Modern Warfare 2 Surpasses $1 Billion Mark; Dedicated Servers What?

The Opposable Thumbs blog is running an interesting article contrasting everything Activision did "wrong" in creating and marketing Modern Warfare 2 with the game's unqualified success. Despite price hikes, somewhat shady review practices, exploit frustrations, and the dedicated server fiasco, the game has raked in over a billion dollars in sales. "There was only one way to review Modern Warfare 2: on the Xbox 360, in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision. Accepting the paid trip, along with room and board, was the only way you were going to get a review before launch. Joystiq noted that this broke their ethics policy, but they went anyway. Who can say no to a review destined to bring in traffic? Shacknews refused to call their coverage a 'review' because of the ethical issues inherent in the situation, but that stance was unique. The vast majority of news outlets didn't disclose how the review was conducted, or added a disclaimer after the nature of the review was made public. This proved to Activision that if you're big enough, you can dictate the exact terms of any review, and no ethics policy will make news outlets turn you down."

Re:MW2

[sopssa]

"double shotgun dude" running around a map

Model 1887 was balanced a month ago.

Re:vote with your money

[bloodhawk]

No, buying the game means I liked the game. I could not give a crap about how they con or bribe the reviewers, I don't care if it is made by sony, MS, blizzard or adolf hitler for that matter. If the game is fun (and it is) and is well made (it is) then I am more than happy to pay for it regardless of how they treat the scumbag media.

Re:MW2

[sopssa]

Well, it wasn't overly overpowered. When you have a perk or custom character build system like this theres always something that becomes the-best-build on the internet. There's many different sites and forums where people discuss such for World of Warcraft too.

You usually lose lots of other abilities. For that 1887 build you had to use stopping power and other perks, and couldn't run as fast as the "ninjas" with knifes. Or you couldn't be an explosives guy. The great thing about that is that its basically a different classes system, but without classes - you modify your build exactly as you want. That's what makes it fun.

Re:MW2

[Anonymous Coward]

The client side model has allowed online play tobe infested with texture hacks and aimbots.
There are even hacks to level up other clients to lvl 70 instantly, causing VAC to ban poor users who were unlucky enough to have connected to it.
There are still plenty of glitches (change to care package and you run at warp speed, ruining capture the flag, and making you damn hard to hit)
last patch did virtually nothing, and the last decent patch which stopped the aimbots was over a month ago.
The client hosting model is utterly poor - it's crippled by bad latency detection where the host can run around like god where everyone else is rubber banding. Game lobbies can take 5 minutes to stabilise, and you can drop out at any point. If the lottery selected host leaves, then the host migration tends to fail, so stopping the game. Myself and friends have literally spent 15+ minutes trying to either connect to games as one or more of us gets suddenly dropped waiting to start.
This is cookie cutter coding at it's finest - what works for the xbox doesn't work at all for the pc.
The irony is that IWnet was touted as the next best thing and unhackable. Shame, as I see one blatent aimbotter every 5 games on average...

Re:MW2

[sopssa]

There are still plenty of glitches (change to care package and you run at warp speed, ruining capture the flag, and making you damn hard to hit)

This was patched in yesterday's patch:

Updates to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades sprint speed normalized
Sentry Guns: Improved placement detection, preventing cases of Sentry Guns inside geometry
Model 1887: Bling using Akimbo and FMJ combination now has same range and damage as non-Bling Model 1887s
Improved player collision removing cases of getting into geometry and 'elevators'
Mouse latency tweaks for more mouse movement consistency
Fixes to prevent various texture and XP hacks

Re:MW2

[Tukz]

You didn't "HAVE" to use Stopping Power. Or any other perk for that matter.

1887 Akimbo is a serious problem in Hardcore game mode, where only one shot will kill from you a 1887.
I tried it a few times, just for kick and with my insta aim (old UT player), I could literally just pick em off one shot at a time within reasonable range. You fire on 1887, and while you are firing the next 1887 on the next guy, the first 1887 is reloading.

And it's insanely accurate. Even in Hardcore where you don't have crosshairs, it's not that hard to know where you are shooting short to mid range.

It's not that much if a problem anymore though, now that I've got 200+ hours under my belt, I tend to pick em out even before they get too close to me with those sticks and it's not that common any more.

Thumpers is a lot more common and pisses me off a great deal more, but that's another story...

Re:Steam fail

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you're the friend who can't work his computer. I am not a fan of a lot of things Steam does, but being hard to use is not one of its problems.

Re:MW2

[caladine]

You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.

Re:MW2

[gknoy]

HC: Hardcore. (1-2 shots kills you, usually)
TDM: Team deathmatch
HQ: Headquarters
S&D: Search and destroy

The former is a mod on the difficulty level, the latter three are different flavors of game type. I enjoy search and destroy because the rounds reset when everyone dies, and you never have people spawning behind you.

Re:Steam fail

[paziek]

I've put DVD inside, installed it and typed CD-Key. Hey, that was it! Hooah!
And: I have router. Router is connected to NATed LAN. The retail game I bought was in polish. I already had steam account, that I made without any issues whatsoever.
AND you know what? When I come to work and there was time when I was really bored, I gave it a try - launched steam and in "My Games" there it was - MW2, just pressed install and it downloaded and installed game no problem!

Those issues you encounter are your own fault. You expect steam/game client to work its way thru default HTTP port or what? If you are blocking your own traffic on firewall, then expect shit to happen. If you don't, then I don't know what you are doing on /.

Re:Maybe he likes real breasts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your description, now I'm aroused while at work

Stop pretending your platform is superior.

[sonic_assault]

95% of the criticism I've heard about this game comes from, drum-roll please... PC Gamers I've logged nearly 130 hours of MW2 on PS3 and 50 on XBox 360 since it came out (Obviously I don't have a girlfriend).I've never had any problems with aimbots. Maybe one out of a hundred matches have had a connection problem, which which was rectified by moving the host. I've encountered only five or six games in which glitching was actually an issue. I've never had any confusion or problems getting together with friends due to the centralized server. The game play is great and the levels are amazingly well thought out. Stop blaming the game. The fact is that for all the graphic superiority and mouse/keyboard functionality, the PC has it's own flaws that degrade the game to the point where you aren't satisfied by it. Also, do you really think that having private servers would help? Or have private servers been putting a pretty enough band-aid on the PC gaming experience that people haven't noticed it's not quite what it's cracked up to be?