Sidenote: in order to see if people are actually reading my posts in full, the first person to comment on this post and tell me, in order, the three words that are in bold and a different colour will be awarded the pride of having done so. Also, if you include your details such as your blog (if you have one), your Twitter, etc. I will make a point of including them in a future post.
You may, upon reading the title of this post, instantly assume that this is just going to be a rant on the lack of dedicated servers in the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, and while I can assure you that it is not, let me just get that bit out of the way first. So, the PC version of MW2 blah does not support dedicated servers blah no control over kicks and bans blah limited number of players blah no modification can be done blah it's terrible and Infinity Ward should not have done it blah...you've heard it all before. While I am not exactly pleased about the lack of dedicated server support, the main crux of this post isn't about that. It's about the system that we were given in its place. Its number is 666, and its name is IWNet.
Disclaimer: unless I specifically say otherwise, all games that I refer to in this post are the PC versions of said games.
Once upon a time, in the year 2008, a little-known company called Valve Software released a game called Left 4 Dead. You might have heard of it, but you can be excused if you haven't. It was purchased by a few people, who enjoyed it very much...I should probably drop this act now. If you're reading this blog as a fan of gaming and technology in general, you have almost certainly heard of Left 4 Dead and will more than likely own it. If you do own it, you will know full-well that it is quite literally a multiplayer game. Yes, there is a single player mode, but unless you want your AI teammates wasting an entire medkit on you just because you have a slightly mild headache, and not using grenades at all, you'll play the multiplayer, but I digress.
What makes Left 4 Dead's multiplayer so incredibly fun is that it uses a matchmaking system to pair you with people that the game thinks are roughly on par with your skill level. Although it's not perfect, it actually works very well. However, it differs from most matchmaking systems in that, although there is an option for games to be hosted locally, most games are hosted on dedicated servers. This is how matchmaking on PC games should be done. Now, back to Modern Warfare 2.
I wouldn't really mind the lack of dedicated servers if the system that was in its place was any good, and on the face of it, IWNet is a system that should work quite well, and indeed, every good game I play on IWNet is a very good game. But on the flipside, whenever I play a bad game, it's not just bad. It's horrible. There is no consistency at all in the people who you play against. In one game, I might be clearly the best player on the server (or at least one of the best) and be top player by a huge margin. In the next, most of us playing might be on par in terms of skill, with only slight differences between our abilities, and I may not come out on top, but it will have been so much more fun than simply beating everyone else. But then, in the next game, I might end up bottom of the table, with only a few kills to my name against the 100 times I've died. No consistency at all.
Then there's the brilliant decision made by Infinity Ward to throw out the established PunkBuster anti-cheat system, and instead use the Valve Anti-Cheat integrated into Steam. While it might make sense from a logical point of view, as of course IWNet itself runs through Steam, delayed bans make absolutely no sense in a game where you can't kick the hacker in question from the current game. PunkBuster is not perfect, but in a Call of Duty game, it works very well indeed. I know this from personal experience. I am part of a COD4 clan called Revenge at War (or {RaW} for short, and all of our servers don't just have PunkBuster. They stream to PBBans, which means that anyone caught using a hack on our server automatically gets their details logged on the PBBans server. PunkBuster is almost impenetrable, and whenever somebody does start using a hack never seen before, we always catch them. It works. I cannot imagine VAC used in COD4. VAC removes all control from your hands, and puts it into the oh so reliable hands of Valve.
I feel that it's also necessary to mention the reliability issues with IWNet. I swear that so far, for me, there have been more failures to connect than there have been successes. It is bad on a whole new level, a level at which connection failures can occur not just randomly, but in predictable patterns. For me, I tend to have 2-3 connection successes in a row, followed by a game that is okay but has some lag spikes, followed by a game in which Host Migration plays a bigger role in the outcome than anything I actually do myself.
But, for me, the absolute worst problem with IWNet is to do with the way it handles map selection. There are only a few maps in MW2 that I truly love to play, such as Highrise, Sub Base, and Favela, and several others that I like but don't love. However, there are 3 distinct maps that I absolutely hate: Afghan, Scrapyard, and Wasteland. This may have something to do with my computer, which can only run MW2 reasonably smoothly with all settings at low, and Scrapyard, for example, always gives me FPS lag. I digress.
As a PC gamer, I am used to seeing a list of servers, and then choosing which one to join. This allows me to only play the maps that I like to play. However, with Modern Warfare 2, you only find out which map you are about to play once you are in a randomly chosen lobby. Granted, most of the time you can leave before the game starts, but I always seem to join a lobby either immediately before the game launches, or once it has already started, and whenever this happens, the map is almost always one that I don't like playing. I have once had to leave 5 different lobbies in a row because the map was set to be Afghan. The sixth one I joined then turned out to be Scrapyard. I was annoyed. IWNet seems to be intent on making me like the maps that I hate by forcing me to play them a lot of the time. And I really do mean a lot of the time, yesterday I played a total of 10 games of MW2 and 7 times out of 10, the map was either Afghan, Scrapyard, or Wasteland.
To console gamers, who have always had a system like this, the previous paragraph may sound like a very petty complaint. But I am not a console gamer. I am used to seeing a list of all the games that I can join, and all of the maps that each game is set to. And while I fully appreciate that such a list is difficult to implement in a matchmaking system, there really needs to be something in its place. And the ability to vote to skip maps does not count, as on the rare occasions that the vote actually succeeds, you have no idea what the new map will be until it comes up. Even the option to choose a map and then join a game or a lobby that is set to that map would have been really quite useful. But not giving any control over what maps you play is just pathetic.
Dedicated servers have become a staple of PC gaming, but even with this in mind, you wouldn't think that, when a company announces to the world that the multiplayer for their upcoming title will rely entirely on matchmaking, and not include any sort of support for dedicated servers in the slightest, it would become an issue that overshadows the game itself in any sort of context, be it news, reviews, forum discussions, or pretty much anything. Unless the company in question is the one that quite literally made Call of Duty 4.
That is why I am disappointed with Modern Warfare 2 on PC. As fun at is can be, you always get the sense that it isn't finished. If this had been a Treyarch game, the community may have been more forgiving, but this is Infinity Ward's title. Call of Duty is a game that began on the PC, and by ignoring the PC market, IW has forever damaged their reputation as a first-class developer of games. Call of Duty 4 was, and is still, one of the best games ever made, but as long as Modern Warfare 2 remains as what it is, it can never be considered as legendarily awesome as Modern Warfare 1. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what Infinity Ward constantly deny, Modern Warfare 2 is a console game, and the PC version is just a hastily made port.
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