Combat Arms

Combat Arms is a free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter developed by South Korea based developer Doobic Studios and published by Nexon. It uses the anti-cheat program Hackshield made by AhnLab.

History
The closed beta started on May 30, 2008 exclusively through FilePlanet and ran for one week. It ended on June 6th. This beta was limited to users from North America, South America and Oceania. In the closed beta, 4 maps and 30 weapons were available. On June 26, Combat Arms went into in Pre-Open Beta Phase, whereby the game was open to the public, but it was still being tested and changed to prepare for Open Beta. Pre-Open Beta was also limited to users from North America, South America and Oceania. The Official Launch of Combat Arms started on July 11, 2008. On the 8th of August 2008, Nexon announced that a Combat Arms service shall be started by Nexon Europe, for European Players.

Gameplay
Combat Arms is entirely a multiplayer game with no single-player mode, and contains 4 game modes: Elimination (Team Deathmatch), One Man Army (Deathmatch), Search & Destroy (Bomb mode), and Capture the Flag, and as of now consists of 7 maps: Warhead (factory), Pump Jack (oil station), Snow Valley, (a missile launch site in the middle of snow-covered mountains), Gray Hammer (power station), Junk Flea (desert junkyard), Cold Seed (snow-covered mine), and Two Towers (communications tower). Players who start a room, (known as the Room Master) are able to choose the map, game mode, set score and time limits, and controls the weapons other players can use or not use, (for example, Melee only, or No sniper rifles allowed). Players are able to obtain in-game money known as gear points (GP) and experience after a match, allowing them to rank up and buy new weapons and equipment, such as armor, uniforms, and backpacks for their persistent characters. There is a rental system of equipment instead of actual purchases of the weapons and gear. The rental periods are 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, and 90 days, each rental period costing more in-game money. This rental period has caused much criticism to the game as players are upset that they cannot own weapons that they buy forever and that they have to keep playing to make up for the GP they used to purchase weapons and gear. The game design was based on a game known as Heat Project, a game made in Korea. The game also uses a customizations system where players can buy silencers, larger magazines, and different types of scopes. The game has also been criticized for the inaccurate statistics of the weapons, as well as the extremely strict profanity filter. For example, if a player wishes to say "sniper", it will show up as s**er, filtering the "nip" out of the word (any profanity, no matter how many letters, shows up as **). Nexon's recent August 21 server maintenance has also come under fire for the witch-hunt style player bans being put in place. While results are mixed, it is believed that all players confirmed to have been cheating were banned or demoted to the lowest rank, Trainee. Many of these players claim innocence, whether because they only did it once or by accident.