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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."
Buying the game gives as signal that you agree with Blizzard-Activision's actions. $1 Billion revenue says that Blizzard-Activision did an excellent job.
The following screenshot is a clear indication a lot of people can't stick to their principles: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/mw2_boycott.jpg
Agree with you on the superiority of PC input control vs. consoles. I also agree that there is something to be said for being able to jump into a game without going through thousands of options. However I disagree with everything else you state. I say this as someone who though MW was one of the top 5 games of all time, and one of the top 3 multiplayer games of all time. For me MW2 has been an enormous disappointment and I refuse to purchase another Infinity Ward game in the future.
1) The single player mode in MW2 is a marginally updated version of MW, more like an expansion pack. The textures have higher resolutions, and they have a few gimmicks like the ice climbing scene, but that's about it. There's no 'wow' moment like when you controlled the AC130 for the first time in MW (the Predator drone in MW2 is too similar to the AC130 to be considered innovative). There's no new groundbreaking revolutionary ideas.
2) The multiplayer is entirely compromised due to hacking. I originally also thought that the lack of dedicated servers was not an issue, since I also never really played on the modded servers. However, as 50% of MW2 games end in a tactical nuke, I've learned that the key benefit for dedicated servers is that the server admin polices and bans cheaters. And if a server got overrun by cheaters you could just flee to another one that was better managed. Clearly the automatic anti-cheating provisions do not work - hackers can always side step whatever protection the game has, much like computer viruses constantly evolve and find new ways to side-step the anti-virus protection. What's happening is simple: they're looking for ways to monetize the multiplayer franchise (think WoW), and that starts with controlling it.
In summary: single player is too short and not innovative enough, and multiplayer is overrun by cheaters and too restrictive for the end user. The COD franchise is being monetized ruthlessly by the parent company - good for their shareholders, bad for the gaming community. Interestingly, the PC community has responded the strongest to these issues (look up the GameSpot average user rating for COD6 on the PC - it is mediocre - and compare it to COD4). The console community has been much less capable of independent critical thought, partially because cheating is probably much less of a problem. Perhaps they're just trying to kill the PC version - they may think they can make more money off consoles.
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.
But it doesn't mean their burgers are better.
Just sayin'
Yes, thats the best added benefit of dedicated servers. However, I haven't really seen such blatant cheating around. There's sometimes an occasional one, but then everyone bitches at him and he leaves. Maybe geographical location has something to do with it, I don't know (as the matchmaking gets those players closest to your physical location)
However, as 50% of MW2 games end in a tactical nuke
I disagree here tho. I've played MW2 hundreds of hours and I've seen tactical nuke two times, and on the other time the guy did it 10 seconds before round end and said on chat he though it would be a fun ending.
That being said, I don't really play deathmatch or such where the cheaters most likely hang around. Domination, capture the flag and hardcore HQ are more 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...
CoD:MW2 had a budget of 200M$. From those 200, only 70 were spend on the development of the versions for all the different versions : PC, XB360 and PS3. 130 were used for marketing. It tells us that the actual game as less "value" than the way it is marketed.
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I consider myself a hardcore PC gamer. I pretty much switched to playing multiplayer FPS games almost exclusively after Doom came out; I just love the genre and the competition of playing against real people. I loved it so much it ended up becoming my job; me and some friends founded a company to provide multiplayer gaming servers for other people in Australia (which went on to become the biggest online game service provider in Australia, blahblahbalhablah).
As a Ye Olde Time PC gamer, I remember the days of games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal - when you could drop AUD$80 on a game and know that you were going to be able to play that game for years, because it had freely downloadable and publicly available dedicated servers, meaning anyone could run a server anywhere in the world, at any time, with any settings. Not only that, the games were generally moddable - which meant the game experience would always be changing.
This model brought about things like Counter-Strike (probably the most successful multiplayer FPS ever), Desert Combat (directly responsible for the development of Battlefield 2), Day of Defeat (one of the first of manymanymany WW2 shooters). It brought about Team Fortress, which has since turned into Team Fortress 2 - another staggering success story. (Lucky Valve are still on the ball.)
There's been a clear paradigm shift recently though. I feel that it began with Battlefield 2, and more games are following the new model. Yes, there's a clear focus on console gaming. But more significantly, I feel, is the focus on trying to really sell brands over and over again as fast as possible.
With few exceptions (Blizzard, Valve), game developers and publishers don't want you to be playing the same game for three or four years. They want you to upgrade to the new hotness so they can get another chunk of cash out of you.
I didn't buy MW2 - I'm completely and utterly uninterested in it if it doesn't have dedicated servers, and I put my money where my mouth is and didn't buy it even though I've heard its pretty awesome. But it's hard for me to come out and say what IW are doing is clearly wrong - because obviously it's commercially successful. I do feel it's not in the best interests of gamers - I think we'd get much more /value/ if they went back to the old model. But MW2 has set a precedent, and I'm sure MW3 is already on the drawing board and not very far away.
A little look at the user reviews in Amazon for the PC version (here) and by contrast the XBox version (here) is quite enlightening.
Basically if you've played Online FPSs in the PC in the last 10 years (with large matches, low lag, effective banning of cheaters and user maps and mods) this game will seem mediocre to you at best: people complain of lag (due to no dedicate servers), unpunished cheating (like aimbots) and pestering behaviour (teenagers playing music in voice), no user extendability (as per choice of the maker: no user mods or maps, only paid for - DLC - extensions) and second-hand market killing measures (online activation mandatory on the PC).
This means that this game should be really be seen as two separate games "Modern Warfare 2 XBox" and "Modern Warfare 2 PC" with the first being quite successful (thanks in in no small part to hype and slick marketing) for the target platform and audience and versus the competition in that platform (console games tend to be simpler and played by a younger audience) and the second being very mediocre from the point of view of that target audience and versus the competition in that platform.
It's thus not surprising that you have two almost completely opposite sets of reviews, since the game really has two faces ...
You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.
Not everyone who pulls of insane shots is using an aimbot. I have never played COD online, but I have played AA2 and AA3 a shitload. I have been banned from plenty of servers for dropping the admin at long range with a crap gun. If you always try for the insane shots, you quite often find you start pulling them off.
I dont read
When people have to replace their banned copies.
Why banned you ask? Well, we don't have dedicated servers, people hosting games local. What does it tell the /. crowd? Right. That cheating is far from impossible. And, wonder over wonder, the cheats are in.
This week the call of a worrying friend reached me. He joined a MW2 game, was wondering why everyone was 70 with 10 honor levels on top of it. Two kills later he knew why: He was 70 himself (instapromotion from about 50). He quickly quitted, fearing a ban, but, well, the "damage" is done (damage being relative, after all, who doesn't want to reach 70?).
Now one of three things can happen. First, Activision bans everyone who increased his level with invalid means. Meaning, that that Damocletian sword is looming over everyone's head because you can't just "avoid" cheat servers. You join a game and bam, you're a cheater. Second, they can do nothing. Which essentially means that the leveling aspect of the game is essentially gone to waste because you pretty much have to create a level 70 character to compete sensibly. Unless you enjoy being the target dummy for the army of 70s running circles around you. Or they can only ban those that started the cheating (provided they can find out who modified the server and who didn't with at least some accuracy). Then you still have a buttload of 70s running around, because for every cheater you can have a game full of players who, willingly or accidently, blew up their level.
Pest, cholera or typhus, free choice.
And that problem will not vanish. As long as you don't have control over the game servers, you cannot control cheating.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.