Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has received quite a bit of flak from PC gamers for its multiplayer component. No dedicated servers, low and fixed player limits per game mode, no server browser and no modding did not gain Infinity Ward and Activision any fans.
Yet a month prior to release, Infinity Ward replied to the fan outcry with some statements of their own. Supposedly Modern Warfare 2 was to be the future of PC multiplayer gameplay and herald a new, better, direction for games of the future with superior connectivity, smoother gameplay, fewer cheaters and various great new features.
It’s now been nearly half a year since release and within two weeks from now we’ll see the first DLC pack. I thought the time right to put Infinity Ward’s boisterous statements to the test, now that the game has seen many dozens of patches and should be optimally playable.
Is it a great new future for PC multiplayer gaming, or does it fall short in every possible respect? Let’s find out.
I’m going to base this article on Infinity Ward’s brief that explained their new multiplayer methodology and essentially try to shoot each of their points down.
Before I begin I’d like to note that I have played a fair bit of Modern Warfare 2 over the past couple of months (and days). I’m currently in my fourth prestige rank with well over a hundred hours of play according to Modern Warfare 2 statistics. This is an examination of the multiplayer functionality from the perspective of an experienced player!
Matchmaking
Contrary to ordinary multiplayer games, Modern Warfare 2 only features a matchmaking system to pit players against one another. There is no server browser to find games with, which means increased accessibility for newcomers: there isn’t a cluttered interface with all sorts of options, just a big Play Game button. Unfortunately Infinity Ward then ruins this accessibility by forcing the player to choose between more than a dozen ‘different’ game modes, which is just as confusing for newcomers as a server browser list.
Now the matchmaking system works fairly decently. If you’re alone then it doesn’t take long at all to find a game and it will usually throw you in games with players of the same rank. However, Infinity Ward claims it should throw you in servers of players with the same skill level. This is an utterly false statement. Whenever I play solo, I’m thrown into games with players of the same rank, not skill level. Most players my rank had to play 60-100 hours more than me to obtain that rank, which results in crazily unbalanced games.
Smoother Gameplay
This is where Infinity Ward loses any modicum of credibility. They claim that removing dedicated servers from the game, which forces all hosting to be done locally (one of the players is always the host) will result in smoother gameplay. A dedicated server is always faster and more stable than a local host, because they’re not playing the game on top of hosting it. Furthermore, most players do not have decent upload rates for their internet connections, which is exactly what is required to be a decent host.
And it gets worse. The matchmaking system does not factor in ping when looking for games, which results in roughly 40% of my solo games being games with noticeable lag. And I’m playing on a 30Mbit/s connection that results in hundreds of 8-30 ping servers in the Bad Company 2 server browser, so most MW2 players are likely having an even worse time of it. Furthermore, the matchmaking system also has a tendency to occasionally throw you into games that you can’t connect to.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the host selection system is also broken. Rather than selecting the best host for all players, it selects the best host for a majority of players in the game. So if you’re facing off against a 6-man team that is playing over LAN on a poor internet connection, then you can bet on it that one of their players will be hosting and everyone else in the server will lag like crazy. This happens frequently, especially when looking for games as a larger (4-8 players) party.
Lastly, the smooth statement just doesn’t hold true. If the host so much as changes his name, or alt-tabs or leaves the game, then the entire game pauses and it starts looking for a new host. Better yet, if the host leaves and there’s no suitable replacement, then the game will lock up while eternally trying to find a new host. And it’s not like you have a list of servers to pick one with a decent connection, because there is no server browser and there are no dedicated servers.
You'll see a lot of this screen in Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer...
Playlists & Private Matches
Infinity Ward tauts their playlists (aka: game modes) as great pre-sets for finding public games, as if it were possible to find games any other way. It’s not possible so why not just skip the fancy talk and call it for what it is: a huge list of very similar game modes to choose from that have set map lists and player counts. No one, not even the host, has any say in the game settings or map list. The downtime inbetween maps is also set in stone, so it can be a pain to get your new unlocks in place in time for the next map, or to have to wait a minute before the next map begins.
There is the option of hosting a private match, which will gain you some minimal server control such as choosing which map and preset/game mode to play on and booting unwanted players. However, this is an option that only clans will benefit from and most of those have opted to stick with the original Modern Warfare anyway. It’s also intended to replace mods, but with the limited server settings, no custom maps, no TV mod and no competition-oriented features whatsoever that claim cannot possibly be taken seriously.
Most important to note however, is the fact that player counts are predefined per game mode. The only 16 player game mode is Ground War, which alternates between Team DeathMatch and Domination. There is no way to play Demolition, Sabotage, Search & Destroy or Headquarters with more than 12 players. Not that that’s a bad thing exactly, what with Modern Warfare 2′s lack of dedicated servers, because 4 out of 5 Ground War matches are unplayably laggy.
Modern Warfare 2 delivers solid FPS gameplay, but its broken mechanics require a lot of patience
Party System & Friendslist
Something positive to note about Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer component is that it uses Steamworks. The friends list in-game is the same as your Steam friends list and you can easily invite people to form a party to play together. It’s also possible to join friend’s when they’re playing from the Steam friends interface, which makes it much easier to form up with friends and clanmembers.
The party system is not ideal however. Players frequently run into connection issues, where you’d be able to join a certain friend for a party one day and not be able to do so the next, without any changes on either end. It gets even more mysterious when you thrown in the NAT type statistic (Open or Strict) which should be an indicator of whether players can connect to you. In reality it’s an absolutely arbitrary value, as I’m noted as strict, but everyone on my friends list can join me, whereas other people I know to be Open cannot be joined by numerous of my friends.
This gets even more ridiculous when party sizes scale up, because sometimes players will not be able to connect to the party leader, but will be able to join the party by connecting through me or someone else in the party.
And I haven’t even covered the myriad of issues you’ll run into with Ground War scale parties, which will regularly be split across different games or even thrown into different parties while searching for matches. This fortunately no longer occurs in the other – 12 player – game modes.
If you’re ever interested in playing with a party of more than 6 players, then you’re best off splitting the group into a few that remain in-party and a few that connect the moment the party start searching for a game. A non-Ground War game mind you, because that game mode only results in lagfests and connection issues.
It’s also possible to game the system by forming up with 5 or 6 local friends as a party, because one of you will generally be chosen as the host (it picks the most favorable for a majority, not all players in the server) which will result in very good connections for your team.
Modern Warfare 2 would rank near the very bottom of multiplayer FPS games
Cheat & Hack Free Games
According to Infinity Ward, the biggest benefit of their grand new multiplayer system is that you no longer have to worry about cheaters. Infinity Ward takes over the job that server admins, community mods, voting systems and blacklists have traditionally represented by monitoring games and utilizing Valve-Anti-Cheat to prevent wallhacks, aimbots and the like.
This has proven to be a naive statement that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Modern Warfare 2 is more cheater-infested than any shooter in the history of multiplayer gaming – and that’s not an exaggeration. The only advantage of the hands-off system is that cheaters now don’t even bother to hide their cheating: you’ll frequently see botters clipping through walls and headshotting players halfway across the map with 2 or 3 bullets from their assault rifle, or switching between 5 targets all around them in the space of a second, taking them all down.
And worst of all: there’s nothing to be done about it. Even the host cannot kick players and there is no voting system in place. There are no dedicated servers or server admins, so there isn’t any IP banning to be done, which makes blacklists utterly useless. And Infinity Ward seems to be doing absolutely nothing about it, as cheaters become ever more common and updates ever less frequent.
I think that I can safely come to the following conclusion: Infinity Ward’s experimental multiplayer functionality has proven to be an utter failure in almost every respect.
That does not change the fact that it’s still fairly enjoyable to play with a few friends over TeamSpeak, but it could have been a much better game had they implemented the good old server browser with a list of dedicated servers. As it stands the gameplay is solid, but the multiplayer functionality is horribly flawed.
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Seriously professional information, I enjoyed reading through it. It had some perfect insight. I will be bookmarking this website.
“headshotting players halfway across the map with 2 or 3 bullets from their assault rifle”
M16 with Stopping Power. It takes about 3 bullets from one burst to drop someone unless of course they have Painkiller. I get headshots with this from across the map on the PS3, and I’m not even that good. I’m certainly no cheater.
Maybe you’re just a moron.
Joe, you might want to read that passage again, because what I said was “you’ll frequently see botters clipping through walls and headshotting players halfway across the map with 2 or 3 bullets from their assault rifle”. You skipped the most important half of the sentence.
The emphasis here is not on headshotting players with a decent assault rifle from halfway across the map. That’s common for any decent player and obviously can’t be called cheating.
The problem here is that they’re standing inside a wall, with absolutely zero view of the target, while they’re doing it. I take it that you can agree with me that that does constitute a cheater?
Oh man, you know. I’ve quit playing Modern Warfare 2 when they’ve released the Stimulus Pack back then (I was at my 4th Prestige run), because I got sick of the Shit Matchmaking and the Hackers.
Now, because Steam had the 50% off Deal ($14 instead of 28 for both Mappacks) I told myself I give it another try.
You know what? It has become even worse. I was playing for 2 Hourse just now and, that is no Lie, I’ve counted 18 Cheaters total in all my Games I had. Either on my Team or in the other.
Seriously. I didn’t expect this. I actually thought that “with Time, Cheaters are going to Quit anyways” but I guess this doesn’t hold true. Modern Warfare 2 PC is, indeed, Cheater infested.
Oh, and what I found funny as well was, that when I’ve quit back in May (? I guess it was in May) the Playerlist showed roughly 60~80K players which were playing in the Evening. Now it’s like 10~50K for the past Days.
I guess when Black Ops comes out next month, Modern Warfare 2 is going to Die :/ It could’ve been so awesome with Dedicated Servers.
I really hate IW for what they’ve done.
Things have gotten a lot worse since this article was written. It’s now very common to run into blatant cheaters, with one in every five matches being a fairly reserved figure.
The matchmaking has also taken a turn for the worse since a recent Steam patch. Most people who used to be able to host parties can no longer do so reliably and NO ONE can host a party through several matches. After playing a couple of maps and then reforming (for a new gamemode, new players, whatever) no one will be able to join until a viable host restarts his entire Steam client. It’s ridiculous.
I’m certain that Modern Warfare 2 will see abysmal player counts next month as Black Ops and Medal of Honor leech all of its players away. Both are guaranteed to be much better multiplayer games and far less prone to cheating.