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When Return To Castle Wolfenstein was released, a lot of people bought it. These were our own John , and to a lower extent, Jane Doe’s. The average age was average, both old and young played it. The everyday occupation was varied, both the poor and the wealthy played it. And most of all, people from all over the globe were part of this community. Somehow this community evolved into one of the best, and now nostalgic, societies out there.

Are there any other communities like this? Yes there are, every game has one exactly like this. But in one hand we have communities such as Quakeworld, Quake 1,2 & 3, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and Counterstrike 1.6, that excel themselves as mature and friendly brotherhoods. Yes, they still have the attention-seeking kid that suffers from the Tourette-syndrom whenever he loses a match. But if you take the community in one piece, then my conclusion is correct. In the other hand however, we have communities that are infamous for their childish and ignorant members. One prime examples of a this is Wolfenstein : Enemy territory. Obviously, there are mature, helpful, intelligent people in this community as well. Despite the fact that these people are overwhelmed by the ridiculous majority, they make a point that there are decent people everywhere you look, but in some places you need to search harder.

This brings up a paradox as the brighter ones may have already noticed. Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory are very similar games with very coequal communities, yet they are very different. Being so alike and so disparate at the same time has created a very special connection between these two games. This bond however, is not the purpose of this column. Investigating the reason of this paradox is. What has made the newer community so rotten, and why did the old one remain so well?

The first difference is that Enemy Territory is a free game. Everyone who had the desire to play this game could get it with a simple click on the mouse. Our average John & Jane Doe downloaded it, but so did every other gamer out there with the wish to play a World War 2 game. And as a certain Roman emperor once said when he denied the German tribes to live in Rome : A bigger society creates a bigger risk of crime. I think you’re intelligent enough to understand the link.

When Enemy Territory was still young, this was only a small problem. Clans such as Gunslingers, Ocrana.Ati, and Reload, just to name a few, were very mature teams. They held up a standard of attitude and the so called medskilled acted like it because everyone wants to be like their role models. Back in these days we only had to worry about Willstar & Mike who made it a hobby to act arrogant in the scene, but both of them were still genuine nice guys if you got to know them a bit better..

The second difference is that Enemy Territory is a game which is easy to master if you put in a big enough effort. This wouldn’t form such a problem if the source code wouldn’t have been released. Whenever some “unknown” starts showing signs of a very fast skill increase, people start to ask questions. With both cheaters and talents rising up in a short amount of time, paranoia has been created. People don’t trust the new talents, and most of us only have one way of expressing this anger towards cheaters, insults and flame. Now, I’m not saying that the cheater paranoia is totally out of place, there are a lot of cheaters, but there are also clean players out there and we seem to forget that. Players like Maus, Perfo , Modus and Lepari for example, have proven that rising up fast is possible without cheating. Perfo was busted with a very old cheat yes, but he has played very well on SHG-Open and CPC2 so he was at least performing well there. Other players on the contrary, have fed the paranoia immensely. Names that spring to my mind are Skeiz, Unisol, Arrow, Mize, Allu, Qyz, Kmt and Koto.
And right now, we have a lot of players that are on the boundaries of the imaginable. These players are accomplishing very nice achievements but they are oh-so-fishy. Of course I’m talking about people such as Scorch, Jan, Xav, Dragoon, Nordan, Slajdan, Nirv, Krein, Mythos, Nuggan. If they don’t prove themselves in the near future they will lose all credibility because our trust is not easily earned.

The third difference is our attitude towards cheaters. In the good old days as Arachon would call them, cheaters were close upon being crucified. They were banned for a long time and it was impossible for them to reintegrate in our scene. Today I see teams crammed with cheaters. Players like Circus, Insane, Fostrum, Jada aka Ecklav, Silent, Viol, Zak, Dmasterx, Nick and Aristo continue playing Enemy Territory. We are wondering why there are so many cheaters in our game, but we seem to look past the fact that they are hardly being punished. If people can get away with breaking the rules, and if they are presented with a lot of opportunities to do so. Then I ask you, is it strange that they try?

These efforts to create new mods and anti-cheat systems are nice ideas in theory, but they will most likely fail in reaching their final goal. We can not defeat cheaters, the best thing that we can do is endure them.