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Modern Warfare 2 Surpasses $1 Billion Mark; Dedicated Servers What?
The Opposable Thumbs blog is running an interesting article contrasting everything Activision did "wrong" in creating and marketing Modern Warfare 2 with the game's unqualified success. Despite price hikes, somewhat shady review practices, exploit frustrations, and the dedicated server fiasco, the game has raked in over a billion dollars in sales.
"There was only one way to review Modern Warfare 2: on the Xbox 360, in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision. Accepting the paid trip, along with room and board, was the only way you were going to get a review before launch. Joystiq noted that this broke their ethics policy, but they went anyway. Who can say no to a review destined to bring in traffic? Shacknews refused to call their coverage a 'review' because of the ethical issues inherent in the situation, but that stance was unique. The vast majority of news outlets didn't disclose how the review was conducted, or added a disclaimer after the nature of the review was made public. This proved to Activision that if you're big enough, you can dictate the exact terms of any review, and no ethics policy will make news outlets turn you down."
Well, it wasn't overly overpowered. When you have a perk or custom character build system like this theres always something that becomes the-best-build on the internet. There's many different sites and forums where people discuss such for World of Warcraft too.
You usually lose lots of other abilities. For that 1887 build you had to use stopping power and other perks, and couldn't run as fast as the "ninjas" with knifes. Or you couldn't be an explosives guy. The great thing about that is that its basically a different classes system, but without classes - you modify your build exactly as you want. That's what makes it fun.
The client side model has allowed online play tobe infested with texture hacks and aimbots.
There are even hacks to level up other clients to lvl 70 instantly, causing VAC to ban poor users who were unlucky enough to have connected to it.
There are still plenty of glitches (change to care package and you run at warp speed, ruining capture the flag, and making you damn hard to hit)
last patch did virtually nothing, and the last decent patch which stopped the aimbots was over a month ago.
The client hosting model is utterly poor - it's crippled by bad latency detection where the host can run around like god where everyone else is rubber banding. Game lobbies can take 5 minutes to stabilise, and you can drop out at any point. If the lottery selected host leaves, then the host migration tends to fail, so stopping the game. Myself and friends have literally spent 15+ minutes trying to either connect to games as one or more of us gets suddenly dropped waiting to start.
This is cookie cutter coding at it's finest - what works for the xbox doesn't work at all for the pc.
The irony is that IWnet was touted as the next best thing and unhackable. Shame, as I see one blatent aimbotter every 5 games on average...