Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect any view held by MyGaming.
Of course, I can’t promise to care much about this at all. I bought Modern Warfare on PC on launch day back in whenever it was, played it, loved it, bought the Xbox version and never played it on PC again. This brings me around to two significant points – one, I’m a mostly impartial commentator on the subject, and two, the reason I prefer the game on Xbox is because of the matchmaking system, because there are no mods in play that everyone insists everyone else use or be forever condemned as an ignorant noob, and because all of this precludes the sort of hostile, insular community that’s made Counter-Strike, DotA, and Halo the worst games on the planet. Which kinda undermines my first point a tiny bit, I know. On the other hand, I’m speaking up for the people who are being shouted out by a lot of outraged noise at the moment – over 100 000 people have now signed a petition demanding that Infinity Ward reinstate dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2, but how many people would sign a petition saying, “STFU, we’re totally okay with this”? There’s clearly a very serious and frankly disingenuous lack of perspective going around, and predictably enough, someone’s already filing a class action lawsuit (yawn).
Now, there are several entirely legitimate complaints about the suspension of dedicated servers, so I’m going to acknowledge these upfront before anyone posts a comment below about what a completely clueless chick moron dumbass from Brakpan I must surely be.
Besides the person who didn’t read past the first paragraph and posts it anyway, of course. So firstly there’s the very real issue of international latency. If IWnet is forcing players through their own remote server networks, that’s obviously a massive problem for anyone sitting 800ms (more or less equivalent to a grenade in the face, in real-pretend terms) down the tubes.
Next, there’s our catastrophically inadequate local broadband infrastructure. There’s not a single consumer broadband package available that’s going to support 24 players in a game without everyone lagging back into last week, so if the move to matchmaking is also a move to ad hoc player-hosted games (like it is on console), Modern Warfare 2 is doomed in South Africa. The more astute reader will have marked by now that both these complaints are necessarily relevant to South Africans, and I’ll remind you that the South African market is almost completely insignificant in comparison to the the US and UK, and going by frequent comments posted on this site and its forum, as well as polls, the South African market is also a heavily pirated one.
Infinity Ward doesn’t give a side-mounted 105mm flying **** about South Africa, and why should they? Not least of all because a whole bunch of you are cancelling your preorders and bawling declarations of pirating it instead to, you know, DESTROY INFINITY WARD. And while you’re waiting for that to happen, why not look up “self-defeating” in a dictionary.
More generally, there’s some distress about the competitive PC community, and I can kinda get behind this one. I’m not exactly a fan of organised competitive gaming at all (see: Counter-Strike, DotA, Halo), but it’s obviously a big deal to some people and in smaller, relatively isolated markets like ours, I can see that there’s some real sense of confederacy around here.
People get to know each other, people help each other out, people squat each others’ faces and shout “RAPED LOL GAY” in a way that’s totally butch and not at all homoerotic whatsoever (seriously), that sort of thing. I do think that, as yet undetermined server complications notwithstanding, this particular problem is mitigated somewhat by the party system being introduced to the game. So it’s a valid concern, but it’s not quite as universe ending as some people want to think.
What’s really most absurd about all of this is how people are raging against Infinity Ward, pulling the PC gamer loyalty card, and decrying some sort of imaginary agenda of corporate self service. There’s a whole lot of specious assumption and speculation behind this. Quite on the contrary, there’s a whole lot of rational, reasonable discussion on the topic over here, straight from Infinity Ward. Elsewhere, IW kingpin Vince Zampella tells Game Informer that, “We’re just prioritising the player experience above the modders and the tuners.” Citing feedback from those people who couldn’t find a server to play on in between the hackers, cheaters, stackers, elitist factions, and massive skill disparities between players, he adds “We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.” Anyone would have to be irrepressibly cynical, selfish, and stupid to roundly denounce something that makes so much sense.
The uncomfortable truth here for many, I think, is that there’s an entire demographic of players who just wants to get on with playing the game for a bit of fun, and that this demographic might outnumber the self-proclaimed “hardcore”. For every person who loves the challenge of massive rank and skill imbalance in their games, there’s a person who doesn’t. For every person who vilifies the grenade launcher and bawls out “NOOB TOOB” at the first sign of one, there’s a person who thinks making stuff explode is awesome. Until now, the first player has had complete preference. What about that second player? Either way, someone’s going to have a crap game.
For whatever it’s worth, I think a combination of matchmaking and dedicated servers is obviously the solution. I can also appreciate that’s probably a logistical nightmare on Infinity Ward’s end. Perhaps it’s time some of you stopped to think about all this too.
Discuss MW2 vs. angry people in the forums
