We've been playing Day of Defeat since Beta 1.0 so we can call ourselves veterans of DoD, and we'd like to comment on a disappointing new trend with the latest DoD updates and the way people are playing the game. It seems to us that the DoD team are just trying to get closer and closer to an exact replicate of Counter-Strike. And because of this, there seems to be a large increase in people who are playing it like it was so. They often camp for entire matches, using the sneakiest spots and dirtiest tricks they can get their hands on. This is not isolated to the latest version of Day of Defeat - this has been slowly coming into place as the mod went mainstream. When it started out, DoD was just a mod for the die-hards and those who had been keeping their eye on the development of the mod rather than some part-time casual CS player. It was more fun and the maps were simpler and had more of the core elements required to make a memorable map. All the favourite maps have been around since Beta 1.0 and all the recent maps are the most hated. And these favourite maps which I have just mentioned were removed at Beta 1.2. You may have noticed our little rant on the message board about dod_mainz, dod_vn61, dod_valley and dod_bliss being taken out of Beta 1.2. Those of us who have been playing DoD from the start will probably still have these maps, but because they are not included in the full installation of Beta 1.2 and 1.3, they have been forgotten by the majority of servers, unfortunately.

In 1.0, the game was new and pure - unedited and undiscovered. Then came Beta 1.1 and a small influx of newbies who abused the game with such things as spawn camping and constant sniping. The maps stayed the same but the way the game was being played was noticeably deteriorating. When Beta 1.2 was introduced, the major bastardisations started to occur -the mod got hosted at Fileplanet and had reviews in major gaming publications, both online and in magazines, and the mod was becoming mainstream. This brought in a healthy flood of new and mature players, but with it came the thoughtless, cheap-assed, personally-oriented 'l337' newbie CS freaks who only care about how many kills they get and not about the greater benefit of their team-mates. This is where DoD started to fall apart and the newly introduced maps that sucked harder than you could ever have imagined didn't help this problem at all. Dod_sicily, everyone's most hated map, was introduced as well as dod_dam (yet another abomination of a map). How much worse could they make DoD? That was my major concern with the release of Beta 1.3 looming. It could redeem us from the problems that had slowly been snowballing since the start. Unfortunately, in our opinion, 1.3 was a let-down. The new maps are horrible, and while they didn't make the mistake of taking out any further maps, the gave the allies an even bigger advantage by slowing down the rate of fire of the Axis K98 so much that a light infantry/leicht infantary stand-off will almost always go to the Allied player (or at least a lot more than it used to). The already obvious Allied advantage just got a hell of a lot worse and this almost enforces that the Axis players camp in obscure places or use other less-effective weaponry.

Now for an interesting proposition - the DoD team scrap dod_sicily, dod_dam, dod_cherbourg, dod_koln and bring back the old maps. Now imagine DoD with these changes - the maps played would be dod_mainz, dod_hill, dod_caen, dod_snowtown, dod_omaha, dod_vn61, dod_oslo, dod_bliss and dod_valley. That would make the best combination of maps and would stop people whining constantly about how much they hate the map that the server is currently running. Keep the 1.3 models, animations and sounds but change the maps, fix the Allied advantages, speed up the K98 rate of fire and change the explosion animations and team-grenading abilities and you would have one hell of a mod. I think that many people would agree with me on this idea and I hope somehow the DoD team get to read this article and take notice of the things we've had to say. And please, for the love of God, work out some system to stop campers!

-CyberFelon & Christophercles, 04/07/2001