Dod

For me, the obsession started around September of 2001. I remember the day very clearly. I was in Computer Related Studies class in High school. That's when my friends and I started talking about Half-Life, and its new popular mod, "Counter-Strike". That day after school I rushed home with my cracked copy, and installed Half-Life and counter-strike. I would look forward to the end of each school day, the moment when I could rush home, connect to my 56K Internet connection, and go on and play Counter-Strike with my friends. All until something happened that would greatly affect my life for years to come. A new mod called 'Day of Defeat' (DoD) was released.

It was around this time that the RAF was formed. Back in computer class, myself and my friend Joey Magee decided to start a Counter-Strike clan, which would include all of our friends, since there were eight of us playing. We settled on the name [-RAF-], which stands for 'Raging Against Freaks'. We agreed on this name since all of us are really into the history of World War II. This is probably one of the many reasons for why we all latched onto DoD. I first found out about Day of Defeat from a computer gaming magazine, which had a review and the 1.3b release version on CD. I purchased the magazine just to try out this half-life mod. I soon realized that this was a great game, and very fun to play, and so I passed the CD around the clan. Once we started playing Day of Defeat 1.3b, we never looked back to Counter-Strike.

We got our first big break as a clan thanks to a Texan guy known only as 'Freak'. The RAF had been playing on his public server, 'Freaks Unleashed'. He noticed on there a lot, and since we all went on at the same time, it would draw in new players, thus filling his server. To thank us for the support, he let the RAF have partial ownership of the server. It was already the server for another clan (a clan known as -]*AM*[- AKA Anger Management), so it became an RAF/AM server. We quickly became good friends with clan AM, and decided to hold our first ever clan match against them. Freak was generous enough to put a password on his server for a few hours while we played AM on two maps. RAF was victorious, and I still remember the feeling of sheer power that went through me whenever I made a kill, or caped a flag to help my team. This feeling is the driving force towards DoD's community and popularity.

Now, three years later, the RAF has grown far beyond anything I could have dreamed of back in Computer Related Studies. We are in the XPL, which is a league of DoD clans. The leagues are set up just like hockey seasons. There are one or two pre-season games, then the regular season, and then playoffs to determine final placement. DoD was just recently added to the list of games in CPL, which is a competition among clans from all over, held in Texas. The big money can be found in the Counter-Strike tournament, but the winning first place team for the DoD division takes home three thousand dollars. Ten thousand is shared between first and fifth place. This is huge news for the Day of Defeat community. This game has made huge advancements since it's 1.3b release (It is now at 4.1 and retail), so why do people play the game?

I have my own reasons. Firstly, if you play DoD, you have to be dedicated to it. It is not a game like Halo, or Counter-Strike. It has a lot more realism added in. Newbies often have a heard time getting used to the realism, because they cannot jump forever or run forever as in other first person shooters. So the people that you see on servers are there because they love the game, and have stuck