the point release settles, Rhea I will probably sit down with FonFon and try to figure out what the best way to go with GTV is, since it will probably need a lot of work. QTV died when 1.27g came out, because they couldn't / didn't want to deal with the updated network protocol. It's quite possible that the same thing will happen to GTV with this PR, since FonFon doesn't really have much free time. That essentially means no more "live broadcasts" for Q3. If Brad does decide that he has to drop GTV, I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve that might make it possible to do something similar, but again it all comes down to time. Outside of id deciding to take a hand in things and help out, there are very few people with the skill and the desire to do something like that, and even fewer who can spare the hours it needs.

Hoony: What involvement have you had with id Software?

arQon: id aren't as close to the community as they used to be, especially with their real focus these days being Doom3 rather than Q3, but we do bounce a fair amount of email back and forth. We've fixed several bugs in the baseq3 source, some of them very significant ones like pmove, which id roll into their codebase for licensees and other mod developers. We also keep them up to date on what kinds out cheats are out there, and work with them to block them in Q3, that kind of thing. They're actually pretty good listeners and decent guys: there's no "we're id, we're perfect" attitude there, which is great. It's funny to see just how crunched they are by the way they reply though - mails will go unanswered for a week, then there'll be a flurry of responses at 8am on a Sunday morning and instant turnaround for a couple of days, then back to a week of silence. :)

Hoony: id software put the CPMA LG code into the PR. Do you know what they think of promode/CPMA?

arQon: I don't know, really. At a guess, I'd say Fredo is probably the only staffer there to have tried it.

Hoony: What do you think of the new Q3A PR?

arQon: I'm one of the people who gets that "phantom PL" a lot with the netcode, so it's basically unplayable for me. I also REALLY hate the fact that the mouse doesn't work properly any more. I can kind-of understand why that was done, but disabling the right code path completely simply because people are too stupid to use in_mouse -1 is the wrong approach.

1.29f is a test build. It works for some people; it doesn't work for others. There are enough significant problems with it currently that now that we've tried it I think we'd be a lot better off going back to 1.27 and waiting for the next patch to come out.

I don't want people to read that as a knock on id: I know how much work they put into this patch when they're essentially already working full-time on Doom3 as well, but it's really a step backwards compared to all the preview PRs we had as well as the last "official" release, and it needs to have a few fundamental things fixed before it can be considered anything other than the experimental code that it really is.

* * * * * * *

Hoony: What has the response to CPMA been like?

arQon: Mixed, to say the least. :)

Good players trying it for the first time tend to think that it's a bit weird initially, but usually come to prefer it, especially if they started with Q1/QW/Q3. Good Q2 players are generally less keen on it because Q2 was a MUCH slower game, and while CPMA actually allows for the kind of strategic play that they love about Q2 it does so at a pace that's just too much of a shock for many of them to adjust to.

Newbies, ironically, generally think it's a hell of a lot more fun than VQ3 and pretty much all prefer it. It doesn't matter to them that they get owned by good players, because that happens to them in VQ3 as well, so they might as well enjoy themselves.

By far the most vocal opponents are the "average" Q3 players - the people who sort-of know how to time items or can win CA games as long as they outping their opponents. They tend to think that they're better players than they really are, so when they get their heads handed to them their immediate reaction is "Well, I know I'm great, so it must be the mod's fault that I lost". They're the ones posting the "ProMode sucks!" comments on XSR every time a thread mentions it. :)

There's another group who've never even played CPMA and merely parrot someone else's opinion. Those people are just sheep, so I don't really care what they have to say. Most of them are off playing CS or RA3 these days: they just follow the herd, so they don't really matter.

Hoony: What do you like the most about CPMA (the mod) and CPMA (the community/ project)?

arQon: I think that probably the best feature of the mod is how complete it is.

ProMode, VQ3, 1v1, TDM, CTF, CA, Instagib, all on a per-arena basis; MA support; cheat protection, all the bugfixes: there's really nothing to touch it. OSP obviously comes close, since the two mods share so many features (and so much code), but CPMA is really a whole new class of mod: a sort of virtual multi-server for Q3, and I'm very proud of that.

The community is great, and I think that's actually related to CPM itself. Since the game requires you to develop a complete set of skills, you constantly get owned when you start playing. All the whiners and lamers can't handle that, so they go off to play different games instead and are essentially weeded out of the pool very early on.

Hoony: What don't you like about CPMA?

arQon: How badly certain people can beat me at it. :)

Hoony: Do you think you've had any personal influence over CPMA design decisions?

arQon: There are a couple of things that I've felt very strongly about (oddly, GL reload time is the one that springs to mind) that I've lobbied for or against and the change has actually made it into the game. It's not really anything magical though, or me "throwing my weight around" because of my position on the development team: it's simply been that those things usually HAVE been detrimental to the game, and I've been able to make strong enough arguments to get the design team to at least reconsider them. Sometimes they agree and the changes get made, sometimes they don't.

Anyone can do it: it's really just a matter of actually looking at the overall gameplay and how the change would impact it, and then presenting a case. The reason most people feel the design team doesn't listen to them is because their arguments are typically "It should be xyz because I WANT it to be xyz." That's not a thought-out desire to change something for the betterment of the game: it's just moronic whining. If the change isn't worth their time to actually think about and attempt to justify, it sure as hell isn't worth anyone else's time to consider it. :)

So yes, I'd say I've had some influence, but just in the same way that anyone else can have. The big difference is that I've put a lot more effort into presenting my case than most people do, and been willing to keep trying to find the right solution on the occasions that I've missed something. As an example, when we introduced the new "Duel" armour system back in January, I and several others had already written about 5 pages on it just for it to get to the point where it was worth considering playtesting. Six months later, after a ton of further discussion, testing, and tweaking, it's finally evolved into the best setting for 1v1 games on just about every DM map. It's taken a tremendous amount of work and perseverance to get it there, but it's something that I've felt was needed for a long time so I was willing to put the effort in.

Hoony: What do you think about the 'name issue'?

arQon: My initial reaction was the same as everyone else's when I first heard about it: "I'm not 1337 enough to play this game? F**k you". To denigrate the effort that so many VQ3 players put into improving their game was arrogant and insulting beyond belief. I didn't even bother downloading the mod to try it out, and if it hadn't been for Natestah I'd never have given it a second glance.

Hoony: What do you think of the 'politics' of RA3 vs CPMA?

arQon: I think it's moronic, especially when it gets to the point it did a few months ago with some of the more disturbed RA3 people faking IRC logs etc to try and put the CPMA supporters in a bad light.

There's no question among RA3 players who've tried both that CPMA is the mod they'd rather be playing: their only real concern is getting the number of servers that run it in VQ3 mode to the critical mass it needs for them to be able to switch. That's an issue for the leagues and server admins to address, but nobody wants to take the first step because of all the abuse they'll catch from the uninformed masses. Until they get that player base there, they're stuck with RA3. Until they switch the servers, they can't get people playing it. It's a classic catch-22.

We'll continue to support VQ3 the same way we still support it in OSP, but what the RA3 community plays is something for them to sort out for themselves.

CPMA has the cheat protection, pure server support, and admin options that they feel are lacking in RA3, and it plays the maps they want to play with the physics they want to use. It has a ton of other features that RA3 is missing, and it's been available to them for six months. If they don't want to use it, it's up to them. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Hoony: What do you think of QW?

arQon: I have a love/hate relationship with QW. I still think that in many ways it's a very good game, but basically I never play it any more. I'm a bit disappointed in its current state, with players being lauded for the fact that 30% of their movement is handled by scripting rather than skill; or that simply camping the RA spawn for 20 seconds while spamming grenades like a monkey is called "control". More importantly, I don't think you can live in the past. Too many people are happy to settle for something simply because it's familiar, rather than actively choose it because it's better. That goes for QW just as much as it does for VQ3. I'm not one of those people. Evolve or die. :)

Hoony: What do you say to people who claim that CPMA is a "remake of QW"?

arQon: Nothing. :)

The only people who've ever made that claim either haven't played the game or have done so with preconceptions that they're too dense to get over even when confronted with reality. Arguing with someone who's convinced he's right but is speaking from a position of total ignorance is a waste of time.

Hoony: What are your views on the RG and LG changes and the resultant "split" with some of the Polish hardcore CPM community?

arQon: The RG and LG changes since CPM 1.0 have very different motivations.

The complaints about the RG change were just a knee-jerk reaction: the same cliched "this is different so it must be bad" fear response that most of the Q3 community had when CPM itself was first introduced. The only people who'd actually evaluated both settings *within the context of ProMode gameplay* and were in a position to make a decision backed by comparative playtesting were the original design team and the players at Lansanity, and they'd settled on 1500ms about 9 months before the first public CPMA build was released. It was only through a communication glitch between the designers and the developers that the 1000ms rail ended up in CPM 1.0 in the first place, and while such mistakes do occasionally result in a better game, I don't think that was the case here.

At the time, the two camps were pretty much religiously opposed, with both sides saying they couldn't live with the "wrong" outcome. I think I was probably the only guy on the planet who really didn't mind either way: I liked being able to whore the rail with no penalty, but I could also see that 1500 made for a better game overall. For most players, the immediate aspects of the change made it impossible for them to see any further than how it affected the way they were used to playing, so the missed the bigger picture. Now that more time has passed, a lot of them have had the chance to see what the change really means in terms of gameplay and rethink their opinion on it.

From what I gather, Polish servers are about half and half these days. We left the option in specifically for people that still can't or won't adapt, so on a server/league/tournament level the decision's really up to the players and admins to make.

The "official" rules for ProMode are set by the design team, and are blended to allow for a nice mixture of strategic play coupled with exciting melees. The Polish style of play has always favoured melee to the near-exclusion of strategy though: they also use 5 second weapon respawns, and that has a far larger impact on how the game is played than ANYTHING the team has done in the last year. Different people play CPMA for different reasons. I think it's a tribute to the overall design and the mod's capabilities that such varied styles are even possible, because they certainly aren't in VQ3. I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but... the Poles generally seem to prefer a game that's much more aim than brain. I think it's no coincidence that they mostly stuck with dmm3 QW rather than move on to Q2. If they're happy playing the game that way, then I'm cool with them doing so. You essentially trade some depth off against more highlight moments. It's a fun way to play for a while, but I generally find FPS's as a whole a little more shallow than I'd prefer personally, so I tend to favour the more strategic settings.

The cooldown on the LG (and MG, though no-one cares about that) was a whole other story.

The LG is by far the most powerful weapon in the game, dealing damage at a whopping 160 points a second. It also has the smallest penalty of any weapon in that you can switch from it instantly, so you're never stranded by it like you are with RG or even RL. That switch time also makes it the ideal weapon to combo from, obviously. In and of itself, that's fine: anyone who's played a game other than VQ3 understands that "unbalanced" weapons are a good thing.

The problem with the LG isn't its power per se: it's the fact that it's also in many ways the least "skilled" weapon. Any decent railer can be very nearly as effective with 100 ping as they are with 40. Admittedly, it takes a LOT of practice, but it's certainly manageable. The LG on the other hand is pretty much pure ping. If we all played on LAN all the time, I doubt anyone would have an issue with the LG, and that's why the Poles don't see anything wrong with it the way it used to be. I can totally understand where they're coming from, since they consider 40ms to be a "high" ping.

We don't have that luxury though: the team HAS to look at things globally, and when even cable and DSL players in the US end up playing 100+ms v 30ms at times, it's out of hand. It's far too easy for the LPB to only have to worry about LG, whereas it's comparatively worthless to the H(ish)PB. Online play is ping-dependent enough as it is, and it's bad enough that the most powerful weapon in the game can be practically unusable for one player but trivially simple for his opponent. When you exaggerate that difference with the combos as well (even an average <50-pinger will almost never miss the LG->RG combo, but it takes FAR more skill to pull it off with 100 ping), then you're looking at roughly 150 damage in one second for the LPB, practically guaranteed; and about a 50/50 chance of either 30 or 130 for the HPB. That's just far too big a gap to be acceptable.

We can't do anything about people's connections, but we CAN make comboing off the LG require roughly the same level of skill for everyone, and that's pretty much what the net effect of this change is.

Am I surprised that people who got used to that rail-after-LG essentially being a freebie hate the fact that they have to work for it now? Not really. I mean, you can hardly blame them. It's not like I didn't use the same trick constantly myself when I played on Cali servers and it was so easy to do. :)

But does the cooldown make for a better game overall? Well, it makes ping a little bit less of a factor, and it takes more skill for a player to combo, so I'd say absolutely it's an improvement.

The fast rail switch I was pretty ambivalent about: 1500 makes for a better game, but 1000 is more fun even though it's kind of cheap. Cooldown was the option that I really hated having to add. I can't see ANY justification for turning it off, because even on LAN where ping isn't a factor it STILL requires more skill from the players. The decision to leave it as something that could be disabled is one that I strongly disagreed with at the time, and still do. I see it as basically a copout (the option, not the decision) to keep a favoured trick easy rather than have it become something that actually requires work, and that really annoys me. That it's the self-proclaimed "best ProMode players in the world" who screamed the loudest about it, well, the irony there is just thick enough to choke on.

* * * * * * *

Hoony: Do you think CPMA lives up to the name "pro mode"?

arQon: In some ways, yes. It does have deeper gameplay with the potential for players to use a more complete skillset than any other version or mod of Quake/Unreal/Half-Life/etc. Moreover, it is (as far as I'm aware) the *only* game in history that was actually designed by pro gamers rather than just programmers and marketroids. (That's actually how I've come to think of the name: it's the game that pros would have made if they'd been involved in the creation of Q3). So I'd say it definitely deserves the name in spirit. But the only literal "pro mode" at the moment is CS. Chew on the irony of that for a while. :)

Hoony: Do you think "pro mode" has been a success or a failure?

arQon: That's a much more complicated question to answer than it is to ask - there are so many ways to look at it. Is it a pity that the CPL never adopted it? Certainly. The very simplicity of VQ3 is what led to its fast fade. A better game, which was freely available to everyone, would have kept Q3 as a viable tournament platform for years.

I know Angel will disagree with me on this, saying that it's up to the players to choose what to play and the CPL should simply follow the will of the people, but I think he underestimates the impact that the CPL has. There's a huge domino effect to every decision he makes, and you can see that very clearly in things like the switch to CS: TDM clans like Abuse, cK, K9 suddenly start playing a game that they hate simply because the CPL encourages it. It's the exactly the same as it was in the Q3 1v1 era, with people like Makaveli and later LakermaN competing in VQ3 tournaments while at the same time saying how much it sucked in interviews and columns etc.

When ProMode was first released, the take from just about every pro out there was "Yeah, I prefer it to VQ3, but there's no money in it and I have to prep for Razer/Frag4/whatever". *So* many players' response to "Why don't you play ProMode?" was always "Because the CPL doesn't use it". With every halfway decent player in the US dreaming of becoming the next Thresh / Fatal1ty and actually making a living from playing games, they took their cue from the established names and also avoided it. By failing to get "critical mass" participation from the Q3 community, ProMode never became the standard for Competition play that Hoony and others wanted it to be, so I'd say that in that respect it was clearly a failure.

On a more personal level though, it's the game I've spent by far the most hours playing over the last year, and I get emails daily from people who've just discovered it raving about how much fun it is, so as far as I'm concerned it's a definite success.

Hoony: What do you forsee as the future for CPMA?

arQon: In the short term, I expect it will continue to grow as players get tired of VQ3 but want to keep playing a real FPS rather than a "Hide and Go Camp" game. As more and more people burn out on Q3, a lot of them will leave the scene entirely rather than try what is essentially a brand new game that they could enjoy for months, simply because it's "just a mod", which I think is a real shame.

In the longer term, well, CPMA is the best FPS out there bar none. It has significantly deeper gameplay than QW; more "thrills" and potential to keep improving your skills than Q2; and an engine that's still superior to anything else currently available. Those games still have active comunities today, even though they're a lot smaller than in their heyday. Despite having pretty much the same gameplay that it had back at Lansanity 15 months ago, the top players are still coming up with new strategies, styles of play, and tricks: no-one has managed to max the game out yet. I think that's a very good indicator of the lifespan it will have. With Doom3 still a decent way off and its gameplay an unknown, I think CPMA will remain the FPS of choice for the hardcore gamer for a long time yet.