By Jim Rossignol on October 21st, 2009 at 9:00 am.
Game Informer were first in line with the responses from Infinity Ward, with this peculiarly unpleasant article by Adam Biessener. The Game Informer writer says of the general outcry about the news that MW2 would not support dedicated servers for online play: “Predictably, nerds across world took to the Internet with a wailing and a gnashing of teeth that would make the Left 4 Dead community proud.” Or perhaps we – nerds or otherwise – were justifiably upset about a change to a proven way of doing things, a change no-one seems confident will be to our advantage. The article goes on to quote Infinity Ward’s Jason West saying “”We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners… we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.”
There’s a more detailed breakdown of what IW are proposing over on Robert Bowling’s blog, which makes for a clearer response. I’m a little dubious about the anti-cheating claim, however, since dedicated server admins have gone a long way to self-policing the community, and I feel like IW’s claim that they’ll be able to deal with it might be a little bold.
ah who cares… I won’t be buying it.
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I don’t care you won’t be buying it.
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Replying to Thiefsie because I want to be at the top ;o
Heres an important point which many aren’t aware of for how this is fucking us over outside of the US.
Do many countried in Europe even have ISPs which give them 512k upload or more?
Hosting a 16 player server for an hour (6kb/player/s) uses about 300MB. How many of you have bandwidth caps in the low double figures (15GB or less)?
I know mine (BT) throttles my upload between 5pm-9pm, but those of you who were considering hosting should think about it.
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matchmaking sucks, I completely by-pass it in L4D by playing on community servers/with friends.
I totally love pwning guys and gals above my skill level..so sweet
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You should care. This is the thin end of the wedge.
It’s a despicable move by the developers with a complete disregard and contempt for the community. I wasn’t even planning on playing this game in multiplayer, was just going to buy it for the singleplayer (which I’m sure I’d enjoy, as I loved CoD4′s). However, I can’t support any company that acts like this.
There’s been an awful lot of ridiculous boycotting and outcries recently (Left 4 Dead 2, the storm in an exported-from-Carnatica teacup over Empire: Total War DLC), but this one is actually justified and righteous. Voting with wallets won’t make much different – 2 million copies of CoD4 sold on PC, and most of those never went online – but we can’t take this lying down. The removal of dedicated server support from a game like this is a big indicator of the shite that’s to come.
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There’s an article on Eurogamer that suggests that the kind of tactics MW2 uses (specifically, the price rise) aren’t going to be easy to mimic – MW2 will sell well whatever they do, but most games don’t. Most games can’t afford to alienate large groups of customers, particularly the most dedicated customers. So I suspect that where Activision can afford to weather losing some sales over this by making an unpopular decision, most publishers/developers can’t.
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You should care if you are a PC or console gamer, This could effect the future of other online PC games and currently stops consoles having a fair online experience.
We need to stop this now before other devs do the same. As I said below this explains why it’s important. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=225744&site=pcg
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OK I take that back… I do care in regards to consolification and the death of Mods, ded servers etc of course… that is why I love PC gaming… but frankly it’s flogging a dead horse. IW have seen the console light and others will follow them to $alvation. This is a dark moment for PC gaming.. and I am fully aware of that.
Fortunately… nifty parts of CoD aside… the series is kind of all the same and way too scripted for me. Give me a Stalker/Borderlands (or dare I say it F3) any day over CoD. So I don’t care about MW2 going this route… kind of like Dragon Rising.
Hopefully there will be a large fallout and low PC sales won’t so easily be blamed on the piratez0rs.
Capitalism can be a cunt sometimes…
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I sincerely hope this costs them sales, but I don’t hold out any real hope that it’ll be noticeable amidst the obscene amounts of cash they’ll rake in regardless.
Oh, and pro tip to developers: mod makers tend to be among your most enthusiastic fans and, in most cases, most vocal advocates. Perhaps insulting them isn’t the greatest way to advertise your upcoming title. It seems clear enough that IW’s sole interest has become developing for closed platforms, if that’s the case maybe they should just stick to console games and be done with it.
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This little quote from the article :
“all they lose is the ability to customize the game on a deeper level with mods and such”
makes me wonder if they really are stupid enough to think anyone will accept that reasoning.
“Hey guys, we wanted to give you a better experience so we took away one of the biggest selling points of our game”.
Jesus.
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They’re also using VAC for their cheat detection. This would be the same VAC that utterly failed to deal with the speed-crit hacker that spent weeks terrorising the PCG TF2 server.
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What were the PCG admins doing, out of curiousity?
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That was bloody annoying.
:F
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I think that’s how vac is intended to work by valve, whenever they can detect a new cheat, they wait a few weeks to catch as many cheaters as they can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#Delayed_bans.2C_criticism_.26_rationale
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What West says is more of an insult to people who run dedicated servers than anything else. I can’t fathom why they’re against dedicated servers (alongside official ones).
Ah well, I’m with Thiefsie here.
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“We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners… we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.”
This is what “Streamlining” is all about. Make a simpler game so everybody can join. And Is his game, so these guys have the right to do that.
On the o ther part, as a modder, I feel that this comment is unfair. Modders are another name for dev’s. We make stuff not for ourselves, but for other people to play. If you fuck modders, you fuck Team Fortress, Capture The Flag, Counter-Strike, Desert Combat (and probably Battlefield 2?). Withouth modders, Counter-Strike would not have been exist. Is somewhat like a BIG LIE, or a STUPID THING TO SAY, that Counter-Strike was created and benefict only his creators, I think a bit more people have benefict from Counter-Strike. Ex… me, I am not a dev of CS, but I remenber looong hours playing the MOD.
For bad, or for good, modding is part of gamming today. I feel uneasy with the hands of Infinity Ward on my neck, tryiing to stop the oxygen….
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I agree with you, and companies havent been making it easier for us to mod there games, many times giving us tools that are half finishd or bug ridden. Bad documentation and engine parts we cant reach but make up a for a fundamental part of the gameplay.
Yes, i mod Battlefield 2…
What they dont realize is that opensource/freeware engines are becoming more and more powerfull, one day modders will say fuck you and move what they got to these engines. I think the Spring RTS engine is a good example.
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“This is what “Streamlining” is all about. Make a simpler game so everybody can join. And Is his game, so these guys have the right to do that.”
This isn’t streamlining. TF2 is streamlining.
This is dumbing down. Big difference.
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@Psychopomp
An issue that’s occluded by the fact that developers like to call dumbing down “streamlining.” You’re entirely right that there’s a difference, and an important one, but I can understand why people are starting to be very skeptical of the term.
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It won’t cost them enough sales to really make a difference to them – the console version sales will be unaffected and they will be halfway to the moon on the day of release. Losing a 100,000 (hah) PC sales? barely a ripple in their projected sales.
Just don’t bother reading any of the comments on the blog post by Bowling, it’s lots of pages of vitriol and poorly targeted rage – he’s “just” the mouth piece of IW after all. My biggest issue with this isn’t the loss of control, I don’t play competitively so am not bothered about being able to control every aspect of the server, but the loss of community created by dedicated servers is a major issue.
Match making / private games just can’t engender the same build up of common faces – certainly on the 360 it’s pretty rare to see the same face night after night except by some bizarre twist of fate (or, you know, if you’re partied up with them).
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I’m so incredibly frustrated with the intellectual dishonesty on display from infinity ward and the journos and commenters the mach to the beat of Infinity Wards drum.
If it truly is superior and people truly are just whiners. How about you give us the technical details on how it works and will be an improvement to support your argument and view point. Rather than just saying it will be, when all evidence of current matchmaking systems employed by consoles and other games demonstrate otherwise?
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It will put you in the game that will give you the smoothest gameplay possible without you having to manually find a server with the best ping.
What’s wrong with a filter or sort button on a normal server browser list ?
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More importantly, why can’t you just have both?
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isnt it obvious ? they want the sheep together so they can DLC their ass, and of course modding is a big no when you are trying to sell maps that the community could make *for free* in 30 minutes
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And this is the difference between Bioware’s DLC, and IW’s current plan
Bioware is making a game that’s almost 100% moddable, and putting out an editor that looks to be better than NWN’s editor. The DLC they’re working on didn’t get in the way of letting the fans make and share their own creations, and ignore the official stuff if they want to.
IW, at the moment, is trying to lock us in, so the can get more money.
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Well, they just successfully abolished my nagging doubt that maybe they just underestimated how much these things meant to the PC community.
It seems they knew full well all along, and just don’t care.
I was years late to COD4 and very much enjoyed the SP campaign, even if I found MP a bit lacklustre. I planned to grab MW2 at some point for the same reasons — mainly for the SP, with MP as a possible bonus if it was any good. But they’re definitely on my “go back to ignoring them” list now.
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The argument “It’s a little dubious. Some of the people complaining are complaining with their pocketbook” misses the point a little, although obviously some people will lose potential server sales over this. The dedicated server market isn’t in competition with IW’s sales (unless, of course, they’re planning to release their own dedicated servers for a price in the future, and want to prevent being undercut).
The argument that having both dedicated servers and a matchmaking facility is divisive might make more sense – people might neglect one or the other if given a choice that a lot of people wouldn’t understand. And while abandoning dedicated servers is going to lose IW a lot of their more involved fans who form clans, etc, Activision’s entire strategy is based around capturing the semi-casual market, rather than the hardcore – their actions, such as the lawsuit against Double Fine and using words like “exploit” with respect to games aren’t designed to endear them to people who are involved enough to read the gaming press.
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Operation Flashpoint 2 doesn’t have dedicated servers and that is an absolute pain in the arse, you just get booted offline without warning when the host decides he’s had enough.
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Did this guy call me a nerd? Holy crap.
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What kind of video game developer uses “nerd” as an insult anyway? People in glass houses, anyone?
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Whoah, non-readers: the Games Informer writer uses the term, not the developer.
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I know – a videogame journalist calls a gamer a nerd. He may die in a fire now.
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Now see, I even read that, this is what happens when I post at 4 AM. Not that games journalist is what you’d call a “non-nerdy” profession exactly, present company excepted. :)
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Please don’t pretend that Game Informer actually has journalistic integrity, nor the people who write for it.
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Because we all know how utterly impossible it is to cheat on games with completely closed servers like MMOs… never any hacks or cheats on those…
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The only problem I see with this is he flat out labels everyone who’s not happy about this as PC gamers. I’ll grant you that many of them are, but it’s not like there aren’t console gamers who, though they won’t be affected by this, think it’s unfair. We’re PC gamers, we have our way of doing things and that means dedicated servers. Console gamers have their matchmaking and are happy with it.
But regardless, I’m no longer buying it. So much for queueing up at midnight outside Gamestation.
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So, if a clan wants a match, who hosts this private server? One of the clan members? That is never going to work as the latency will be too variable between those playing the game.
I am a member of a loose clan that play together for fun. We don’t take part in leagues and indeed came together playing Battlefield 1942 because of like-minded players playing on a specific dedicated server on a regular basis.
IW’s decision means that existing clans would only be able to play in a much-reduced way and that new clans or communities will be impossible to form.
Their comment that “We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners… we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.” is wrong.
What they are actually doing is catering solely to the player experience of casual gamers by extinguishing the online communities.
Console players don’t have the same level of communities when they play games so they won’t feel the pain, but for PC gamers it is a big step backwards.
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Mind you, we’re “nerds” in the same vein as the L4D2 boycotters. So what do we know?
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Nonono – the L4D2 boycott was a joke from the beginning (complaining about daytime, new survivors) but Infinty is killing a fundamental PC multipalyer feature.
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Please point out just where in the Boycott manifesto it complained about THAT?
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I agree with Ging. There is something beautiful about having a long and protracted rivalry with complete strangers.
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“West takes a shot at the motives behind some of the outrage, noting that there’s money to made by selling dedicated servers and adspace on them: “It’s a little dubious. Some of the people complaining are complaining with their pocketbook.”
Oh this is rich. Coming from the guys who slapped a 60 dollar price tag on their PC version for absolutely no justifiable reason.
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“we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.”
Obviously IW have no idea how pc gamers operate, most of us search for servers and often play on either the lowest ping or a specified modded one, again they have alienated their fanbase.
Also there’s the question of how long the IW servers will last a year or two then theres no multiplayer for anyone, this isn’t an MMO IW its a quick round based fps lack of dedicated serves will mean there will be no competitive play between clans unless they do a lan instead.
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There’s also the fact that when the IW servers inevitably shit to bed, the game’s multi player component is completely down.
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But by then IW’s masterpiece, Shoot People With Guns 9 (the best game ever made) will be out. Who’d want to play some silly ancient 3-year-old game then?
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“a change no-one seems confident will be to our advantage”
I am
Anything to balance out skill levels is grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat
I’m tired of being fodder for the amazing top three players all teams in every FPS has
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And another side of developer controlled servers? Less control for the players in booting out douches. Welcome to next generation servers!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6TzAKOaWxg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqF0sDI_0Hw
I mean the PC servers aren’t perfect. But we can at least rely on a moderator stepping in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXIQyOr7eJE
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@ Bhazor
Those vids are disgusting, but not really surprising.
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“I mean the PC servers aren’t perfect. But we can at least rely on a moderator stepping in.”
What promised land of servers are you playing on?
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Baron’s Pub, for me
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“Clans can set up private matches to do their training or what have you; all they lose is the ability to customize the game on a deeper level with mods and such. Infinity Ward sees the addition of solid matchmaking and community support like IW-run tournaments to the PC as a huge win, and not something that could be done under the old system.” ever heard of Valve or any other PC shooter in the world ever?
Now I don’t even care about this game and probably won’t play it till it’s in the bargain bin. But this really is a worrying trend for such a big developer to start. Essentially they’re removing the mod tools and selling us the mods.
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Excellent, so it wasn’t just an out of touch community manager but a whole company who doesn’t understand pc gaming.
MW1 is still great, actiblizzivision will still make a killing on this game. Hell, they might even reduce piracy (i’m not suggesting that will result in sales) so they’ll feel justified.
Of course, no one pirates things they don’t actually want.
When sales are weak they can blame piracy (i know, inverse logic) and abandon the pc for good and sing cumbyar holding hands with microsoft and sony.
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everyone keeps throwing the “reduce piracy” line around, for your info every single freaking game released in the last few months was cracked inside the first week, a LOT were released several weeks before official release (probably because they delayed release date but the boxes were already shipped, a google-translated Stalker COP has been floating around for a while now), console versions are released even faster than PC copies, they are not reducing piracy and i very much doubt they are stupid enough to try, they only use it to justify other goals, dont let them fool you
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Well, I have to agree fully with Ging. I am not a modder, I rarely play on modded servers, and I am not part of a clan. However, I have been playing CoD4 since release and this is solely because I have been playing on the same handful of servers. These people are not my direct friends but I know them well enough to enjoy playing the same game over the same handful of maps for years whilst enjoying friendly banter and a sense of community.
This matchmaking service will be similar to the faceless, random match selection to be found on almost all console multiplayer games. This is a problem, because I cannot guarantee where I will end up, what group of people I will be playing with and really, I have no control over the experience at all. I play Battlefield on my PS3, but I only play for brief periods of time because I do not have a clue who any of the people i am playing with are. This creates further problems when complete and utter strangers attempt to play a game where team tactics are at least relatively important to success and/or enjoyment.
Dedicated servers were great mostly for the sense of community that you will NOT find in a simialar way on consoles.
ALSO, that article was absolutely terrible. It’s so stupidly biased it almost took my head off. My particular favourite part:
“Zampella downplays the obvious piracy prevention angle (IW has cited numbers of people online playing illegal copies of Modern Warfare up to 60 percent). “The Steam stuff helps with the piracy. I don’t know that the matchmaking stuff does,” ”
So, the guy says that matchmaking does NOT help prevent piracy, and the writer STILL attempts to make it an “obvious” piracy issue. beautiful. The guy is a real tool.
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They can feed us as much “IT’S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD” garbage as they want, but as soon as the next COD game comes out, they’ll pull the plug on the MW2 servers, leaving you forced to buy the next in the never-ending cash farming series or be without multiplayer.
Either way, I won’t ever be purchasing a IW game unless they clean up their act.
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On the other hand Punkbuster is so easily evaded it may as well not exist, and if it wasn’t using VAC it would almost certainly use Punkbuster. Anyway, VAC bans aren’t instant, they’re delayed.
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Gah that was supposed to be a reply to Hermit’s comment on VAC
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I can’t understand why IW spend all this money developing this IWnet software before asking the PC community first. Plus the cost of massive servers, the bills must be sky high. Now I see why the game costs so much. What a mess how the hell are they going to get out of this one. They are going to need a lot of game sales even on PC just to break even.
The first thing I would have done is a quick internet survey the second I came out the meeting about this major new feature. How simple would it be for a quick survey to say: Do you want dedicated servers in the next COD game? YES or NO
Then before any money was spent they would see all the YESs right before their eyes.
This is why I’m not in business because if you speak sense you just get laughed at.
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People are focusing on the wrong things here.
MW2 is an elephant in a china shop for dolls; a massive, precedent setting game that will influence the market and other developers.
The main problem, that people have already swallowed and forgotten about is the pricing. Nothing in the trailers seen so far suggests any groundbreaking innovations that could possibly justify this price increase. You are paying for hype, no more, no less, but be sure other developers will take notice. Anyone sitting on a franchise that sells regularly, or a title with a big following that <might> turn out to be good, will perk up and rub their hands together with glee.
Queue money being poured into marketing, as well as reviews withheld until release day.
The other big issue is the lack of mod support. This paves the way for paid DLC <only>, which, while usually well executed and cheap, is still an overwhelmingly big price to pay. There is no rational justification except moar $$$ for this move. Look at Fallout 3, a game that integrates modding and DLC perfectly. The two are not exclusive, and in fact are intrinsically linked with every DLC pack spawning fresh mods that take advantage of it. The point is, the DLC packs are not selling less because of mods, but the game improves massively because they exist.
What IW and also, especially, the gamers need to understand is that they have the power to shape the future of the industry here. So far, it seems like the accountants, the corporate suits and marketing "gurus" are winning. IW needs to start listening to the gamers, and the gamers need to stop fawning and sucking their sweet MW2 balls just so they can possibly play an overpriced and possibly overhyped FPS. There <will> be better games.
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petition for dedicated servers 118k currently
http://www.petitiononline.com/dedis4mw/petition.html
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Cheers Dev, gunna spread that one around!
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Might this be a publicity stunt to incite a little nerd-fuss and internet chatter about their new game? Only for them to patch it and replace the old server browsing feature? It does seem like a bit of a daft move, almost designed to piss off the pc market. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
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What an annoying article – I had to reg to Gamesinformer to respond to it.
The first principle of any journalist should be to question authority on behalf of their readership, not suck up to it.
P.
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Apparently not when your parent company is Gamestop (or so I’ve heard), where your priority is getting people on consoles anyhow.
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Arsewisely, you may have a point.
I have replied to FourZeroTwo’s blog with the following:
“I’m sorry but your justification for doing this just doesn’t match the detrimental effects this will have on PC gaming.
Let’s look at your comments above:
MATCHMAKING & SMOOTHER GAMEPLAY:
Listen, if a PC gamer can’t use a server browser they really shouldn’t be playing.
Matchmaking itself is a cool idea but PC gaming is all about choice. Fine, have an “automatch” button that allows you to leap into a server with players of the same rough level and a low ping, but don’t do it at the expense of letting a player choose where to play.
What you are doing is catering exclusively for casual gamers.
And what happens if I don’t want to limit myself to playing with people of the same skill level?
I know several people that have had to reinstall CoD and have lost their level so needed to start again.
PLAYLISTS AND PRIVATE MATCHES:
Playlists are just filters under a different name. Filters exist on server browsers as well. Where is the benefit?
Private Matches? Okay so who exactly is hosting this private match? Where are the CPU and broadband resources coming from? IW? How will a clan be able to arrange a clan match if one of their own individual members has to host it? Surely the variation in latency between the host and the other players would preclude such a thing?
You say that *you* can start a private match “which is essentially like running your own private server”. NO IT ISN’T. The very reason that dedicated server programs were created in the first place is that you can run them on a server with more processing power and more bandwidth, rather than expecting a client PC to shoulder the burden. How exactly is your system going to match that?
I don’t host games for more than a few people because my system and connection cannot cope with it. That is why I prefer using dedicated servers. How will your “Private matches” help me?
PARTY SYSTEM AND FRIENDSLIST:
Nothing wrong with either the Party System idea or the Friendslist idea (which has worked fine in Call of Duty: World at War alongside the server browser), but there is still the problem of resources – both processing power and bandwidth of client PCs.
And by the way, if a “casual” gamer joins a server where they get thrashed by a more organised opposition because a load of clan members are all playing as an organised team, how is that any different to current experiences for casual gamers?
CHEAT/HACK FREE GAMES:
This is pure rubbish. The number of cheats in COD:MW and even COD:WaW are fairly low and even though we know PB isn’t the best system out there, VAC is not imperfect either. I have seen someone complaining of a player running rampant on TF2 servers for weeks with a hack that VAC did not detect.
No anti-cheat software is fool-proof, which is why the best form of cheat detection is always AC software backed up by active policing of a server by responsible admins. Your system does not allow for this.
In conclusion:
Your decisions will have two very serious effects that none of your explanations deal with.
By removing the option to mod the game, you are removing one of the main advantages PC gaming has over console games. As PC gamers we do enjoy the option to play mods for games and indeed some of the best playing experiences I have ever had are with mods (that tweak the games to deal with flaws or limitations left by the developers), or total conversions that completely change the feel of the game and often give it a new and extended lease of life. Counter-strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Forgotten Hope, Desert Combat; these are all seriously good mods that apart from anything else, kept the games being played (and purchased) long after the original game became stale Most of them are still being played in one form or other now, many years after the original game was released. This means extended life and popularity for the game and extended sales.
One of the other main advantages PC games have over console games is the community support. Not just clans, but entire communities of gamers thrive based upon players being able to visit and revisit regular, trusted servers.
I am a member of a friendly clan that play together for fun. We don’t take part in leagues and cannot be considered “hardcore”. We came together playing Battlefield 1942 because of like-minded players playing on a specific dedicated server on a regular basis. We knew the server, we knew the admins and we knew the other players.
We wouldn’t exist under your system and neither would any other clan or community.
Your decision means that existing clans will only be able to manage a second-rate version of what they were able to do under the original MW and that forming new clans or communities will be virtually impossible.
The comment that “We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners… we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.” is grossly misleading and inconceivably flawed.
What you are actually doing is catering solely to the player experience of casual gamers by extinguishing the online communities, clans and modders altogether.”
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Oops. Just spotted the “imperfect” typo. I have corrected it in the original response but I can’t edit my comment here.
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My mind still boggles where they talk about how there’s supposed to be less hacking/cheating on IWnet. Without admins. VAC is a delayed banning system, for goodness sake! That’s usually several weeks that a hacker can run around before VAC catches him. And they want to remove admins from the picture?
I’m told that the host is allowed to kick people in the Xbox version of COD4. Maybe this will still be true. But does your average (casual?) player know how to spot a hacker? Or is he just going to kick people better than him? I get hacking accusations in L4D every once in a while from people who just don’t know any better.
How are they going to keep the player experience good? Are they even going to release details?
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…So you get accused of hacking…
In a team game?
PC gaming is fucked.
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I assume he is talking about survivor mode….
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He’s talking about versus mode in Left4Dead – 4 survivors against 4 special infected.
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I would love to know if they had any plans on releasing this information before they released the game. It came out because of an off-hand comment, imagine how unhappy you would be if you had to buy the game before you found out….
This is a really unhappy development, both for this game and for developer / community relations in general.
:-(
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Infinity Ward are a bunch of pretentious, disingenious jerks with delusions of grandeur who haven’t made a truly good FPS since CoD1. Fuck them, if you buy this game you are supporting cancerous development strategies and flagrant disrespect to the platform that got them where they are today.
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PS : Gameinformer are not to be taken seriously, they’re a wing of Gamestop for god’s sake. You’d have to hold a gun to their head to make them remove IW’s collective dicks from their mouth.
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idk man modern warfare was pretty rad
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This is also screwing over the dedicated server hoster companies – last week, I got an email saying that some server hosting company I used to use (Warservers? Something like that.) were taking preorders for MW2 servers – meaning they’ll have to refund all of the servers.
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@Pink Ninja:
So tell me, how exactly does matchmaking EXCLUDE server support? Left 4 Dead seems to manage both. Albeit non-skill based, but that’s because Steam doesn’t have skill based rankings yet.
Sorry, the response was really, really disingenuous, and talks about issues in black or white exclusives that they aren’t. You agree that it’s a good thing, but only because you don’t understand enough about how this works (please understand, I’m really not trying to insult here, and I apologise if I come off that way) to discern that it’s not a “one or the other” situation that it’s clearly being written as. Comments such as:
“It’s a little dubious. Some of the people complaining are complaining with their pocketbook.”
Are pretty incredible to be honest. Is he honestly suggesting that the fans are fighting because they want to pay more on servers? Or is he merely suggesting that this is organised by a powerful server lobby of some sort?
Servers are expensive to run. They’re expensive and a pain. BUT. People still want them, and still pay for them, and still run them. And it’s not because they’re stuck in their ways, they’re genuinely valuable and important aspects of a community. You may laugh, but games communities of like-minded gamers genuinely do build up around these. When I load up TF2, I don’t just jump in with random people of a similar skill level. That would be terrible (bear with me). I hit up our community servers and play with a group of people that I’ve known for years now. We all play on the same server because it’s where like-minded individuals go to play. We talk and communicate, we don’t treat the game seriously and we have fun. That’s the thing, I am by no means the best player on there. Heck, on a regular basis I’ll get thrashed by dudes higher in skill than me. But whenever I join that server, I know I’m going to have a good time. And that’s the important part. Because I’m playing with other people who’re likeminded, and don’t go on rage-sprees, who’ll talk and goof off and just have fun
And the server, being part of the community, adapts itself too the community. You get community made maps and server scripts and mods that will never see the light of day for any other people. That doesn’t matter, because it’s stuff that we like to have, so it’s there for us. If there’s a map we don’t want to play on, it just gets removed from the rotation (to forestall, no our servers are not “2Fort” only).
I’m just trying to give you an insight into why we feel servers are so valuable. Without them, there’s no real community. You genuinely can’t do the same thing with just a friends list. You ESPECIALLY can’t if it’s all hosted off of someone else’s connection. Ever tried hosting a 24 player game of TF2? I’m guessing it wouldn’t be too pleasant for you, it certainly wouldn’t be for me, or anyone else without a massive upload connection.
Scroll up to the very top. What do you see?
* home
* about
* FAQ
* advertise
* hey, developers!
* subscribe
* steam group
* twitter
* podcast
* rss
* forum
In that Steam group, we’ve got our own RPS server. Personally, it’s not my community. But every now and then RPS will announce an event, Something like “TF2 midnight madness!” wil crop up in the corner of my screen, and I just jump in. And the thing is, winning or losing, I know I’m going to have a good time. Which is more than what ever happens when I’m just playing with random dudes on the internet, even if they are ostensibly of the same “skill level”.
I’m not against matchmaking. I’m against removing community servers. Without them there really isn’t a community, at least not to the same degree.
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TLDR
Don’t give me anything about an internet community.
People suck and that goes for the internet twice as hard and online gaming ten times as hard.
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I’d like to point out that all arguments they make for matchmaking in favour of dedicated servers are rendered moot by the fact they are not mutually exclusive. The game could support both if they wanted it
The only reason dedicated servers were cut from the game is that they think IW.net is going to be a big source of revenue, and dedicated servers would encroach upon that revenue. It’s all about the money, nothing else.
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And anyone sceptical of this point of view should bear in mind that we’re talking about Activision here, the same company that is attempting to monetise Battle.net, a traditionally free matchmaking service and is forcing WoW users onto the system in order to facilitate that. Activision under Bobby Kotick are more anti-consumer than EA ever were.
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Frankly the developers’ explanation of their decision is very weak, even ignoring all the potential problems with matchmaking or the potential advantages of dedicated servers that might be lost, the big question really is why not include dedicated servers as an option?
If matchmaking is just something to make things easier for casual gamers, then fine – include it as an option (the default option even). It only makes sense to actively prevent the use of dedicated servers if you have some ulterior motive, and the fact that they’re trying to hide that motive worries me – since it tends to suggest that it’s something that PC gamers will be even less happy with.
Honestly I don’t really care about MW2 itself, but this is definitely a worrying play by Activision – I can only hope that there’s enough bad press as a result that other developers don’t follow suit.
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Developers certainly won’t. Just look at the mockery Activision/IW are getting from the guys at DICE now. EA are going to lap this up as an opportunity to win brownie points with PC gamers and push BF1943 and Bad Company 2, both of which have mod support and dedicated servers.
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I agree with TotalBiscuit. It appears that they just don’t care. “We’ve decided to make our game like this. Tough luck.” At least, if EA doesn’t follow suit, there is less chance of more of this. But still. The best way this could turn out (other than them changing their position) is if it doesn’t sell at all. That might teach them.
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This move suggests perhaps a lack of understanding as to what makes PC games great – the mods and silly little game modes that spring out of and require dedicated servers root access. TF2′s Prop Hunt and HL2′s GarrysMod are prime examples of this.
The L4D Matchmaking was controversial when it was released, though with a 4 player match there is at least a level of sense to the idea. Though to be honest – I’ve never used it and have always hosted matches with friends largely because it’s often unreliable/too busy.
Trying to have a larger scale deathmatch game run without dedicated servers sort of kills off a lot of possibilities with community, professional clan gaming and silly, fun game modes which don’t play exactly by the games rules. I hope Infinity Ward create an alternative to allow PC gamers to run things they want them.
*sigh* Bad times. I think I may be getting this one on 360.
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Why get it AT ALL?
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Exactly, why do exactly what they want you to do, ie. buy the more expensive version? They clearly don’t give two shits about the playerbase in general and seem to be of the belief that you will swallow whatever load they give you to swallow. Buying it only proves that they were right in that belief.
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Is it just me or are the developers/journalists deliberately trying to dodge the real issue?
I don’t care what motivation Inifinity Ward had for deciding these changes and i bet most of you don’t. Imo, it’s primarily the RESULT in gaming and user experience those deicisions will have that outrages most people. However all they keep defending are their REASONS for these changes; aside from making promises and the ‘everything’s going to be alright, just TRUST US’ attitude of course.
It is indeed a sad day when even the journalists can’t see the irony in themselves resolving to calling the critics ‘n3rds’ just because they don’t agree with their viewpoint and have probably confused the real issue.
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Regarding anti-cheating things is there any reason why they can’t use both VAC and Punkbuster?
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All the decisions, that they’ve stated, for such a system make absolutely no sense. In fact 90% of it is beginning to sound like thinly veiled spin.
I just find it astonishing that they didn’t even consult the community prior to implementing it. It’s turned the whole MW2 affair into the straw that broke the camels back.
Gutting the multiplayer in such a fashion will just hurt them, because who is really going to spend £35 on a 5 hour single player campaign?
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A first person-shooter on PC with no mod support? Do they want any sales on PC at all?
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The majority of casual FPS players don’t use mods. I played hundreds of modded maps for COD 2, but I never came across any for COD 4, and tbh still loved the game and chalked up hundreds of hours on it,.
I’d prefer free modded maps for MW2, but if there arent any, I’ll still be buying it, and tbh, Activision know that from a business POV, if I buy it less eagerly then I would have bought it, it matters not, because it’s a binary /buy/don’t buy decision.
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Thank goodness, someone to stick up for the poor developers….
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I am literally crying a river for poor, down-trodden Infinity Ward.
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I don’t think he’s sticking up for the devlopers. But what he says is true. The majority of gamers these days ARE casual gamers and they will buy this game regardless. Heck, even the majority of gamers who disagree with IW’s “policy” here will still probably end up buying it. From their point of view, all they will see is that regardless of the price hike and content cuts, thay still sold x number of units and made £xxxxxxxxxxxx.
It ain’t right, but is how it’ll go down.
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Yes, the majority of gamers can be considered casual, but when it comes to the majority of gamers who have rigs capable of running Modern Warfare 2 on PC, that’s a different matter entirely, with a significantly larger demographic of ‘hardcore’ gamers and folks who seemed to have no issue what-so-ever dealing with dedicated servers in any of the previous CoD games, so why should it so suddenly become an issue now? Do all this nonsense on the console, that’s fine, it’s to be expected. Deliberately handicap the PC and then smirk and laugh about it in some trashy gamer rag after the fact and expect to be hit in the pocket.
I would be more than happy for Activision to abandon the PC platform all together, they will not be missed and there are plenty of publishers and developers out there willing to step in and fill the gap.
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Oh yeh, don’t get me wrong, Biscuit, I totally agree. And in fact, I think the developer’s comments were increadibly insulting, dismissive and unsanctionable. Not to mention that his explanation was so much balony.
Actually, I think you would be surprised at the number of medium – high rig owners who could be considered “casual gamers” these days. But you are right. I mean the petition alone shows that there are a significant number of people out there who care about this, and that petition will actually only be the fraction who are being vocal and in the right place at the right time to see and sign the petition.
Personally, I think this whole thing is ass backwards. We should not be dragging the PC backwards into mindles, random matchmaking services from the 90′s. Rather, we should be giving the console market a helping hand toward dedicated servers for themselves, giving them the space for community now that online gaming is apparently the be all and end all of console gaming.
My main point, though, is that it’s genuinely appalling how Jason West and Vince Zampella got so personal. pre-emptively too. But these guys are supposed to be professionals. Money grubbing or not, that ain’t good behaviour and they HAVE negatively impacted on their sales through these insults.
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Yeah, I normally like when PR guy drops all the corporate talk and just says it like it is, and calls fans out on their bullshit, but to out and our *insult them,* is fucking ridiculous.
I had no intention of ever getting MW2 in the first place, but I’ll be surprised if IW ever meets with success on the PC again.
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This explains why we all have to sign the Modern Warfare 2 dedicated server petition to save the future of PC gaming and communities.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=225744&site=pcg
This also explains to the console player why devs should be looking at dedicated servers for consoles not forcing it the other way around.
PC is still the king of online gaming because of dedicated servers. We (PC gamers) are getting less fair gaming experience with non-dedicated servers.
If IW are going to hide by the fact “it’s only dedicated server companies that are upset” think again.
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So, we have Biessener, West and Zampella insulting PC Gamers, and Bowling thinking that we’re stupid enough to believe that bunch of bullshit.
All in all, a great day for Infinity Ward. Way to kick in the balls your most ardent fans.
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Everyone keeps citing L4Ds matchmaking as a precedent. One massive massive difference (actually several but I’ll keep this breif) L4D matched you up in a lobby and then put you onto a dedicated server that was available. No possible.
Anyhow I bought CoD1, 2 and 4 for the PC. I was going to buy this, even though I think the series has gone a bit stale. *sigh* I don’t like being a pirate but companies that act in this way get pirated, a yo-ho-ho for me.
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No I disagree. You shouldn’t pirate. Piracy only shows people still play their games. And Activision will take it as a sign for more draconian shit. You should ignore it. Do not buy or get it any other way.
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Exactly. Are you short on good FPS games, so much so that you have to pirate an average-at-best pseudo-realistic game like Modern Warfare 2? It’s the PC, we have the biggest FPS back catalogue on the planet, go and play any one of a number of fantastic titles and support those developers instead. Don’t give Infinity Ward the time of day.
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Your trolling is shrivelled and flaccid.
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The thing that IW is really missing here is that the people that are protesting this change are NOT a vocal hardcore minority. The thing they need to remember is that console gaming is almost universally cheaper than PC gaming. If I wanted to play a game with console functionality, I would buy a $300 console, and not a $1000 PC. We are on this platform specifically for the functionality that PC games provide and are traditionally different than the console versions. Do they really think that we pay the difference in platform costs solely for better graphics and mouse+keyboard?
It is really sad that they just don’t see it, especially since CoD got its start on the PC. Oh well, my gaming schedule was getting pretty packed and crossing this one off of it helps out some.
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I’m with you there we have so many good games to play I can give this a miss until they sort this out if possible.
I’m even getting back into Battlefield 2 with the new patch.
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Absolutely true.
Consoles are geared more towards casual gamers in the same way that PCs (especially the sort that would be used to play MW2) are geared more towards what IW call “hardcore” gamers.
So as far PC gamers are concerned, casual gamers are the minority.
If all developers did this it would kill the PC gaming platform dead. If that is really what IW want, I hope they choke on their blood money.
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I don’t know why “browsing through a Server List for a server with the settings / ping you want” is portrayed as a bad thing. In CoD4 I, presumably like most, will ‘favourite’ servers that I see are run well and use rules that I enjoy playing. I don’t just mean hardcore vs regular, TDM vs SD. I mean no martyrdom servers, no grenade launcher servers, no abuse servers and so on. The kind of thing that makes your gaming experience more enjoyable outside of the rigid rule template that IW want to impose. I can’t see this decision being good at all, from this perspective.
On a related note I remember reading something a while ago about the martyrdom perk being included in the new game, desptie its generally unpopular nature online. Sure IW themselves might love it, but removing the ability of players to disallow it (and other weapons etc) seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.
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Everyone should buy Borderlands in protest.
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Seconded.
KG
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SOLD!
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Signed.
I had already done this as they still have MW2 off the steam list. Good job they did, saved me some hassle.
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Way ahead of you, though they’d better sort out those control and voice-chat issues with a 0-day patch. Gamer wrath is easily redirected…
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This should be official RPS policy. Go on, you know you want to.
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Why would I want to buy an MMOFPS which is pretending to be otherwise?
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Get out.
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I dunno, you could buy an online multiplayer shooter with the ability to earn upgrades and skills, customisable weapons and other RPG elements, or you could buy Borderlands.
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I think its a little far stretched to say this is a “huge” selling point. I like dedicated servers, but at the same time I understand how it cheapens the experience. I stopped playing CS:S because you couldn’t find two servers that ran off the same rules/mods any longer. If the match-making works and still allows for friends to get together, it will be fine.
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So you’re for it because you don’t like diversity?
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OH NO, CHOICE!
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@ Andrew Dunn –
Just because other boycotts took issue with aspects of games that you didn’t care about doesn’t make them less right or just. Just as the person you’re responding to doesn’t care about this feature being removed.
Think about that in future before you write off someone else’s views.
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There was no ‘slippery slope’ issue with Left 4 Dead 2 – it was a company making a sequel to a successful game and by all accounts adding a lot to it. It was the perceived abandonment of L4D1 and the constant calls of ‘expansion pack!’ that led that boycott, and it was telling that the boycott leaders recently called the whole thing off.
The Empire DLC issue I’m referring to is the recent Warpath DLC, which caused outcry among some sectors of the community for being a downloadable, paid, mini-expansion. Along the lines of the Alexander expansion for Rome: Total War in fact, but rather more developed. And with no compulsion for anyone to buy it, and there was no issue of splitting the community or anything. People still complained, usually alongside “they’re not patching Empire! Why aren’t they fixing Empire!” despite the regular updates from Creative Assembly, and the 1.4 patch that hit at the same time as the Warpath DLC was very substantial and added more free content alongside the reams of balance fixes.
I’m quite happy to write off the views of anyone who thought such support was inadequate.
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Damn lack of editing. Which isn’t to say that Empire on release had no problems, and isn’t to say that there wasn’t legitimate concern in there SOMEWHERE. But this is self-evidently a more just cause to get up in arms about.
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Andrew doesn’t care about broken promises for games he doesn’t care about, clearly.
L4D1 never received the support that was promised and L4D2 will kill support for it. You don’t care, that’s fine, but kindly admit it rather than trying to dismiss the concerns of other people.
Similarly, Empire suddenly went from “most moddable TW ever” to “encrypted to prevent modding” and never received an entire promised multiplayer component that was supposed to be rolled out a month after release. Again, you don’t care, again, that’s your right, but don’t pretend people have no grounds to be pissed off.
Personally, I couldn’t give less of a damn about MW2. I was never going to buy it, I never play this kind of shooter in MP. If I was like you, I’d be screaming in this thread about how everyone is whining for no reason, but I can understand the implications on the wider PC gaming picture here and instead entirely agree with the outrage.
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Valve will continue to release content for both L4D2 and L4D at the same time. Haven’t you heard that enough times, Vinraith? :/
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I think it’s absolutely adorable that you believe that.
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I’m excited about L4D2, and I actually have to agree with Vinraith here.
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No dedicated servers means that there can be no RPS MW2 server.
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The best option will be to not buy the game. but then they will blame poor sales on piracy not on lousy pricing strategy and crap like this matchmaking…
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And who in their right mind will believe them, particularly when Randy “Magnificent Mouthy Bastard” Pitchford turns around and shows them Borderlands PC sales figures? MW2 is going to get the shit pirated out of it far more so than Borderlands and Gearbox/2K are going to benefit from that. Plenty of games succeed on the PC and do not fall victim to the monster under the bed that we so whimsically call Piracy and they do that by not pissing off their core PC demographic and providing good value for money.
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I always think he should change his name by deed poll to Randy Pitchfork. Just for full effect, you know.
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IW’s arguments are so weak that and intellectually dishonest that I don’t see myself ever buying another game from them again. That’s ok though, their manshooter XXXIV series has been going down the drain ever since CoD2 anyway. Auto-aim, on-rail shooters with regenerating health…hahahahaha!
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Im going to pirate it and not play it. Ever. How do you like them apples Mr “PC Gamers are all basement dwellers”. Oops mom is calling down, brb.
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Seems that other are starting to react to this, and not just the fanboy community. Article on PC Gamer about why servers are important:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=225744&site=pcg
Article on Gamasutra regarding how Infinity Ward completely botched this entire reveal, and then their response.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JustinKranzl/20091020/3360/Infinity_Ward__Youre_Doing_It_Wrong.php
That second one’s an interesting read.
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Standout quote:
Pretty much says it all really.
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When you look at the numbers of sales for the original MW on console versus PC their ‘palm off’ing of PC gamers make a lot more sense.
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This is thread of the year, hit them where it hurts. Thumbs up to the guys even cancelling the console version.
Gamers unite FTW
http://www.infinityward.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=128306&start=30
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Theres this guy on my regular TF2 server, goes by the name Nobby. If I throw my mind back, I’ve actually been playing with/against him for over a year, and don’t really know anything about him, except that he’s better than me, and as such, is brilliant fun to play against. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except that perhaps throwing you into any old game takes away a lot of the personality which for me makes games special.
CoD 4 multiplayer also had none of this personality, and being the kind of game it was, it didn’t lend itself to creating personal server communities in that way. Perhaps it’s only natural for this to be the next step.
The singleplayer was brilliant, though, so I suggest we respond in a typically PC way and pirate the hell out of it.
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Is that [DoGs] by any chance?
They have a guy thats exceptional who goes by said name.
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Oh yeh nobby, seen him round the SAS servers a few times, damn good scout.
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Thats the guy :D
It’s a small interwebs, really.
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I wish I could say they lost a sale, but I had no interest in a competitive MMO shooter in the first place. It costs more just to see if they can and it’s made by dicks? Man, that’s a high-priority purchase right there.
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Can someone clarify this for me? There seems to be some confusion about what IW is implementing. If I understand right, the system will be a matchmaking system where the games will be hosted on listen servers. This means that the host will not be an IW server, but just the computer that one of the players is on, right?
Personally, I really prefer BIG matches, at least 16 x 16. This will be pretty much impossible on listen servers, right? Also you have the problem of the match suddenly ending when the host decides to finally eat dinner or whatever. I’ve never had any trouble finding dedicated servers. This has to be the dumbest move by a gaming company EVAR.
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This is correct. It’ll all be peer-to-peer with one person hosting, and you seem to understand what that entails so there’s no point explaining it again!
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Well, someone might want to explain this to IW, as they seem to be implying that they’re improving and streamlining the system.
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If the host quits then the game pauses for a moment while it transfers authority to another player’s computer. But otherwise, yes.
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Hey, don’t worry. this just means it’ll be like xbox live. right?
I don’t see what all the fuss is ab…. MUM!! GET ME A FUCKING BURGER!!! I’M PLAYING!!!! MUM!!!!
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I played natural selection obsessively for years. I have people from those years on xfire, not just that, many games sometimes i’ll have a new multiplayer game and i’ll know i can find a quality server by dropping in where these people are. Not in mw2.
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I am pretty annoyed with how some of the media is hand washing this as the usual angry-internet-men ranting. Upset with this decision is well justified, dedicated servers and the community they involve have been a key part of FPS gaming on PCs. As people know this wasn’t always a good thing, you couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t join a server with terrible mods but at the end of the day you have plenty of choice.
Team Fortress 2 shows the complete opposite approach. Servers can be highly modded, such as shown by the excellent prop mod and Valve provides regular free content, no paid for DLC, There is healthy competition between dedicated server hosts or you can run one yourself.
Modern Warfare 2 will allow no modification, have no free DLC only pay for packs that splinter the community and overpriced publisher run dedicated servers, with many laggy listen servers populating the server list.
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So what i want to know and maybe you guys can ask them. Will they be providing refunds if we dont like this new system. ‘Buy it and try it’ doesnt work when shops dont give refunds on PC games. Does that not strike you as just plain wrong
Maybe Steam will be giving refunds?
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Consumer rights? In MY PC gaming?
Don’t be ridiculous, you’re expected to part with more of your hard earned cash than normal and thank the gods that you can play yet another generic sequel.
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Giving the game negative reviews at places like metacritic and amazon is another good way of getting your displeasure aired.
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Is anyone else worried that poor PC sales will lead to a complete departure of the COD games from the PC platform and that will be blamed on said poor sales / piracy rather than IW's lack of commitment to the PC?
I am increasingly frustrated with the "consolisation" of my PC games (Operation Flashpoint 2 etc). This used to be where we had after release console ports but now games and their engines (CryEngine 2, Id Tech, Dunia) are being optimised to the low tech footprint of consoles.
We as PC Gamers seem to be losing out to the consoles in this regard. Will it get better? It very much feels like the Lager vs. Real Ale debate that we had in the UK where cheap factory made lager flooded the market. It took a lot of effort to swing against the tide. Quality won out (or at least regained some lost ground and got the respect it deserved). Do we need a "Campaign for Real PC Games"? like CAMRA but without the beard and slippers…
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I think you’ll find that beards and slippers go very well with real PC games.
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Indeed, coming from a beard and slipper wearing beer drinker as they do!
Consoles are the Fosters and the Carlings of this world. Mac’s are Staropramen etc and PC’s are real ale. There are parallels: http://www.businessballs.com/realale.htm !!
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Worried? If that happens I’ll celebrate. CoD has been shite since 2, it’s an trashy pseudo-realistic console shooter. It speaks volumes that Battlefield 2, as old as it is, is still a far superior multiplayer experience and hey, Bad Company 2 is coming soon. Guess what? That’ll have dedicated servers! Activision can go move in with Mr 360 and Mrs PS3 for all I care, where I might add I STILL won’t buy their games, because there are far more ethical publishers out there which release far more original and better IP.
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And your seriously wondering why this is happening you guys need to open your eyes.
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Can I trade the beard for underwear? I can’t grow a decent beard for the life of me :c
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@Psychopomp: beard for underwear? I’ll trade half my next beard for your bifurcated underwear. Remember to send postage because half a nicker certainly won’t cover it. (huge apologies to the memory of Ronnie Barker!)
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How do I know you’ll actually mail the half-beard, and won’t just keep my half-wear?
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I’ve just cancelled my copy – I have a 25GB cap per month with my ISP. I can’t afford to host a 16 man game – for an hour that would be ~300MB of data (based on 6kb/player/second)
Got to go down as the biggest own goal this year …
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Just throwing it out there, your cap probably applies to download not upload.
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If I am host I will need to download everything everyone else uploads to keep the game in-sync :)
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That, Mac, and ISPs generally aren’t happy when you start uploading a lot. So, unfortunately, you’re out of luck.
Well, you would be, if IW hadn’t mucked everything up so miserably.
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Oh, wait, no, you wouldn’t be out of luck at all if they had simply left things the way they were.
Huh.
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I so dislike what they're trying to do here. Pushing the price of games up, removing mod support and saying its for the good of the fans. They actually make me sick. I hope this game sells like crap and nobody ever tries this shit again.
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I like how Bowling completely skirts around the issues in his blog post. Everything he mentions can be, and with L4D has been, done with dedicated servers.
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Preorder most definatly canceled now.
Im also not a very happy chappy about this growing trend of consolisation (word?) towards PC games. I can only imagine its gonna get a lot worse before it gets better….
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I think that I have to disagree with you; probably because I was in a COD4 community that I’d joined through CSS and then COD2, but COD4 had as much of a server community as any game that I’ve ever experienced. I mourn its loss.
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“Predictably, nerds across world took to the Internet with a wailing and a gnashing of teeth that would make the Left 4 Dead community proud. ”
This author writes like a complete tool.
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It’s Gameinformer. Most Brits won’t be familiar with that particular rag but I had the misfortune of being roped into a year’s subscription while living in the US. Admittedly it did come with the amazing Edge discount card but whatever. The magazine is owned by Gamestop which is an immediate blackmark on it’s credibility. You know that absurd ‘radio station’ that GAME has? GAME Live? Gameinformer reads like a transcribed version of that. It makes Kotaku’s writing look like War and Peace.
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They are really terrible. It’s nice that they’ll tell it like it is, to the various idiots who inhabit this world, but more often than not they’re just namecalling for the sake of it.
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What i want to know is . since when did playing pc games become so hard ??
i have seen several articles and post recently stating that pc gaming is hard and we need this matchmaking bull crap .
what is so hard about choosing a server with low ping good amount of players out of a list ?
i dont know but i tend to agree with the peeps who say this is a marketing ploy to limit choices to pc gamers and bring them inline with controlled and spoon fed console market.
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It is hard if you don’t know what “ping” even means. It is difficult if you don’t like the rules of the game being different every time. The whole system is hard because it places you on servers with uber-twitch maniacs who you have no chance against. Hitting a “Play Now” button is a lot simpler. I can understand that many people (ie, console players) prefer this kind of system.
But not the PC players who own rigs that play MW2.
Having a “play now” button is great. Buy why would it preclude dedicated servers?
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I think everyone has the right idea – ignore it and get something else (i.e borderlands). This is the final straw for me after the price hike and everything else. Hell if I feel I’m missing out too much I’ll just go back to playing the first MW on the dedicated servers.
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@BraveDave: I think you’re right. Ignore it. Let IW drop PCs (they’ve perhaps taken this franchise a step too far anyway). Buy something else more PC friendly. Await the vacuum to be filled by another more PC orientated developer who can play to its strengths rather than to the lowest common denominator of the current consoles.
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Absolute stupidity, summed up by this:
“We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners”
THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY POSSIBLE, THESE THINGS OVERLAP.
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The Game Informer article reads pretty much like PC Gamer, RPS, PC Zone, PC Format and every other games media outlet did when there was an equally justified Boycott going on over the development of Left4Dead 2 at the expense of the original.
You never addressed the points; you did exactly what the twat at Game Informer is doing now. The difference being that he doesn’t appear to have blatantly made shit up or selectively quoted and misrepresented anyone.
No sympathy. If the best game company in the world can fuck over 40,000 petitioners(with your sychophantic consent), then I expect Activision and Infinity Ward will have no trouble telling a couple hundred-thousand where to stick their keyboards(with Game Informer’s sychophantic consent).
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Now this really is an Angry Internet Man. Haha.
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Gorgeras: I do actually think Valve made a mess of delivering Left 4 Dead extras and the subsequent Left 4 Dead 2 announcement. (In fact RPS asked if a sequel was appropriate *before* the boycott even occurred. We made a joke of the outrage – it was funny – but we didn’t insult people for being outraged.) The difference is that we’re nevertheless excited about Left 4 Dead 2 and don’t see boycotting it as an appropriate response to getting slightly less free stuff for the original that we felt entitled to. There has been free L4D DLC, and there may well continue to be.
The MW2 issue is rather different, in that it’s a radical change to how the PC community is intended to function. It’s a little different to the Left 4 Dead issue because this is about content *control* and the value of PC gaming fundamentals: dedicated servers, modding, player-driven community. Both IW and the Game Informer dismiss that in a way that isn’t appropriate.
The L4D argument was one about content over time, this is about functionality and philosophy *in principle*.
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Gorgeras: And – adding insult to injury – paying more for the privilege.
KG
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What Jim said +1 million trillion gazillion
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It’s kind of telling that this shot up to 100K plus in a few days, whereas the boycott peaked at 50K after a few *months,* and then proceeded to trickle down, Gorgeras.
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IW clearly missed the boat by admitting to what they were doing up front. They should have said “we’re launching with it this way, but we’ll add support for dedicated servers in a month or two.” Then they could have delayed endlessly and, at most, a small protest movement might have started that would have been shouted down by the larger fanbase. Many PC gamers don’t actually care about being lied to by developers (they expect it, in fact), we’ve seen that several times lately. Consequently there’s no real reason for a developer not to lie their ass off about post-release support. As long as you keep telling them things they want to hear, there will never be any real consequences.
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Vinraith, you’ll make a great PR manager some day.
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Now Jim, there’s no reason to be insulting. :) I’m an empiricist, and I’ve had plenty of observational data to work with lately.
If you want to divide community opinion on a controversial move it’s clear enough that claiming you’re going to fix it later works swimmingly. By the time it becomes clear that you’ve screwed everyone over, you’ve already sold a bajillion copies and run off to count the cash. Admitting this in advance, and then further compounding the problem by being insulting rather than contrite about it towards PC gamers, has to be the PR blunder of the year.
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But Vin is right, isn’t he Jim? You’ll forgive me if I couldn’t see what you thought about it under the massive weight of Future Publishing mags like PCG giving anti-Boycott letters ‘Letter of the Month’ twice(no you don’t insult people, just cheer on idiots that do) among op-eds talking about how uninformed the Boycotters were, citing nothing that the Boycott actually said and given no credit what so ever.
I do not consider the small amount of content delivered and the large amount undelivered for Left4Dead to be ‘free’; I consider it to be already paid for. I would not have bought Left4Dead if I knew it’s continued development was going to be the closest thing to static without technically being completely static and I am certainly not alone. Every man-hour spent on L4D2 by Valve is a man-hour not spent on getting the original into the state it should be after one year.
Like Mr Biessener at Game Informer, you’re picking the points that suit you and framing them in a way that suits you. You say the MW2 issue is different because of X and then X to my eyes consists of a list of things that are completely the same regarding Left4Dead 2.
“The MW2 issue is rather different, in that it’s a radical change to how the PC community is intended to function. It’s a little different to the Left 4 Dead issue because this is about content *control* and the value of PC gaming fundamentals: dedicated servers, modding, player-driven community. Both IW and the Game Informer dismiss that in a way that isn’t appropriate.
The L4D argument was one about content over time, this is about functionality and philosophy *in principle*.”
I think you’ll find it was more than that; it WAS an argument over player-driven communities. servers. modding and such: these were frequently issues of contention among Boycotters, cited repeatedly by the Boycott as primary reasons for it’s existence. Maybe you didn’t know this because everyone at PCG and the rest were only reading their own bullshit about the Boycott and not the Boycott forums or Steam site directly. Arguing with anti-Boycotters was like walking into an echo-chamber and I’m beginning to understand why, I bet no one actually knows where some of the lies originated, they just formed out of chinese whispers and no one bothered to check.
Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer is being turned into a consolised turd-sandwich and people are rightly(even if hypocritically) angry. Left4Dead suffered from consolisation(a piss-poor matchmaker, removal of anticipated features etc) and could have been fixed just like there is still an outside possibility that MW2 can be fixed. But it won’t happen for L4D because Left4Dead 2 will happen instead. Those that fail to see the very large similarities because of the superficial differences they choose deliberately to exaggerate deserve everything they are getting now they are being treated like how they treated the L4D2 Boycott.
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I’ve never heard anything of the sort. Quotes please.
Even if someone did say that, since L4D2 uses the exact same system as L4D I don’t see how it would be valid.
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Come on Theory, please re-form that argument into something coherent. What wouldn’t be valid?
I’m not prepared to trawl tens of thousands of posts on the Boycott and Steam forums to find conversations you could dismiss as easily as you find the suggestion that I do so is actually reasonable. Perhaps if journos hadn’t been lying through their teeth about the Boycott and reporting it accurately what I said about the general goals and concerns of members would have been common knowledge.
Let’s be specific and narrow this down, which of the following do you disagree the L4D2 Boycott was concerned with?
1. That Left4Dead 2 would split the community
2. That there would be far fewer servers hosting Left4Dead
3. That modders would find ways to import L4D content for use in L4D2
4. That outstanding issues with match-making, admin tools and server browsing would not be fixed
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1. A split community isn’t an unhealthy community. See: CS 1.6, and CSS/ Red Orchestra, and It’s 5375861236 mods
2. I believe TFC, CS 1.6 and the old Unreals are still alive and healthy
3. This is a problem, how?
4. The only legitimate complaint here.
I, like most non-boycotters here, completely fail to comprehend the mental gymnastics you lot are pulling to see this as hypocritical. This is about taking away our freedom of choice, one of the defining featured of PC gaming, in addition to being treated like a red headed stepchild by a developer *we* originally led to success.
The L4D2 boycott was about a lot of things, some idiotic, some legitimate. While there’s *some* overlap amidst the two movements, disagreeing with one, and agreeing with another doesn’t make you a hypocrite.
There’s a small thing called the Undistributed Middle fallacy you might want to look up.
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I can’t see how any of that applies to MW2, Gorgeras.
MW2 issue: No more dedicated servers
L4D2 issue: Sequel several years sooner than anyone anticipated
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This is bad Giant bomb have missed the point http://www.giantbomb.com/news/this-modern-warfare-2-pc-situation-is-getting-crazy/1737/
It’s this one sidedness that’s going to hurt future games. We may as well sell our soul to the 360 now and dump PCs in the bin.
The irony that M$ and others are forcing you to play on 360 that’s the gaming future just when Windows 7 is out.
The future is web surfing on mobiles, gaming on consoles and for security businesses are using typewriters and filing cabinets.
So no need for Windows 7 good job everyone.
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Yep there holding guns to are heads and forcing us to play on consoles grow the **** up.
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consoles arnt the future ckloud computing will put a stop to that – for example farmville on facebook – i can plant crops in the morning, check on them on the computers at uni then then harvest them on my mobile on the bus on the way back – thats the freakin future man.
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Giant Bomb is ex-gamespot editors, led by the guy who didn’t like Kane and Lynch, because the main characters aren’t nice people.
So what you will about the Kane and Lynch debacle, him and the whole gamespot crew are horrible journalists, fullstop.
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My favourite comment from the users there has to be “Probably fed up with supporting dedicated servers for pirates if their numbers are so high.”
What a tard.
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ITT, people don’t know how dedicated servers work.
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Was it not the case that some big survey of piracy found that pirates were over half of the tech support calls because they were trying to get their dodgy rip to work? So, as well as not paying they were actively costing money.
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“Bifurcate the community.”
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Yes. He said that. “Bifurcate the community.” Those words, at one point or another, came out of his mouth in that order.
I would personally like to have an audio recording of that.
“Birfucate the community.”
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It’s a beautiful use of the English language.
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Yea, I hate games that “bifurcate” the community. I want a FPS withouth autoaim, where XBox and PC playes play togueter.
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What I don’t understand is why they didn’t give us the option of both this system for people who just want a quick game, and dedicated servers for more hardcore people who want to fully customise or want more control over the game they join, and want a good ping.
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See the above comment about how it would ‘bifurcate the community’.
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I love my 360. No, really, I do.
Matchmaking isn’t the reason for it, though. Far from it. Anyone arguing in favour of matchmaking can just answer me this one question: How many of the dozens of multiplayer-centric games on Xbox Live Arcade have a playerbase large enough to make matchmaking work?
I’d say maybe 2-3. Worms seems to be going strong. Battlefield 1945 is doing well purely on account of it being a full-fledged Battlefield gmae. Not much beyond that.
Why? Because once player-base falls below a certain level, matchmaking doesn’t work. You sit there waiting for a match, and can’t find one, so you don’t go looking again, and thus the game dies.
Matchmaking kills games.
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This is rather fun. I don’t know if it’s what I think. I don’t feel my specific game leanings and knowledge are enough to allow me to comment relevantly on this issue.
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If I wanted Halo’s matchmaking, I would just play Halo (which I do somewhat regularly, and enjoy). But that just fucking isn’t what I’m looking for when I play FPSs on my PC. This was pretty disappointing to me.
I’m voting with my bank account on this one- bargain bin pickup.
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“all they lose is the ability to customize the game on a deeper level with mods and such”
All you lose is one of the main advantages PC’s have over consoles!
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Mman: That bit did make me blink. It struck me as someone living in an actual monarchy going “All you lose is your right to vote!”. You don’t even know what you’re missing.
KG
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”We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners… we thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game.”
hmmm i thought those guys modding an tuning were also players and fans of the game? I wasnt going to be buying this to start with but that will make sure i never buy another IW game again.
They are content to provide a crap multiplayer experience anyway. How hard is it to actually provide proper PoV. oh look im totally behind a wall hidden. Nope you head is actually sticking out cause IW cant program. How many times have they had a chance to fix it?
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Looks to me that they’ll hit the long tail on their sales of the pc version a darn sight quicker than they’d expect.
This dismissing of some genuine questions from the community is very irksome.
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Everything written by Bowling has jack-all to do with dedicated servers vs. peer hosting. Every piece of his argument, in other words, is an obfuscation or distraction; everything he said is literally irrelevant. Dedicated servers are not only compatible with matchmaking and all of the features he’s talking about, but they’ll even work better with those features than peer hosting is capable of doing.
Way to totally dodge the issue, IW. Shame.
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Next stage to help prevent “bifurcate the community” will be to disallow keyboard/mouse control and force the use of an xbox 360 controller…
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Damn right. We cant allow bifurcate the community! I am also ever so glad for microsoft forcing me to use xbox live on my pc too. I mean the other day my internet stopped working and so I was rightly punished by not being allowed to play Fallout 3, Batman AA or DOW2. How DARE I not be connected to the internet!
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and thats why you should give achievements the finger and play with an offline account, other wise, no internet = no access to your save files, ho ho ho (you can probably make a offline account and then copy one folder’s saves to the other tho)
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i dont think anyone is wondering. IW wants money money money money money. Why else would they milk the CoD series so hard. Isnt there any type of creativity there that makes them want to try something new.
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The amusing thing being that if Activision had had their way, there would never have been a Modern Warfare, it would all still be WW2 games, since that’s what they wanted from IW and IW had to convince them otherwise.
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Also, there never would have been a console version of CoD 4.
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That writer is a cunt.
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Don’t they get that the people who pour money into dedicated servers and time into making mods are their biggest fans? Where would Half Life be without Counter Strike?
And the streamling argument is bullshit. Games for Windows Live tried to play that card, with their pay-to-use friends lists, server browsers and store package, and look how many people liked that.
I’m fine using my amazingly complex server browser, which lists such archaic terms as “ping” and has a tab for “favorite dedicated servers”.
Nice call, IW.
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IW are launching info about the midnight parties it would be funny to see protesters blocking the doors.
First midnight launch in history to have 0 sales. :D
What am I saying I hate protesters….see IW look at what you made me think. :(
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I played CoD:MW1 and CoD:WoW multiplayer extensively.
I used the server list.
I never used an official server.
Why? THE PINGS SUCKED!
I used gaming pubs that happened to be nearby or clan servers with friendly mods. I played exclusively on dedicated servers and had a favorites list on both games. I saw the same people at the same time most every day. It was comfortable. People recognized the goods and the bads and acted accordingly.
With the loss of dedicated servers, you don’t see the same people. I know – I just know – that it’ll devolve into Halo-esque pubescent howling because, after all, players are practically guaranteed never to see one another again.
It’s a license to be an asshole, forever and always.
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Maybe part of the problem is how modding is done in current games. Modding used to be a “everthing or nothing thing”. It use to be imposible to join accidentally to a modded server. It was tecnically possible, but not the norm. Mods where created as separate entities, and created in a way, that needed the users to download and install then activetelly. But theres something like a new generation of modders that make serverside modifications, that don’t need clientside installation, and that will autodownload any extra file.
It seems there are people that don’t like modified games, and there are people that are tired of the original maps, and want some gameplay tweaks of fixes. So bugs are patched with serverside mods, maps are added, and gameplay slighty modified. And there are people that do hate that.
But theres a “trivial” solution for that. Flag servers. Filter servers based on that flag. Is “trivial” and not trivial, because the server don’t know if is modded, and modded are a thing subject of opinions (some people would think that new maps are not mods, or disabling a command that crash the server is not modding, others will think otherwise), you have to trust on the servers admins, to correctly flag the server. This is not a perfect solution, but is a 99% one, and 99% are OK for real world problems.
The fragmentation thing, Is a lie? It could be a lie, since If you have uses on PC, XBox and PS3, your playerbase is already fragmented. Also fragmented by timezones, ping (localization) and maybe language (for europians ). Is like raining, while you are swiming. More water will not make you more “wet”. Is hard to tell If IW here is telling pure lies, or really fear fragmentation.
The misconception here is that you can force people to play the “native vanilla” version of a game forever. If people want to play different maps, and can’t do with your game, will move to other game.
Milking scheme. Getting rich is a good thing, and creating richness is actually a good thing, for everyone involved …and uninvolved. But its all built around fair trade. Unfair trade result on broken unstable economy. All thiefs are, ultimatelly, idiots that have to run with our money. Milking schemes are Ok, if are fair trade, but If you get a lot, and the other part is not getting enough, It will break, and your reputation will be damaged, you will have to run, to steal from other people. “Maximizing profit” sould live in a world with limited resources. Theres a point where more money on marketing don’t make more sales. Theres a point, where no one want your product, and selling it on the cheap (below his true value) make you a even worst image. Theres a point, where all the bad decissions create a formidable wall / stack, of stupidity. fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me-twice-shame-on-me. You can lie some people, indefinitly, but you can’t lie everyone, forever. Lyiing, Unfair prices, Insulting the customer.. You can’t do that forever, you burn trough all available limited result. On the consoles, since is a bigger market, you can lie longer, and more, on the PC market, since is a small market, you will soon meet a wall.
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Mods can be dynamic, Tei. UT2K4 and other games just had you automatically download whatever files you were missing upon joining the server. What you describe are Total Conversion mods which are practically games in themselves (of which there were many, and were quite fun diversions.)
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I am modder, I have made a serie of mods and some engine coding for Quake1.
I know what is a mod, and what is a total conversion. A total conversion is a mod that change the whole game. but a mod could add a pet, a new weapon, or a new map with a new gameplay.
The old Fileplanet directory use to have a different folder for Total Conversions, Almost total conversions, and normal mods.
I can show to you 5000 quake1 mods that are not total conversions on my 12GB Quake1 folder.
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Valve tried flagging with TF2. Server admins wrote plug-ins that made their servers look unmodified — no, really.
The solution to that mess was a points system on the master server where you gave a server one point every two minutes and took two away when you disconnected (numbers are wrong, but it went along those lines). Dipping too low meant your server was de-listed.
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Let’s try that last sentence again:
If a server’s points dip too low, it’s de-listed.
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Better still, here’s Valve talking about it.
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Man Kotick really screwed the pooch this time
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I have to say RPS is about the only ones not being complete tools in their coverage of this….everyone else seems happy to write us off as elitist nerds throwing a hissy fit without just cause.
kudos to you for actually representing our interests and our voice.
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MW2 boycott 125000 petitions signed.
Thats 2.5 times more than L4D2 boycott … but we started it all ;)
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YOu seem to have missed these…
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=225744&site=pcg
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JustinKranzl/20091020/3360/Infinity_Ward__Youre_Doing_It_Wrong.php
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Tei. The mod downloaiding when you join a server was something added by IW themselves so maps and mods could be shared much more easily.
There are entire leagues dedicated to various mods out there. Tactical realism being 1 of the biggest. They just totally alienated that fanbase.
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There are many ways to deliver a multiplayer game, and I think IW has overlooked the advantages of some of the others in favour of the Xnox style of play.
Client/Server with server browser: Classic PC gaming, users pick a server and join. Technical advantages are that the Server PC can be a beefy PC in a data centre with a phat pipe which makes for fair pings to everyone. Disadvatages were mentioned in the IW rebuttal.
Peer-to-super-peer: Xbox style and what IW appear to have chosen. Everybody connects to one of the players and they all play on his machine. Advantages are things IW mention. Disadvantages as well as moddability are both technical and experiential. Technically it is inferior because the super-peer will not have the kind of uplink rates you would see in a data centre, he will have a huge lag advantage, and you can’t support as many players at a time this way (why Xbox games aren’t 64-player). Also experientially, you cannot have a server “venue” where people go to play like the PCG server. When the game ends, the server goes away.
L4D style: Players are matched in a party to an available empty data centre server. Advantages are that it offers many of the party/matchmaking advantages of the peer-to-super-peer method, with the speed and fairness of the client/server but still allows people to select and join a server at will if they choose.
It has not been perfected IMHO in L4D, but I think this has the potential to be the best of both the PC and Xbox style. In a game which needs more than 4v4 you could still have “venue” servers which were off the matchmaking list.
I guess the real summation is: why not have your cake an eat it! It’s no great technical achievement if you’re already doing the extra work of the Xbox method to add a Custom Game option which is your bog standard client/server PC style.
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L4D Style
This is worst possibility.
I still think its one of the worst possible solutions.
No mater how many times i tried, and in what time of the day. I always got connected to either French or Russian servers.
And i am located around 3000 km in different direction.
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You are focussing on an implementation, not the idea.
If you ate the first soup ever made and decided it was bad, is soup bad?
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You can have community DSes in L4D by associating them with a Steam group. Then they show up on the main menu next to your online friends.
You can also take that server out of the matchmaking service.
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Yeah, hardly looking forward to this game anymore. I’ll most likely give it a miss.
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What a pathetically unprofessional excuse for journalism. Who hired that cunt?
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I must concur, and share your sense of wonder.
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Same, that was the worst most biased article I’ve ever read.
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I must admit arrogantly dissing your reader base like that does seem a bit much. Still now we at least know he’s not worth reading.
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I’m willing to bet that the majority of the Game Informer’s user base is not PC gamers.
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I’m willing to bet that the majority of the Game Informer’s user base is not PC gamers.
Yeah, I’ll second that. I get Game Informer because I have an edge card. Though I don’t think Gamestop sells used PC games and I only buy console games from there, because they have few pc games there. And I buy my pc games from the… pc… internet place.
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I have to agree.
“stinky nerds rage about their precious gaming habits, meh, meh, meh… the cool PR dude who laughs a lot totally has counter-arguments! Oh boy, I wish I was cool and relaxed like him!”… That borders a gaming journalist’s equivalent self-flagellation.
It’s a trend. I don’t really see the difference between this and the treatment of the L4D2 boycott, though (“lol, stupid nerds want valve to treat them well! NOBODY UNDERSTANDS THEY ARE A BUSINESS FOR MAKING THE MONEYYYS!!!”). But at least this time, most gaming sites don’t chime in with the nerd-bashing and capitalism-praising.
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Hey! Leave off our Jim, he’s doing his best!
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VAC gives out delayed bans.
I thought this was common knowledge
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That was supposed to be a reply…
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BOYYYYYYCCOOOOOOOOOTTTT!!!!
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The sad part is that the “explanation for confused nerds” doesn’t explain a thing. It’s the same information people already knew, only with some verbal PR sugarcoating over it. I wonder how stupid they think PC gamers are?
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Very, apparently, since they seem to think that we’re too stupid to be able to cope using a server browser and choosing a game that we want to join ourselves, rather than it being done for us (with questionable results…).
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The thing is they don’t care – not at all. They purposely waited to release this information and it was probably only done because they caught wind that it was going to be leaked. The dismissive aftermath of this bad decision proves the case even more, they don’t care. They know people will buy it for the SP and those that don’t will not really make much of a difference to sales in the long run.
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Thanks for saving me 60$ Infinity Ward! Shame about the probably great SP campaign I’ll miss. Oh well. I’ll grab it on the cheap in a few months.
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That seems to be the consensus of opinion from most PC gamers I know (save the lucky ones with Press accounts). Wait until it hits the bargain bins/Steam weekend and get it for the single player. Though of course if the PC sales tank, no doubt IW will have the guts to acknowledge that the lack of take up is a result of bad decision making at their end.
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@Kadayi – No, it’ll be piracy. It’s always piracy. “Our PC sales are for shit compared to console? It’s certainly not because we treat our PC base like a bunch of lepers! It must be the pirates!”
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Yeah, they will blame piracy for sure. Even if the direct cause can be found in their game.
No dedicated servers is a no-go these days. Haven’t they learned anything from the commotion itself at all? Probably not.
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just like all the other content they released for it? a whopping half campaign. 2 vs campaigns that should have launched at the start, and a laughable survival mode that simply regurgitates the old content.
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You’d rather they have delayed the game altogether, to finish tweaking those campaigns for versus?
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Now, now, it’s not a “half” campaign.
It’s 2/5, or 40% of a campaign. It’s also some of the worst L4D content I’ve ever played, and I’m including community content there.
But it’s ok, PC gamers don’t care about being lied to. You just can’t tell them what you’re doing up front like IW has, THAT gets them all riled up.
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I, for one, *like* being able to complete a versus game in less than 46097618924768901 hours.
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Hey, any content is better than no content. Especially when you don’t have to pay for it.
Are people foolish enough to be lured into buying games because of promises? I think you might want to look at yourself in the mirror before hurling abuse at Valve.
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It sure it ad hominem in here
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND I forgot Delet-o-tron is really good about getting rid of namecalling fast.
Delet-o-tron might want to get these two comments by me.
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“Are people foolish enough to be lured into buying games because of promises?”
Yes, the expectation should always be that developers are lying. When they lie, there should be no consequences, it’s simply the default state of the industry. There’s nothing wrong with this, and no change of any kind should be encouraged.
Seriously, what’s wrong with you people? How is it an entire conversation about a really bad move for PC gaming by IWnet has morphed into “my boycott is more important than your boycott?” I can sort of understand not caring about a developer lying, but I can’t understand the hostility toward people that do.
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Vinraith, the answer to your question would be that the internet makes you stupid.
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Most of the folks upset about L4D2 got over it at an early stage.
However, inclusion of dedicated servers has become something that is expected of most multiplayer games, whereas future DLC isn’t such a bad loss when they’ve given you the tools to make your own.
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@Psychopomp
I can appreciate the value of a short campaign for versus. I’m not a fan of the mode myself, but what little I’ve played certainly did take forever. Can we agree that it would have been awfully nice, if they were going to release short, versus-centric campaigns, for them to have released several? I’d have been happy to see such a thing as PAID DLC, it doesn’t have to be free, it still would have been a nice content addition to the original game.
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@Psychopomp
Amen. Far too often I’m an example of that myself.
@Stupoider
It’s not my intention to draw an equivalence. I don’t particularly care about adversarial multiplayer shooters, but even I can see that the implications of what IW is doing are genuinely frightening for the platform as a whole. I just don’t understand why, by the fifth post on the first page, we’ve gone from “we can all agree that what IWnet is doing is wrong” to “this important, unlike those other things that have upset people lately.” I’m particularly annoyed by the Empire reference, because I think the precedent of a strategy game locking out modding is a pretty horrifying one, and it applies to a genre I care a LOT more about than FPS games.
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I’ll never complain about getting new stuff.
Also, Crash Course was made for versus. It doesn’t work as a regular campaign, at all.
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“It doesn’t work as a regular campaign, at all.”
Amen to that, too.
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The problem wasn’t the length of the Versus campaigns; the problem was that you had to stay for the whole thing to get a decent game and that it automatically returned to a dead lobby that almost never picked up again once completed, rather than rolling seamlessly over to another campaign.
Valve misunderstood the problem. The original Versus mode(originally called ‘Campaign’ before the focus changed) that attracted me to it to begin with was that there would be 20 people on a server, 4 random people spawned as survivors and the rest were zombies(‘boss’ zombies being special spawns) who had to do as much damage as possible to the survivors. When a survivor died, the highest scoring zombie then spawned in a closet as a survivor to get rescued and only survivors could score ‘real’ points, by surviving and helping the others survive to a safe room. This suited drop-in and drop-out play just fine.
.The solution was to make drop-in and drop-out a more streamlined and easy choice(it makes rage-quitting less devastating to a game). Valve instead provided the solution to a completely different, non-existent problem to do with campaign length, by introducing a short and very poorly designed campaign that even if planned long ago looked, played, walked and talked like a duck delivered in response to people demanding a duck.
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Gorgeras: As far as I’m aware, L4D’s competitive play has always been 4v4, with 4 additional spots for spectators.
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Along with the demerits sytem, it was changed and removed at some point, but featured in previews I’d seen.
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Why can't they do both?
FTA:
<<<Why not have both? West does not want to include dedicated servers alongside the custom-built backend, stating that it would just "bifurcate the community.">>>
That smells like bullshit. They don't want to bifurcate the community so they're telling half of them to fuck right off?
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well put
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spot on, apparently
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What a complete and utter turnip.
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I just bifurcated my sandwich for lunch and not surprisingly both sides were tasty.
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Seems pretty obvious to me, someone doesn’t want to develop/publish on the PC anymore I guess.
No special editions for the pc, only for consoles.
Price hiked up.
Dedicated server removed from the game.
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You know I really was considering getting this game. I had never played any Call of Duty before and I thought I might try this shiny new Modern Warfare II. Not anymore! Thank goodness.
What I really want to see after this debacle is for Activision or IW to try and blame the inevitably poor PC sales on Piracy. I think at that point I would support a movement to officially kick them off of the PC. Go on, get out. You’re not welcome any more. You’ve stuck your fingers in the dip one too many times.
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PC GAMERS! CHILLAX!
The reasons IW give for the changes make sense. There are loads of problems with the dedicated server model, and these changes MAY make online games a more accessible, pleasant experience for MORE people.
I think a lot of the backlash is from ‘hardcore’ gamers who WANT their online experience to be baffling and off putting BECAUSE its part what being a hardcode PC gamer is all about.
I for one am looking forward to see how these changes work, who knows? Maybe it will be a better experience then trawling through a browser list trying to find a server without stupid mods/full of twats/redirecting you to an empty server, etc, etc.
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To everything you just said: No.
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Psychopomp. second.
And:
“I think a lot of the backlash is from ‘hardcore’ gamers who WANT their online experience to be baffling and off putting BECAUSE its part what being a hardcode PC gamer is all about.”
Defines the stupid notion people seem to have about ‘hardcore’ gamers and why they like what they like in games that is not necessarily mainstream.
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1. You’re not HARDCORE for working out how to use a server browser.
2. Favouriting servers is your friend.
3. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have had dedicated servers and a quick join button that finds the lowest latency server with the gamemode/maps/whatever you want (or just use filters) if y’know, streamlining and a better user experience is what they were actually after.
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Strawman arguments are stupid arguments from stupid people.
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“Maybe it will be a better experience then trawling through a browser list trying to find a server without stupid mods/full of twats/redirecting you to an empty server, etc, etc.” So you basically don’t want dedicated servers because it would make it easier to navigate servers.
No.
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You must be trolling.
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Funny, because I’m not going to hold this against him in the future.
I believe the only proper response to this, is “u mad?”
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@chopnsauce: On the off chance you’re not trolling, please reflect on the fact that you’re presenting a false dichotomy. What you’re praising is the possibility of a good, robust matchmaking system in place of the traditional server browser…which is fine. There’s absolutely no inconsistency between dedicated servers and a good matchmaking system. In fact, both matchmaking and the traditional browser will work better with dedicated servers than with peer hosting.
IW is trying to spin this entire issue as “dedicated servers vs. robust matchmaking”, which is intellectually dishonest. It’s disappointing to see so many people swallow that hook, line, and sinker.
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Forgot the picture : http://moesucks.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/u-mad.jpg
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@suibhne
No, I’m not trolling.
I don’t see how matchmaking and dedicated servers can coexist. Part of the point of matchmaking is that the server level of the service is invisible, why would anyone want to run a server that they can’t get directly onto to play and is just part of a matchmaking ‘cloud’?
People should stop talking about IW like they’re part of some evil empire. And open up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, IW are just trying make a better service for multiplayer???
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“I don’t see how matchmaking and dedicated servers can coexist.”
There’s a little game called L4D…
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“I for one am looking forward to see how these changes work, who knows? Maybe it will be a better experience then trawling through a browser list trying to find a server without stupid mods/full of twats/redirecting you to an empty server, etc, etc.”
This, right here, is the problem. They CLAIM that it will be a better experience. They’re tossing out the server browser that we know and love for something that (as far as I know) has pretty much failed miserably every time it’s been tried on the PC (L4D being something of an exception, but I’ll come back to that). Maybe it will be better. We don’t know. However, unless there’s a demo (I haven’t heard any news of one), we don’t get to try it out. We either buy the game (and possibly hate it), buy it and love it, or we don’t buy/cancel preorders until we see what the heck is going on. Sure, make what you think are improvements. But if you take away something that is proven to work and replace it with something that has been proven not to, you had better have a demo or a good return policy in place. We’re supposed to make a leap of faith on something that has failed previously. Of course we’re all skeptical.
People keep citing L4D as having a good mix of dedicated servers and matchmaking. It does have its issues, however. The biggest one is that people using matchmaking (unless they do a local listen server, which sucks (take note), or an official dedicated, which also usually sucks) can get thrown into any dedicated server. Which can mean server-side mods, perk-mods, level changers, etc. Anything goes. It’s also much harder than it should be to pick a specific server that you want to go to from a lobby. Certain tweaks would go a long way to fixing these issues. A lobby browser ( a real ones, thank you, like those used for old RTS’s), for instance. You’d be able to name your lobby (alerting anyone to the expected mods on the server you’d be connecting to), show expected ping, etc. You’d be able to CHOOSE your game.
What this is doing is taking choice away from us. Which is bad.
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@Chopnsauce: L4D has done just fine with dedicated servers and matchmaking. Its matchmaking system has issues, but none of them has anything to do with dedicated servers.
This really isn’t rocket science. Off the top of my head, I can think of multiple ways for dedicated servers and matchmaking to co-exist. For example, it makes perfect sense to have matchmaking alongside a traditional server browser, to cater to all sorts of gamers rather than excluding one crowd or the other. (You could even approach things like L4D and make the server browser a more “advanced” feature.) Alternatively, you could have a “server browser lite” by initially funneling everyone through matchmaking but also allowing players to “favorite” servers they liked so they realiably could revisit them. Another option would be for dedicated servers to be available behind the scenes, enabling all clan activities even without a traditional server browser. This could exist behind a matchmaking system, so that dedicated servers would always and only be private, or those dedicated servers could be “donated” to the matchmaking cloud when not otherwise in use (and it would obviously be in IW’s interest to promote this somehow, because those dedicated servers would offer a significantly better multiplayer experience than the peer hosting they’re currently targeting).
I think there’s a lot to like in Bowling’s outline of where IWNet is going with matchmaking. There’s nothing wrong with matchmaking systems, as long as they’re not the only option (in which case they destroy community). The big problem here, even beyond the fact that IW wants everyone to matchmaking and only matchmaking, is that their entire system is predicated on peer hosting which is technically unable to provide a game experience matching dedicated servers, on many different levels.
This isn’t inevitable. For example, both Bad Company 2 and Section 8 provide dedicated servers for their console versions, so consoles can have the same excellent multiplayer performance that PCs have enjoyed for years. This strikes me as rather nice, warm, and fuzzy, along the lines of “a rising tide lifts all boats”. IW, by contrast, apparently wants everyone at the lowest common denominator.
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Being a pc gamer is to me, about having freedom and control.
This is neither. I’ve never had trouble finding a server without mods in any game ever.
I am willing to see if the new model is playable, but will it be as good? I doubt it because it has already failed in a few ways, not least the death of mods.
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Aaaaaamen!
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So if I were to, say be in a community (like RPS, PoE, etc) I can’t join a server hosted by them anymore? And there’s no server HUB for us to all meet at?
Fuck. This. Game.
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My bottom line is that I enjoy dedicated servers because of the informal communities that grow up around them. Because I enjoy getting to know the guys who kick my ass on a regular basis does not mean that I want to ‘friend’ them just to experience that.
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Bingo.
I like the regulars on the servers I game on, but not enough to want to be friends with them.
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Simple solution ladies and gents, vote with your wallets. Get the game anyway, just don’t pay for it. I’m sure the singleplayer will be enjoyable enough to keep me entertained for a couple of afternoons. Let piracy rates show them what we think of them.
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If you take a moral stand, you can not lose a moral argument.
If you change the argument to What You Can Do and What You Can’t Do VS What They Can Do, your chances of losing increase by a margin akin to a sugar puff suddenly finding itself outnumbered by spoons at a hundred-to-one.
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You’ll finish it in a lunch break.
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“Of Mice and Men is no bigger than a pamphlet, it’s trash!”
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The only thing piracy rates will show them is that IWnet is necessary to combat “rampant piracy on the PC platform,” to talk devspeak.
Voting with your wallet is good, but it means not getting the game at all, not going “oh well, I won’t pay for it but I still want to play it so I’ll fuck PC gaming over!”
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@ Gorgeras: I never said anything about taking a moral stand. I’m looking at it from the simple standpoint of “you try to fuck me, I’ll fuck you right back.” I’m part of the market, the market fucks businesses, not the other way round, they are the ones investing in a product hoping me (and people like me) will hand over money for it, in a competitive market I lose precisely nothing not buying their game, I lose even less pirating their game.
@ Alexander Norris: Like it makes a difference. Piracy rates go up, devs talk that crap and fuck the PC. Sales drop instead, they instead present it as “serious decline in the PC videogame industry” and do their best fuck the PC anyway.
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And I’m pointing out the error: you have a tiny chance of turning the market to your side, where you win by market values. You have a major chance of winning the moral argument if you don’t play an illigit copy of MW2.
Don’t underestimate the power of sentiment; the moral argument is the one that matters.
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The way I see this, there’s no moral argument to win. It’s not like they’re breaking promises (or perceived ones), they’re just royally screwing their own games success and longevity. Anyways, I’ll bet a whole bunch of ‘everyday pirates’ were going to get this game just for the multiplayer access, and now they won’t have to because it’ll be a mess of laggy, disconnecting servers. It’s quite amazing to me how successfully IW are accumulating lost sales in their fight against pirates.
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Yeah I’m not really seeing this “moral argument” or if there is one that it has any relevance. This is industry, money matters a lot more than morals to these people. Anyway, turning the market to my side isn’t necessary. There are plenty of pissed off PC gamers at IW for making huge steps back for PC games, will they all pirate it? Of course not. But I do recall a theory stating that if you occupy a certain mindset on an issue, it isn’t unreasonable to assume there are many others. I can’t be the only person who pirates games to enact some small punishment on the unscrupulous developer or publisher behind them.
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If this campaign gains momentum, it would be really funny:
http://www.infinityward.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=129314
“Send in Soap to clean-up the mess…”
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My turn to spit into the ocean.
How much business does Activision do outside of North America ? While my experience is anecdotal, I was under the impression that consoles thrive in NA/UK and the rest of the world a) doesn’t care about multiplayer fps b) rather plays on PC. They basically killed the chance to have a decent match anywhere where there isn’t enough people in the same area to play. I would be very interested to see MW2 sales figures for each european country.
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US/UK is rather console dominated. Western Europe has a much stronger PC presence, particulary Germany and Scandinavia. Eastern Europe and Russia are practically PC dominated. Asia outside of Japan is PC dominated, but as to their gaming tastes, I believe they differ quite a lot from ours.
And yes, matchmaking is really a shit idea if you live anywhere where the new and shiny IWNet won’t have a strong prescense, i.e. probably everywhere outside the US and parts of Europe.
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Petition is located here, over 126,000 signatures.
http://www.petitiononline.com/dedis4mw/petition.html
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126751 Signatures Total
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That whole Game Informer article makes me want to punch somebody in the face. What a bunch of stupid cunts.
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Maybe giving the phone here is not a good idea. But I know no one will call, since most people is timid.
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What a twat.
Still, what bothers me most about the article is not its general unpleasantness, but the fact that it uses “nerd” as a derogatory in a major gaming publication. A sad sign that “mainstream” gaming is losing sight of its roots.
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TotalBiscuit: choice for its own sake isn’t necessarily a good thing. Some people will find it frustrating to have a confusingly-presented list of servers, many of which are running mods or are empty. Some people love it. Both points of view are valid, and Infinity Ward should include dedicated server support precisely because they’re both valid.
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The type of people with PC’s that can run MW2, aren’t the type of people that are going to be confused by a server list.
Besides, there’s no reason they can’t have matchmaking *and* a server list.
Aside from money, of course.
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“… Some people will find it frustrating to have a confusingly-presented list of servers, many of which are running mods or are empty. Some people love it…”
Seems the few million who play Counter-Strike find it pretty easy to use.
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Having never been a fan of the COD multiplayer none of this should bother me. But it does. A lot.
Why oh why are our favoured development companies doing this to us?
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@Frosty
Why on earth do you favor Infinity Ward or Activision?
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It just occured to me that this mess is the true legacy of the L4D boycott. Those lovely angry internet men have given weasley developers and their suckups an excuse to write off any complaint from their users as insane ramblings.
Well done, guys. Hope you’re proud.
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You can’t possibly be serious. I mean, there’s not caring about being misled, then there’s getting hostile at those that DO care about being misled, and then there’s this new low: blaming all the woes of PC gaming on those who have the gall to complain about being misled.
Congratulations, you’ve actually lowered the bar of internet debate, who knew it was possible?
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Haven’t you heard, Vinraith? Giving a damn about something is so 1990. It’s 2009, man! Nihilism is coming back, and it’s the new shit (or whatever it is that teenagers say these days).
Mind you, I guess it’s a lot easier to understand why Western political systems are so ineffective, illegitimate, unrepresentative and corrupt when people’s default reactions to protesters is “lol who caers gief me moar thingz to by”
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And this is the new “militant nihilism” where we get angry at people that DO care. Brilliant!
As if “weasley developers” needed any excuse to write off user complaints. Still, with the “anti-boycotters” demonstrating so clearly that fans will not just forgive indiscretions on the part of their favorite developer, but actively attack anyone that doesn’t, is it any surprise that IW thinks they can get away with anything they like? Finger pointing goes both ways, but isn't very productive in either.
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“and it’s the new shit”
ARE YOU MOTHAFUCKIN’ READY?
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Who is you, and wheres Dominic White?
:-)
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Ha, and you thought the comments were safe now. NOT SO FAST
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I don’t see the correlation there, Mr. White. Without touching the L4D2 boycott stuff, the indignation that many of us felt at being misled by Mr. Newell re: speed and amount of updates that would be forthcoming for Left4Dead is completely justified. Being pissed off that we can’t mod our game the way we want or have a virtual place to call home that we can meet and kill some of our finest friends we will probably never meet face to face is also quite distressing. The only recourse I have, as a singular consumer, is to voice my displeasure with such tactics and choose to not purchase either product.
This new-fangled matchmaking may be what some people want, but I’m not one of them. I want servers I can choose from until I find a few that make my rotation. Without that, I will not buy the product. Something totally different is promising something and then failing to deliver on that promise. That practice may be acceptable to some people, but I am not one of them. I will choose to not purchase the sequel when the original promise was not fulfilled. If the promise was never made and I chose to buy it based on my assumptions, I would make an ass out of myself. When someone else lies and they make me the ass, I make them pay the only way I can, via the pocketbook.
Thusly, these are the first games created by Valve and Infinity Ward I will not be purchasing. If one of my godsons gives me a gift, so be it, but I’m trying to educate them that what these people did, even if they make great games, is wrong. It may not mean much, but it is disappointing to see companies I believed in that were, and to some extents still are, making great interactive experiences, who either don’t care what I want or lie to me about what they are willing to give me in order to secure a pre-order. I see no reason to reward such behavior.
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help the send Infinity ward them soap campain -http://www.infinityward.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=129314 forum thread
digg – http://digg.com/pc_games/CoD_Modern_Warfare_2_with_No_Dedicated_Servers_SEND_IW_SOAP
and there adress is 15821 Ventura Boulevard Suite 590
Encino, CA 91436
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I dunno how old you guys or if you've even been to an aracde physically but . . .
To me playing an FPS game is like going to a public arcade. The first time I go to a server I meet people I've never met before, get to know them and the way they play and if I like it I keep coming back (not because of the game itself, but because of the server , the people on it and the type of maps they play)
Similiar I used to go to the same arcade because I liked the people there, I liked the way they played when fighting against them in Street fighter 2 or later Tekken and the sort (NBA Jam anyone? )I made friends from total strangers and got to know them but ONLY saw them when I played games :P
So, this, to me is akin to going to an arcade then randomly being teleported to another location on the planet to play with a bunch of other people that were randomly teleported to the same place who I'll never meet again (and probably won't like any of them)
Also another factor I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this but. The fact that a server is dedicated means someone owns it or is running it. That person can either be cool, or an A-hole. That means if I find a place with cool admins than the other people playing and acting like idiots will be banned and I know I can enjoy the game more. If the game is totally random anyone in it can act a fool for as long as they want and there is NOTHING I can do about it except load up another random game and probably find another griefing idiot who keeps shooting me or blocking me in rooms :P In a dedicated server world this wouldn't happen because I'd play on a server I know has good Admins and they would ban the F@#$@#.
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I’ll put my quarter up on the screen to secure my place in line.
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On another note, taking away the choice from a gamer as to who they want to play with is insulting their intelligence.
I'd much rather the match making system simply keep track of someones skill level with a Win/Loss ratio or Kill/Death sort of thing and I can decide on my own who I want to play. Maybe I don't want to play someone who is equal to my skill maybe I WANT to play someone better so I can learn!
I a server full of idiots who can't play the game going to teach any of them how to play better I ask you? And what of that one dude who is AWESOME at FPS games and just hasn't played this one yet? 17 people on the server are idiots 1 dude is new to the game but has a lot of FPS experience he's going to pwn you any way even with your precious match making.
I'd much rather have a system like Diablo 2 or Starcraft with Battle.net where you can see the other players profile and decide from that if you want to play with them. A server browser where I can see the average skill level of the other players would be enough, not random match making that decides who I play with for me O.o
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Well my money is now going to dragon age instead. I was really psyched for this game until this news! I’ll borrow it or something to play te singleplayer. The multiplayer can, as much as I love it, wait til the game’s much cheaper or they sort their fucking shit out.
Terrible move with terrible motives that they knew would cause a lot of anger. Good work activision/IW
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Myself and my clanmates, our money has now been diverted to Borderlands instead of MW2 – despite hundreds of hours of competition in CoD4. And we’re keeping fingers crossed for Bad Company 2 next March.
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Personally I think people should stop calling it MW2 because Mech Warrior 2 deserves the acronym much more than Modern Warfare 2.
Also I'm confused by the name itself, when did we start making sequals to sub-titles? Shouldn't this be Call of Duty 6? I hated this when they made Final Fantasy X – 2 and I hates it even more now. (It made more sense for Final Fantasy X 2 since it carried on the story from Final Fantasy X but still)
Unless this game picks up where the last one left off I don't care for the naming of it. If it does well, I don't know what fun it would be to play Soap at this point, I won't say any more incase anyone else didn't finish playing CoD 4 yet.
I still think it is kind of strange how attached I got to the characters in CoD 4 when the game was so short. I didn't even get that attached to the characters in Republic Commando.
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“when did we start making sequals to sub-titles?”
Since Rambo III.
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Yeah, I totally agree. The sub-title sequel thing is ridiculous. STOP THAT ISH!
I have to say though, its not all bad, as at least they acknowledge the underlying technology isn’t “sequel worthy” in probably all of such cases. Meaning, you can avoid some of those sequels if you already have the previous one.
Modern Warfare 2 obviously doesn’t use the Unreal 4 engine or something, so I’m guessing there’s a method to the madness of this silly sub-title sequel naming.
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It’s MW2 and nod CoD6 because it IS a direct sequel.
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It’s MW2 because IW don’t want to be associated with Treyarch made games.
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In fact, if it hadn’t been for the uproar about the Modern Warfare-only title, they would have tried to get away from the Call of Duty brand all together as well.
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I think IW should announce a $50 paid DLC that enables dedicated servers. That would make sense according to their current business plan.
Also, I wonder whether a PC review site/mag will balls up and give the game a lower score for this. Probably almost every site/mag will just give this 10 +- 0.5 out of 10 anyway.
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Have their ever been any mags that were objective? Rhetorical the question is, let me answer that one for extra clarity.
Heck f’ing no!!!
I don’t think reviewers are going to ignore it completely, but it won’t influence the score for sure. Games hyped like this because of a previous success usually get treated somewhat differently from brand new games. To me it seems reviewers are scared to rate such games low.
It will be interesting to see the variation in scores on Metacritic though.
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In fact it is actually Call of Duty (in small letters): Modern Warfare 2, since a study found that that half the people surveyed who were aware of the Call of Duty brand, were aware of the Modern Warfare brand.
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A point to be made.
Many folks have PreReserved Servers in expectation of this games release. Some reserver 5 or more servers at the tune of $300+ American dollars EACH. out of their own pocket. There is nothing complex about setting up servers for them. They know how to do it. They have been doing it for years in many cases. These reserved servers are a NONREFUNDABLE purchase. Which puts many people out in the cold. Right now, there are about 20,000 COD4 PC servers out there. Each privately owned (or leased) and operated by someone. Just like the 100K servers that used to host Quake3. Obviously, some folks at Inifinity Ward are still eating Captain Crunch for breakfast thinking it’s genuine a balanced meal instead of fixing bacon and eggs. What I mean is they took the all to common “milktoast” route. They just called you simple, stupid and not on the ball enough to do more than pick up a mouse or a controller and and click a couple of times.
In their Q2 Finance report, the mention 2 DLC map packs over the next year and a half to keep that $60 price tag right where it’s at. It’s about the money people, not “options”.
HERE’s THAT link:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/154118-activision-blizzard-q2-2009-earnings-call-transcript?page=9
BTW Jim, nice simple article. No fluff and right to the point. Nothing false in it or missleading. IW mad and ass of themselves with poor media control. Ive spent the last several days tracing sources and reading many many articles. They blew it from a business stand point.
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Haha, 144 reviews on amazon give it 1 star.
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Booby is angry at this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUpZVnceJx4
(note: this video is not a angry hitler, something else)
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That video is.. amazing to me. in a good way. in a true way. haha
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IW are wanting us to give IWnet a try and if you don’t like it after then complain.
They have invested a lot of money into IWnet as they have the rest of MW2. IW have always made top quality games and they are not going to suddenly give us a half-ass add-on.
So that just leaves us to say how much do we trust IW.
Me I don’t know I’m going to wait and see. It’s a question of is anyone brave enough to throw away £30 – £40 or more on a game that could well be the best game they have ever played.
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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/23/twilight-clans/
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Yea, good Lord, it is funny how he calls us names and so on. That is like some 16y/o noob who just got banned is going off and calling everyone names just to make himself feel important.
He really sucks at his job- i didn’t know you could get paid to write crap like that.
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I'm sticking to Indie games for the next 6 months as I am sick and tired of developers treating us all like cash cows; instead of selling us games they now sell us "services" wrapped around games in a tediously transparent attempt to tie us down and sell us more stuff we don't want (the Apple business model).
Apparently you can complete the single player MW2 in about 5 hours. So all this hype is for 5 hours of single player game and a multi-player that people don't really want to play because it's too restrictive? Are we gamers that stupid these days? Didn't us PC gamers used to be the smart ones, when did we turn
Yeah; this is mainly aimed at consoles, isn't it? IW have tried to give it a nice PC coating but it's mainly aimed at the console market 'cos that's where the cash is and their online gamers are a lot easier to manage.
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Actually he’s spot on.
ive been playing modern warfare 2 since it came out and this matchmaking system is nothing but fail. the game itself is amazing, but this has got to be the worst mistake IW has made with their IWNet.
i get dropped out every other round, theres horrid lag spikes (today it crashed an entire game, and made me and my friends get dropped out of steam connection all together), you end up playing the same map up to 3 times cause theres no way to choose what map to search for when starting a game, you cant put more then 9 PEOPLE IN A PARTY AT ONE TIME, you cant change game types…
….AND THERE ARE HACKERS.
A lot. I dont know what they’re doing over there at IW but i run into at least 5 aim botters or wall hackers, even some fire-rate hacks (auto pistols, snipers, no recoil, ect.) a day, and there’s not an option to vote kick or anything. im forced to either deal with it or leave, losing points.
Whats bias is IW’s explanation: Gamers over Modders. Player experience over modding and tuning.
…Modders ARE gamers? Modders make what they make to give players a new love and fresh look to something already awesome, and people that host dedicated servers put what the players want to play, the settings they want to play, otherwise the server dies (trust me, i know. helped watch over my clans server in CoD4, keeping hackers out and kicking unruly visitors). I never modded a day in my life with any of the CoD titles, but id rather play a duke nukem map remake then Crash (a CoD4 online map) and everyone i know in real life or online that play games will agree me. Mods are good, they keep games alive long after the release date.
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