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Michael Arzt: We always have some stalwarts, what we think of them as legacy games, games that are sort of intrinsic to the esport movement that sort of have to be there. Then we also do our best to keep it current and mix in some of the blockbusters or the more mainstream type titles, whatever it's going to take to keep us both on the one hand sort of core, but on the other hand leading edge and relevant.

Crave Online: Some of the new rules are just different maps for each game. How does that change or update the competition?

Michael Arzt: A lot of that comes from simply just keeping up with what the trends are, the people playing these games are. We're very tied into the communities and obviously each game in a lot of cases has its own community, so being kind of aware what the community is doing and what the community is finding relevant in an individual game is a big part of what goes into those decisions and how we modify things from year to year.

Crave Online: Most of the Half Life rules involve ducking. Was that a real problem before?

Michael Arzt: Forgive me on the one hand because when it comes to some of the really technical stuff, I'm not the right guy to dive in deep. What I know about the ducking and some of the things that are going on, basically when you're talking about Counterstrike, there are what are best described as exploitable anomalies in the game, or glitches in the code. However you want to talk about it. Basically, what that means is to level the playing field, because we are talking about a competition here, you sometimes have to make choices on what is legal and what is not legal. If we make a choice like that and it's about something like ducking, there's a very specific reason for it, because the competitive community has determined that that particular move, if it's allowed, kind of creates a snowball effect that allows other things to happen that are not desirable and obviously can skew the competition in a way that is not the way you want it to go. I hope that answers the question in the best kind of non technical way that I can describe it. I can only take it so hard when it comes to the really hardcore answer but when it comes to making choices on rules, we go back to the community. We do a lot of polling, whether it's about specific rules, we seek suggestions from the community, even on the broader sense when it comes to choosing the games each year. We want to know which games are really resonating in the communities as relevant and viable and competitive platforms and things like that.

Crave Online: For Halo 3, why did you choose a four person format?

Michael Arzt: Yeah, Halo, we'll go out there and say that there is a very established competitive community in Halo that spends a lot of time and has spent a lot of time over the years, whether it was the first Halo or Halo 2 or now Halo 3, establishing a very, very viable and workable set of rules, so honestly, sometimes it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes if the bugs have been gotten out by someone else or by the community over time, who are we to question what works? We're adopting rules that are widely accepted. Obviously, the last thing we want is for a player or a team of players to go into a competition and have a rule that they hadn't anticipated suddenly pop up in their face and work against them. Then you're just making people angry. That's obviously not in the community spirit that our brand is all about. That's for sure.