WTF of the Week: MW2 No dedicated Servers!

I have played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with passion over the last two years and ever since World at War did not live up to the COD4 standard (though still being a solid game), I have been looking forward with hope to Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2: A game with no flaws, so perfect, so crisp, with an epic singleplayer story line with strong multiplayer competition that was anticipated to surpass COD4 multiplayer due to new perks, more guns, maps, more levels and superior graphics. These were my thoughts yesterday.

Enter Sunday morning. I wake up and after doing some jobs around the house and homework due to the internet being down (a common occurrence here in Australia), I check my clan's forums. First up I see a new thread titled 'Bad News about MW2 for PC'. Clicking on it and expecting to see some news about a delay, which wouldn't bother me at all since it means MW2 wouldn't be released during exams. Instead I find some news about MW2 having 'No dedicated servers, no modding, no server lists, no ability to host.'

Great. Just Great. Up until this day I had thought Infinity Ward to be superior to their Treyarch counterparts. But this news is far worse than COD3's existence. Whether or not this move by Infinity Ward was due to pressure from the new evil Activision is debatable. It does not matter to me. All that matters now what on Earth are PC gamers going to do? By removing server lists and dedicated servers and replacing it all with a new system called 'IW.NET' which we are meant to rely entirely on for matchmaking services, we (PC gamers) are brought down to the console level of gaming which many gamers purposely avoid by playing online games prominently on the PC.

This brings us to our next problem. What is going to happen to the clan and modding communities which have existed since Call of Duty? If there are no dedicated servers then there cannot be modded servers nor a server equipped with competitive mods. They have basically reduced the life of the multiplayer game right there. Competitions and mods bring additional life to the multiplayer aspect of the game, why would they want to remove that? Maybe Rob Bowling knows, but he was too cryptic and didn't explain with good reasoning why Infinity Ward thinks this is a good idea or anyone for that matter. With the matchmaking system a single player hosts the game which will lead to more lag when compared to people playing on a dedicated server. Also if the single person hosting leaves the game, the game has to stop while the host migration occurs. Where does LAN fit into all of this if all online multiplayer games are made and found through match making? Are they going to include a LAN browsing element?

BASHandSlash.com who covered this story first have started calling this day (which was Saturday for America while Sunday for Australia) 'Black Saturday' and the 'Day of infamy' and complaints have come from all corners of the internet with many Infinity Ward community members public announcing on the forums that they are canceling their pre-order. There is also a petition now here,which should be signed by all to raise to the attention of Infinity Ward that their latest plans suck. BASHandSlash's article 'MW2: Our game has changed forever' can be found here. It basically summarizes all the changes to how the MW2 multiplayer will now work.

 I don't think I've ever been so saddened by a video game before, this is truly a sad day for PC gaming aswell as the gaming industry as a whole.

If anyone would like to share their comments/rants/rage feel free to comment.