On October 17th, Infinity Ward and by extension Activision killed a significant section of PC gaming by announcing their new title would lack dedicated servers, modding capabilities, and free DLC. Up until this point Infinity Ward has had a stellar reputation as an FPS developer that others could only dream of, their pairing with Activision on the CoD games guaranteeing them plenty of facetime. However their dogged public defense of their new approach with upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 makes Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick look like an OK guy for merely wanting to charge $10 more for a game that people will be playing for years anyway.
The ramifications of such changes in the world of PC gaming are huge. No dedicated servers means all games will be hosted by Joe Shmoe on his home computer--it doesn't matter how good his residential connection is, it's nothing compared to a commercial T3 line. That said, you will be insanely lucky to join a game with less than 150 ping...there goes any hope of you actually being able to kill something. For reference, an East cost player would get about 100 ping with a solid broadband connection when trying to play on a British dedicated server. The server you're playing on is also only up as long as Joe Shmoe decides he wants to play; when the host leaves, the game's over, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. IW has tried to sugarcoat this by saying that they have a way to channel people's requests for server connections by always locating you to the closest game for minimal latency. Wait, since when does IW have a track record with networking? Oh right, they don't. Even if their system works FLAWLESSLY, the ping will be enough to ruin the experience.
The next thing they're taking away is modding. This is another bullet to IW's foot. Modding is what kept vanilla and UO on the charts for so long. Without modding support, the community fails to play a game after it gets "old" because there's nothing they can do to keep it interesting. Love you some Zombies? Wait, where did that come from...oh, it was a mod back in CoD. Need to play TWL/CAL rules for competition? Also a mod. The most ironic part is the only way to play competitive CoD4 was to take out certain perks, be it from Promod or another competitive mod; and IW expects the sequel to be wonderfully balanced out of the box? Yeah, no--the community picked up your goddamn slack and made the game balanced FOR YOU so they could play YOUR GAME competitively.
The last part is free DLC. I honestly don't know why they bothered to announce this as DLC was never free in the first place--large corporations have simply picked up the tab in the past to save our asses. Remember the fiasco with CoD4 when the mappack probably wasn't going to be released because PC gamers stuck to their guns and wouldn't pay for it? nVidia payed for it. CoD5's mappack? Covered by Intel's Nehalem advertising campaign. Saying "no free DLC" isn't changing anything, but people are up in arms about it anyway. To the developer, money is money, and as long as they get payed by somebody for their work they don't care. I seriously doubt anything will change on the DLC front.
393430 hours for the entire Call of Duty franchise. Retrieved 12:00 AM 10/27/09.
As of the time of this writing, every single CoD game released on PC except vanilla is in XFire's top 15 in terms of hours played on a weekly basis. That's right, THIS WEEK, people have been playing games as old as 5 years, and they're more popular than almost anything you can think of. The franchise is literally more popular than the pillar of online popularity that is World of Warcraft by virtue of hours played.
Just 3 days after IW's announcement and 100,000 signatures were logged in the petition to put dedicated servers back on, IW had to go into damage control or risk losing face. They had successfully pissed off the entire Internet, and they had to defend themselves. The result couldn't have been further from the goal. Peruse the article for your own amusement, but here is the key paragraph.
"We're just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners," says West. He points toward the mounting feedback IW has received from PC fans of Modern Warfare who couldn't find a decent server to play on between all of the cheaters, the insular communities, and huge skill level disparities that the original game's community fractured into. "We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game," he laughs.
I would like to bring to your attention to "PC fans" giving "feedback" about "huge skill level disparities." In a nutshell, the only people complaining about the state of things at all are noobs--who else would complain about people essentially being too good at a game? This is always the case, as those of us who possess enough hand eye coordination to actually play games in the first place are enjoying ourselves, because we're busy handily smiting the ones QQ'ing and ragequitting. The people who complain genuinely think that they're having a subpar experience simply because they get their asses handed to them wherever they play, then complain about cheating, and on a giant leap of logic by extension, no good servers. They then scream so loudly that they appear to be in the majority and the developer caves, screwing over the integrity of the game.
First of all, I have never had an issue with cheaters, and neither has anybody else who knows what they're doing. Contrary to popular belief, PB does its job very well... and many GUIDs are globally banned because of it. Also, wall hacks and aimbots are not perfect. I will not go into the specifics, but I will say that those who are worth jack in a game can beat a hacker; this just reinforces that those complaining are inexperienced. In addition, good players know how to properly spot a hacker versus a good player, and if they happen to have rcon, it's not a problem. If they don't, it's as simple as just playing on a server where they know the people who DO have control of their server. I'm sorry, but cheating is simply a terrible platform for removal of dedicated servers, there are so many ways to deal with it.
Flash forward to a week after the death of IW's reputation. Robert Bowling, IW's community director, uttered this little gem:
"Not only do we know the game but we know the gamer."
Robert Bowling is a douche bag.
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