I am with the 20 million people worldwide who think that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is probably the best game ever. It’s a brilliant campaign plot with amazing environments and fantastic audio all wrapped up in a gooey mess of lush graphics. Infinity Ward has done an unbelievable job at making a film-quality game that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Too bad Activision were stupid enough to get rid of them!
But despite its immense success, MW2 has several major flaws when you go to play its multiplayer mode. Issues that need to be addressed in the next (if there will be) Infinity Ward-built Call of Duty game is to become any sort of success.
- Please please PLEASE sort out the stupid glitches that give people that search through YouTube videos looking for exploits an unfair advantage over us that play the game normally! A major example would be the rock in Fuel which is constantly being rubbed up against by n00bs who want to get inside because they get killed if they play normally.
- One of the most annoying things to happen in MW2 is joining a game only to find that it’s seconds from being lost and there’s nothing you can do about it. Why should I suffer a ‘lose’ just because the team I replaced (which all left!) sucked?! Can I please have a ‘Join lobbies only’ option?
- Personally, I think the ‘Pro’ versions of the perks need to be looked at. To get ‘Commando Pro’, all you need to do is meele 80 people, which is fairly easy when commando makes you leap across the map, through walls and over obstacles to knife someone who is most likely lagging through a doorway. This is too easy compared to ‘Sit Rep Pro’ where you have to destroy 5 million pieces of enemy equipment! Maybe the ‘Pro’ version isn’t too hard, but the level VI challenge requires 25 billion times as much work! Also, why don’t knife kills count towards Ninja Pro and Scrambler Pro?!
- Although Infinity Ward created all the environments and character models, I’m not sure that the netcode they used for the multiplayer section was their own. Whoever wrote it should be shot, for real! Why do I have menus and screens that I have no exit from? If the game doesn’t load as planned, I’m looking at a completed loading screen for what seems like years.
- In Modern Warfare, you had to listen to everyone you don’t care about natter away in the lobby. Modern Warfare 2 fixed this by allowing you to mute people in the lobby, but what if I don’t want to hear anyone ever? Can’t it mute all by default and I un-mute as I wish? I don’t want racial hate screamed at me by someone who has jumped into my game when I’m trying to line up a shot!
- A major problem that I found living with another PS3 owner was the lack of support for multiple consoles on same network which constantly left one of us with a ‘strict’ NAT type which Infinity Ward tells me is bad for matching games. I’m pretty sure NAT can be used or not used, not varied but I may have misheard my computer systems and network-studying flatmate.
- It wouldn’t be that hard to make the score/kills/wins/accuracy tables available on a website either. The data is all stored on servers somewhere on the Moon (or wherever!) and I could quite easily fart a website that displayed your scores and a day-to-day graph of how much I suck so I could see my score decrease on the days I don’t have time to play.
- From what I hear, computers are quite good at spotting patterns in data. Why oh why, then, can’t they spot that one person is constantly being killed by another in the same way at the same location? I, like many, hate ‘stat padders’ or ‘boosters’ so why hasn’t this been addressed? It wasn’t so bad when they boosted in cage matches – I would just kill them when they came out because in all probability, they sucked, but now they’re ruining my proper games! The fact that some use the same clan tag is just embarrassing for IW…
- I was once told why ‘elevators’ exist, but I have since forgotten. However, I can’t see any logical reason why they exist, testing or otherwise. Please remove them; I am tired of getting killed from a mountain 16 miles away from the edge of the map and through walls that you shouldn’t be able to get behind!
- There have been several games where when I had finished, I had to run to the toilet (or something equally as important) an not had a chance to see the game score. When I get back into the lobby, why isn’t there a summary of the game? I have everyones KDR, but no game-related info…did we at least win?
- Again, the crap netcode I mentioned is also used for team matching. I would love to see the algorithm used because I don’t think it uses any parameters or variables whatsoever. It will quite happily group all the people from the last game and all the people who just joined, despite not knowing how good they are and will more often than not team me up with a bunch of people who can’t even manage a KDR of 1, let alone win the game as well!
- As with the boosting, it would be quite easy to spot a pattern for lag switches. Surely if the game starts lag-free and then there’s a huge spike in ping times when the host lies down on a flag, it’s a good sign that he is being a dick because he read about lag switches on Facebook when a mate did it…
- Problem 12 could be solved by the use of a ‘Vote new host’ system. If more than half the people think the game is too laggy, it could surely re-evaluate and pick a better host, just as it does with the map selection before the game. I have been in too many laggy games just desperately waiting for the system to pick a new host.
- There have only been a few occasions that this has affected me, but random spawning is very annoying. I have watched the killcam and the player who killed me just watches me pop into existence, unprepared to shoot and just opens fire. One kill to him, one annoying death to me…
- I spent money on Call of Duty 4 and all the extra map packs. Why can’t I transfer all those old packs to my MW2 game? I want Quarry, Bog, Chinatown, Broadcast and most importantly, Wet Work. Why are you selling me content which I have already paid for? Could I have not at least got a discount for buying both? This is similar to the DRM agreement you can have about songs bought from iTunes, and I hate the way that works as well!
- I have been in several games where the host on the losing team pulls out his ethernet cable (or his routers power cord) and the game ends in a draw, despite the fact that we were winning 198-14 just because he couldn’t hack losing. This is not only extremely irritating, but a huge waste of everyones time which is why we need…
- DEDICATED SERVERS! Problems 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13 and 16 could easily be solved if just 1% of the sale of every game and map pack went towards dedicated servers and there would still be plenty left over to write “FUCK OFF BOOSTERS!” onto the Moon in the blood to all the people who use a lag switch…
If you have any more ideas, I don’t really care because this is my blog so feel free to write them down and then set fire to the piece of paper and launch it into the sea. You can’t comment because I hate trolls and don’t like to feed them!
Some credit goes to Swert for some of the ideas and some goes to me, but it’s mostly what everyone complains about anyway…happy shooting everybody!
