Infinity Ward bitchslaps the PC Community
Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days you know that Infinity Ward recently announced there would be no dedicated servers and no modding for Modern Warfare 2. Today Fourzerotwo the community manager for MW2 came out from under a rock and climbed right back in again saying in part:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is actually the biggest investment Infinity Ward has ever made into the PC version of our games. It’s also the most feature-rich PC version we’ve ever made. IWNET takes the benefits of dedicated servers and allows them to be utilized and accessed by every player, out of the box, while removing the barrier to entry for players unaware of how to maintain a server on their own.
This is only the first slap in the face. Wow, nice work wasting money Infinity Ward on a feature PC gamers had no idea about and do not want. As every PC gamer out there knows there is no need for every player to setup a dedicated server as mentioned above. Entry level players simply click multiplayer and select a server from the list. There are more than enough dedicated servers run by more than capable players to choose from. What a ridiculous concept created by a team that is obviously unaware of how the PC community works.
Party System and Friendslist: Modern Warfare 2 on PC also makes it much easier if you want to party up with your friends, or again, with your clan for a match. You can utilize the friendslist to see when your friends are online, and invite them to your Party. A Party allows you to move from game to game as a group. It’s great for clan matches, because you can party of with your clan and move from public game to public game together. Or if you’re doing a scrim, party up and invite the other clan (who is in a party) and they’ll all join at once. Set up a private match together and play. It makes setting up scrims or games with friends easier and hassle free.
Wow.. just wow. This is just a ridiculous and utter fallacy. Friends lists are well and good, and a nice addition to dedicated servers. And obliviously a must for console players. But this is yet another slap for PC players who have been building gaming communities on dedicated servers since the first one’s ever hit the scene many years ago. PC players BUILT online communities, we started it.. we may know a little about it. A console gaming community is more of a bunch of people you play with on occasion and may never see again.
A PC gaming community is much more fluid and rich because PC players by nature are more enthusiasts, we are people who enjoy gaming on the PC because of the flexibility it gives us so we like to hang around with people of similar interests. You find a server that you enjoy playing on and you keep playing there. You have the chance of running into people you know and even meeting new people, or joining their team because you like playing with them. This does not happen with the system IW has in mind. Another thing? On PC we want (and expect) 24+ player servers.
Cheat / Hack Free Games: The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don’t have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters. Or relying on the server admin of the server to constantly be monitoring, banning, and policing it. Modern Warfare 2 on PC allows us to control the quality of the game much more than ever before as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system to keep games clean of hackers and cheaters.
And another slap.. what a joke this is. There is no such thing as cheat/hack free games. First off no system (Especially VAC) is capable of a hack free game. This actually is precisely the reason you NEED server administrators to monitor their servers. Many games today have come out with mods (yet another thing not allowed by MW2) to create global ban databases of bad players and ID’s. It is the PC community that stops cheating, not some silly “anti cheat” system.
I only went into a few points here because it’s just too easy to pick apart every tidbit of this post. From reading IW’s response to an amazing outpouring of rejection on blogs, gaming sites and over 110,000 signatures online it is totally apparent to me that they have absolutely no intention of changing this. So we as PC gamers must stand tall and not buy this game as it is the only way for us to show the company that we do not approve of their actions. It’s a lesson to other developers who may be thinking of dumbing down their PC experience in favor of consolization.
This will be my last entry on this topic unless they decide somehow to change their minds. Good work Infinity Ward on totally destroying COD for the PC.
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