Call of Duty: Black Ops hit local retail shelves yesterday, and its release was a less than smooth affair. The most notable hiccup in SA was the dedicated server issue, which resulted in local dedicated servers only being up and running after 3PM. This, however, was not a problem for the majority of day one buyers who only installed the game in the evening.
Once the servers were up and running, things seemed fine. At least for a few hours, before a global server downtime caused hundreds of thousands of desperate gamers around the world to be locked out of the multiplayer component of the game altogether.
But it seems that that was just the beginning, and gamers have expressed such anger at the buggy state of the release code, that Activision’s social media manager Dan “One of Swords” Amrich has made a plea for customers to be civil when voicing their complaints.
According to Amrich, there are currently two separate camps of complainers. The first, he calls the “I didn’t get what I paid for” camp. Missing manuals, disc read errors, missing bonus content and other core functionality that is not working are common gripes.
Then there is the “I found a gameplay problem” camp. This refers to gamers who have noticed users taking advantage of game exploits, or are having problems with server reliability. Having installed the game myself last night, I can attest to experiencing the latter.
Amrich points out that when explaining your issue, “it helps to be polite (insults in all caps might make you feel better, but it makes it tougher to get to the useful stuff), be specific (the more detail you can offer about what was going on when the problem occured, the better) and be clear & direct, and you have a much better chance of finding the info you need and/or helping get the problem fixed. Less helpful things include angry Tweets directed at nobody in particular, how-to-exploit-the-bugs videos on YouTube, and screaming at the walls, so I do not recommend them.”
According to Amrich, the best place to voice your dissatisfaction is the Call of Duty Forums.
The biggest problem I noticed when playing the game last night, was excessive lag from some users. While I was able to connect to the server on a sub 50ms latency, there were a number of users connecting at over 400ms+. When half the game lobby is experiencing such high latency, it is difficult to really enjoy the game.
Early tests suggest that Telkom ADSL accounts are completely unsuitable for Call of Duty: Black Ops, due to the fact that Telkom is not peering with MWEB. When using our own Telkom test account we experienced latency in excess of 400ms, and iGame representatives reported the same findings with various Telkom test accounts on a variety of servers.
Call of Duty: Black Ops may be the biggest release of the year, but so far, it is also one of the rockiest.
Having problems with Black Ops? Share your views in the forums
