For a game that has some 849 teams signed up on this seasons Clanbase OpenCup, the biggest team FPS based prize purses outside of CS 1.6 for its LAN's and the attention of the G7 you'd be forgiven for thinking that filling Call of Duty LAN's was easy, well not in the UK!


Multiplay run the iSeries LAN events in the UK and their last event, i34, hit an excellent 2000 player total, there are expansion talks that could see that number double next year and their CoD4 tournament had some 80 odd teams in it this summer. That is of course including all the teams formed just out of random players from the BYOC, but regardless there is always some strong competition.


The iSeries events have been a breeding ground for some of the games biggest players and teams, most notably the Dignitas roster that has dominated the iSeries finals in CoD4. Vying for the other place in that final the likes of Reason Gaming, TLR/MYM, Infused Gaming, Team CoolerMaster and other well funded teams are always present. So somewhere between those 5 teams I've mentioned and the other 75 teams at an iSeries the UK community would appear to be healthy.


The success of the Multiplay's iSeries has lead to other companies wanting a piece of the pukka gaming pie here in the UK. PCGamer, one of the largest magazines in the UK announced the PCGamer Showdown at the same venue as Multiplay's iSeries and with the technical support of Multiplay. Surely a recipe for success? It would appear not, signups are low and the word must be spread to get along to this LAN to make this media monolith stay in the game. They've thrown £5000 at CoD4 usually a figure to tempt any team to travel and play, however somewhere there has been a disconnect between the event and the community.


If £5000 wasnt enough then surely £15,000 would be? The ESL brought their biggest prizepurse outside of German EPS's to the UK in a bid to bite into the pie, throwing £15k at both CoD4 and CSS. However that event sits at just 17 signups out of the necessary 32. What is even more surprising there is that the tournament features and online contingent with the live event not until the beginning of 2009.


Shocked that £20,000 is potentially going to waste? Well Crossfire's CoD expert Morg wasnt, he stated:


Quote by MorgThere's just such a lack of advertising from these "top" organisations to the "lower" skilled base of esports, To me the current problem with events such as EPS UK and PCG seems to be their lack of structured advertisement and marketing strategy. If you're going to pump £15,000 pounds into a game and not give out even a press release its little wonder we only have 17 out of 32 teams signed up.



I agree, but I'd take it from a different vantage point look at the common theme the successful CoD4 LAN events have. Crossfire LAN, TeK-9 LAN, Multiplay - they all have their own community behind it and if you are an external party wanting in, then there is where you need to go. The Experience had two key factors that made it a successful external LAN, a) the Roskilde Ravens b) ground level marketing - newsposts, updates and community features everywhere making sure the event was unavoidable.


If you cast your memory back to CoD2 at the Intel C2E tournament which was UK only, it partnered each game with a community site and borrowed their userbase to deliver the tournament. Its a successful model that needs replicating. For PCGamer they should have tied in their event with Multiplay even further, potentially by hosting their event at i35 in November rather than being slap bang in the middle of i34 and i35 and ESL, well they just generally should have known better than to think that without community partners they would succeed.

If you cant beat them, join them!

(Oh and if you cant read between the lines, this is also a request for teams to sign up and get involved because these events are very important to the development of UK eSports)