Congratulations to all teams that participated in GameArena's Call of Duty ladders for Season 2.

At long last, after delays and downtime, finals are upon us for both ladders. Finals are scheduled to begin on the 22nd of November, however, there are no set match times as yet.

We're happy to announce that following their contribution last seasons finals, the good people at gamestah are gearing up to shoutcast as many finals matches as they can. These shoutcasts will be broadcast on one of GameArena's Shoutcast servers so they won't count towards Bigpond users download limits. Keep a close eye on the Call of Duty forum for shoutcast details as they're confirmed.

You can keep on top of the action by keeping an eye on the website set up by Triton5. It will update with details of who is going to verse who and can be found here.

Good luck to all teams participating in the 6 vs 6 and 8 vs 8 ladders! Don't forget, you need to get your team up to date and awar of the finals rules.

The GameArena ladders will restart tomorrow, Friday 22nd October at 12 noon. We have finally completed the integration of the ladder system into the new look and feel of the site and thanks to the great testing by the ET ladder folk, everything is go!

With that in mind, all ladders that were previously in Regulation play, will again be placed into regulation play tomorrow. All ladders that were in free-play will be placed back into free-play. Natural Selection and Desert Combat will shortly be shifting into regulation play, and its important to point out that DC will be using DC Final.

Again, thanks all for giving us the time to get the ladders integrated, and good luck to all the participants!

The latest expansion pack for Activision’s very popular Call of Duty, United Offensive was released on Friday and over the weekend quietly into the Australian market. The new expansion pack supports new modes, new maps, and all-new single player action.

GameArena, as the most popular destination point for Call of Duty fans in Australia, has heaped on the support for the game, providing support for previous popular gametypes such as Search and Destroy, and offering servers for the all new gametypes for the expansion pack, Domination and Base Assault. Here is a server list:

139.134.253.67:27025 Call of Duty - United Offensive CODUO BAS #1 Players:22
139.134.253.67:27035 Call of Duty - United Offensive CODUO BAS #2 Players:22
139.134.253.67:27045 Call of Duty - United Offensive CODUO CTF #1 Players:22
139.134.253.67:27055 Call of Duty - United Offensive CODUO DOM #1 Players:22
139.134.253.67:27015 Call of Duty - United Offensive CODUO SD #1 Players:20

COGS has been updated to include full support for this great mod and we’ve also worked all morning to provide the basic interface support for our popular GameCreate, and GameCreate ladder, so we can look at providing both in future.

This update also includes vehicle support allowing you to battle it out in a Capture and Hold type game mode (BAS) with really intense tank/jeep battles (even faster-paced than Battlefield). I’m expecting United Offensive to have a great following due to the significant improvements and new features and am hoping we can get a Base Assault ladder up and running in a few weeks. Stay tuned! Note: Servers are running on one of our brand new Dual 3Ghz Xeon's with 3Gb RAM, for those techies out there, its an HP Blade server (BL20).

To further protect the Call of Duty servers from cheaters and exploits, we have introduced MD5 checks through PunkBuster on all servers.

MD5 checks will automatically verify all your game files are the original files. Any hacked or edited original files will be detected and the player will be automatically banned by PunkBuster.

If any player encounters an issue with the MD5 checking, please post in the message forum so we can determine if there is an error or another issue with it.

We've developed a new feature to the GameCreate ladder system this week that goes a very long way, (as did last weeks feature) to improving the overall feature intergration of teams and competitions.

The new feature is a team email system.
How it works: Teams usually find it difficult to contact each other, this becomes more apparent where the team is a collection of pickup players using the ladders automated recruiting feature. You may not know who the new team member is so thus find it hard to communicate such things as prefered nights of play, game tactics and prefered maps to challenge. The new team email system removes that by dynamically building a mail list of all members of the team and providing one email address to send information that the whole team will get.

For example, I create a team on the ladder, say team mammoth, then add 8 players from the automated join feature to my team, since I dont know much about these players I can send an email to mammoth@teams.gamearena.com.au which will email all members in my team the info I want to advise them of, which they can in turn reply to that will agian go to the whole team. The team email address can be changed at will by the captian of the team at any time. The email address will work if other teams would like to contact you or you would like to contact the other team, allowing you to send one email to all the team mates of the team you are challenging (if they have told you their address).

This is a very powerful feature that can be a fantastic help to assist captains in the management of their team, and promote competition within the ladder system by improving the communication between the teams within the ladder. As an anti spam messure, we will not publish the team email address, if teams wish to publish it they may, or if its been published by someone else they have the facility to change it to something other than the published address to avoid getting emails. For those familure with the power of traditional mail lists, this is practically identical so you should feel right at home. Captians can find and change the email address that has been generated for you by visiting the teams properties page for your team, for other members you can quickly look up the address by visiting the Team management page, you will need to be logged in to view this information.