Modern Warfare 2 PC will not have dedicated servers

[Stark]

It's arguable they wouldn't even have to buy good reviews; MW2 is an 'instant classic' and anyone who says it's not amazing is just going to get dogpiled by literally millions of people. Integrity isn't a great assest when you're running a review website with comment functions.

[Alyeska]

Any website that offers fan reviews has scores around 10%. The big reviewers for the PC version are going to get mobbed by the angry fans because the review was bought. Writing a review that completely ignores the single largest controversy surrounding the very release of the game your reviewing is highly indicative that someone encouraged you to ignore it.

[Stark]

Any website that offers fan reviews has scores around 10%. The big reviewers for the PC version are going to get mobbed by the angry fans because the review was bought. Writing a review that completely ignores the single largest controversy surrounding the very release of the game your reviewing is highly indicative that someone encouraged you to ignore it.

Even that is questionable; a thousand retards spamming the vote due to petition-style thinking is going to massively sway it. It is funny as hell, though.

The idea that anyone is going to give a shit that gaming reviews are dishonest or overly positive BASED ON THIS ONE GAME is absurd. It's been like this for a decade. In a week nobody will care and I doubt anyone will stop reading IGN or whatever over it. I'd say anyone with a brain ALREADY ignores all videogame reviews; they're not getting any LESS reliable.

[TheMuffinKing]

You think? Of course they fucking are, and every other game company does that too to the point of buying up review companies and gaming magazines and trying to keep it hush hush to the readers. This is why I long ago stopped reading 'professional' reviews. I don't even care anymore about the game anyway, since I've now played through the single player on console (this works out so well for Activision too, I can still easily play the game and yet they get not a dollar from me) all I can say is look, Modern Warfare 1.5 made harder by adding more enemies rather then making better missions. Its absolutely nothing like the advance call of Duty 4 was over the previous games and yet they want more money then ever for it. Activation is very much the new EA of asshole gaming companies.

Why should it be an advance if the previous formula worked so well? I could understand if we were talking a generational difference like between Crysis and Doom, but drastic changes in such a short span?

[Alyeska]

Crysis was one of the worse examples in recent history that I remember. Reviews just glowed over it. Sandbox gameplay you say? Approach the situation from any angle? Riiiiiiiiight. I used to trust reviews from PC Gamer. Now its abundanently clear that they can be bought. Not all their reviews are like that, but I highly suspect that most of their big name reviews on new games are. But with the negative publicity on MW2 and that even a PCG editor went public in his support of the MW2 dedicated server petition, I just wonder.

Mass Effect developed a very large outcry after the DRM was announced for it. As it stands, DRM became a very bad word to hear in PC gaming. So much so EA tried to get away from using the word and eventually dropped it outright. Outcry from consumers can get their attention. With MW2 having one of the largest outcries I've heard in quite some time, the total silence from Infinity Ward and the glowing PC reviews (half of which are exact copies of the console review with a single added paragraph about graphical settings) makes me think Activision believes they can ride the storm and buy reviews to get the sales up.

[Jade Falcon]

You can also add in that there are comments in the Amazon site, not reviews, but related discusions that have been removed by Amazon with the "This has been removed by Amazon", sometimes the discussion has disappeared altogether without any sign.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why should it be an advance if the previous formula worked so well? I could understand if we were talking a generational difference like between Crysis and Doom, but drastic changes in such a short span?

Umm, because they want a full fucking price for the game? If they just wanted to make another version of the same game with an even shorter single player then it should have been thirty bucks. Exactly like how Crysis spawned Crysis Warhead and thus provided more standalone content without trying to ass rape the consumer at every turn. Infinity Ward made this out to be a whole new game in its propaganda, and it is not and they did not try to make up for this at all by providing more content except somewhat more multiplayer maps, some of which suck so much I see everyone voting past them two days after the game came out. It still even has lots of objects like railings which cannot be penetrated, which is the number one thing I expected them to fix since I never did believe this was going to be anything but a modest improvement over the last product.

Crysis was one of the worse examples in recent history that I remember. Reviews just glowed over it. Sandbox gameplay you say? Approach the situation from any angle? Riiiiiiiiight.

I don’t know how the sandbox missions bullshit got started on that game, but in any case they DID provide a full fledged map editor and mission/campaign maker which is way better then being stuck in the same preprogrammed sandbox to me. You could even modify the existing game missions to add more approaches if you so desired or hoards more enemies or anything else you might want. Hell even the demo had the editor and one map to play with. Meanwhile Modern Warfare 2 takes away mods completely and gives absolutely nothing in return.

[SylasGaunt]

Found this image on their official forums today and it pretty much sums up why I'm not buying MW2 until it either has a price drop or they do something sensible like patch dedicated server support back in.

[Ace Pace]

Question to everyone here whining about the PC reviews.

What do you want them to do? Judge a game by it's hype? Or by the PR around it? If so, then a game review is automatically a review of the entire system from which the game came from. To me, this is absurd.

A game review reviews the game, on it's own merits. If the multiplayer is fun in it's current incarnation, then that part of the game should get a positive mention. At most, it should be compared to prior versions of Call of Duty/MW and improvements and defects mentioned.

[Commander 598]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[Edward Yee]

Beat me to it, but I'm already lol'ing.

A game review reviews the game, on it's own merits. If the multiplayer is fun in it's current incarnation, then that part of the game should get a positive mention. At most, it should be compared to prior versions of Call of Duty/MW and improvements and defects mentioned.

Although this seems to be a 360 review, it doesn't seem to have any 360-exclusive aspects (the review) and it's amusing to see the game get a 9.5 even when it clearly denotes three issues that seem cross-platform: the campaign being an awesome "collection of events" but incoherent overall, the Perks/Streaks being possibly overly important compared to CoD4 (while grenades are less so), and the controls being "absolutely horrible" in 3rd Person mode.

[General Zod]

Beat me to it, but I'm already lol'ing.

A game review reviews the game, on it's own merits. If the multiplayer is fun in it's current incarnation, then that part of the game should get a positive mention. At most, it should be compared to prior versions of Call of Duty/MW and improvements and defects mentioned.

Although this seems to be a 360 review, it doesn't seem to have any 360-exclusive aspects (the review) and it's amusing to see the game get a 9.5 even when it clearly denotes three issues that seem cross-platform: the campaign being an awesome "collection of events" but incoherent overall, the Perks/Streaks being possibly overly important compared to CoD4 (while grenades are less so), and the controls being "absolutely horrible" in 3rd Person mode.

I've learned to ignore the actual scores in reviews for years now. It's always hilarious to see a review needle on about various complaints here and there and yet still give a game close to a perfect score.

[Stark]

Are we done with pretending that game reviews are honest assessments of quality?

Good. People want simple numbers; look at almost any assessment for anything. People want a simple number at the end (like, say, IQ) and fuck the system, fuck the supporting data. Games are even worse because people just want to know which way the tribal wind is blowing; is this a 'good game' they should worship or is it a 'bad game' they should laugh at? Why bother reading all that text when there's a fat 95% there? Find a simple number from an authority and deciding what's good and bad is very easy.

Every time someone says 'xyz gave it 9.4' they reveal that they're complete idiots who can't form their own opinions. Or stating a verifiable yet meaningless fact. As Zod says, the review text is often not too bad (once you remove the gonzo nonsense like 'it blew me away with it's awesome rollercoaster story'), but the ratings are totally decoupled from that, because this is an industry and they know people just look at the numbers (and maybe the phrases printed REALLY BIG).

I think reviews for MW2 and DA are very interesting, but not as a method to determine quality. They show some very different attitudes toward games (or 'goodness') between the PC market and the console market (ESPECIALLY Dragon Age), which is worth understanding (especially in context of PC gaming losing it's primacy).

[Minischoles]

Seems the problem of no console and no dedicated servers has already been worked around:
http://www.gamereplays.org/modernwarfar ... _id=555175

[Temjin]

Seems the problem of no console and no dedicated servers has already been worked around:
http://www.gamereplays.org/modernwarfar ... _id=555175

It's been worked around for now. But I bet you can expect a patch soon that will "fix it".

I'll be staying away from this game until there's actually something official fixing those issues. I'm sorry but the idea of no mod support and having to rely on match making doesn't appeal to me at all, unless I want to spend 60-70 dollars on a game I probably won't touch after a month, if that.

[TheMuffinKing]

I would love to see some either some region locking, or more intelligent matchmaking. Almost every game I play is hosted or populated by a majority of players from the U.K and Europe, turning things into a shitty lag fest.

[Mr Bean]

I would love to see some either some region locking, or more intelligent matchmaking. Almost every game I play is hosted or populated by a majority of players from the U.K and Europe, turning things into a shitty lag fest.

Hey who would have thought it? Peer to Peer Netcoding is kinda shitty for an online video game?
Could it be the lack of dedicated servers (And yes some 360 games have those) and terrible matchmaking is showing off how wonderful Peer to Peer makes the worst connection everyone's connection?

[Jade Falcon]

I would love to see some either some region locking, or more intelligent matchmaking. Almost every game I play is hosted or populated by a majority of players from the U.K and Europe, turning things into a shitty lag fest.

Which is the most bollocks excuse around. Region locking has been in one game, Army of Two and the multiplayer in that was wrecked as a result.

[TheMuffinKing]

I would love to see some either some region locking, or more intelligent matchmaking. Almost every game I play is hosted or populated by a majority of players from the U.K and Europe, turning things into a shitty lag fest.

Which is the most bollocks excuse around. Region locking has been in one game, Army of Two and the multiplayer in that was wrecked as a result.

How many players did army of two have online? Like five. I think that the population of players for MW2 is large enough to support such a function.

At the very least I want matchmaking to match me up with players on the goddamn West coast USA (not Mexico or further South either), not fucking Dusseldorf.

[Jade Falcon]

How many players did army of two have online? Like five. I think that the population of players for MW2 is large enough to support such a function.

At the very least I want matchmaking to match me up with players on the goddamn West coast USA (not Mexico or further South either), not fucking Dusseldorf.

Army of Two sold reasonably well, but it would have had a lot more online if not for the region locking. Region locking a game makes no sense whatsoever.

[TheMuffinKing]

How many players did army of two have online? Like five. I think that the population of players for MW2 is large enough to support such a function.

At the very least I want matchmaking to match me up with players on the goddamn West coast USA (not Mexico or further South either), not fucking Dusseldorf.

Army of Two sold reasonably well, but it would have had a lot more online if not for the region locking. Region locking a game makes no sense whatsoever.

Army of two sold pretty well indeed, but having two on two for multiplayer and the close teamwork required to win a match necessitated region locking, unless you seriously want to argue that such a game would be playable between me (in Seattle, USA) and Somerandomdude (Pretoria, SA).

The lag would quickly render the match into a shitpile.

On the other hand, the way the region is defined would have a lot to do with it too...upon further thought, perhaps region locking isn't the best choice, I concede that such a heavy handed method is counter-productive.

You've given me an idea. Assuming for whatever reason regional dedicated servers were a non-issue, what would stop games from searching for the geographically closest peer connections?

[Stark]

Its possible to request local games without locking you out of other rgeions. The matchmaking just sucks.

[Starglider]

Could it be the lack of dedicated servers (And yes some 360 games have those) and terrible matchmaking is showing off how wonderful Peer to Peer makes the worst connection everyone's connection?

Non-dedicated (including dynamic) servers are not the same thing as actual peer-to-peer. In a true peer to peer system, each player sends their control inputs (somewhat abstracted) to every other player. Synchronisation and cheating prevention is done by a variety of techniques that can be concisely described as 'black magic'. This is a bitch to program on anything other than a LAN or a turn-based game, so the vast majority of games designate one node as the master copy of the game state, and have everyone communicate with that one only (i.e. have one of the player's machines act as a server). My first company was working on real peer-to-peer for real-time Internet gaming, and making that work properly required highly unconventional netcode coupled with a fundamentally different kind of physics engine (to the kind that basically all contemporary games use).

[Stark]

Demigod tried peer-to-peer multi (apparently off-the-shelf) and it didn't really work out until I believe they added a) client filtering by latency and b) a client-server framework at some point.

[Genii Lodus]

Yeah, Supreme Commander ran off the same engine as Demigod and used true peer-to-peer. It used a 500ms delay IIRC to absorb latency. Obviously you can get away with that in an RTS not so much anything faster paced.

I quite like this quote from an IW developer from this article.

Our mantra of '60FPS 60FPS 60FPS!' would all be for nothing if we had horrible input lag. ... If anyone cares about the end user experience of their game, they should be heavily invested in their input latency."

I know input lag's quite different from network lag but I find it strangely hilarious how they can make remarks like this while simultaneously introducing more lag for most people by going to non-dedicated servers.