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Friday, 20 July 2001 -
An Interview with arQon ? $comment_count ?>
After quite a bit of work I've finally published a big-assed interview with arQon who, if you didn't know, is the key guy behind CPMA development at the moment and somebody that a lot of gamers are very grateful to (including me) for putting in enormous efforts to build better and better versions of CPMA.

Here's a cut and paste from my intro:

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.

And here's a cut and paste quote from the interview itself:

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.

Hope that all sounds interesting. I'd like to thank arQon for taking the time to answer all my questions, and bear with me, and once again a big THANK YOU for all the great work he has done on CPMA.

You can find the interview right here.