Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best shooters out there. There is no doubt about that. It is so good that I put over 300 hours of online play since it was released almost 4 months ago. It is like almost 3 hours of multi player everyday. I have also completed the game on veteran which means I spent even more time on this game. I still continue to play despite a bunch of flaws in the game, environment and how others play it. As of 3/1/2010, I am on level 66 of 3rd Prestige. A really good player would have completed all 10 Prestige levels within that time frame. I do have a reasonably good stats though.
Now lets move on to some criticism. What if someone told you “Give me your money and I will give you something that will constantly annoy you, make you irritable and turn you in to a whining moron”? I am not talking about match.com. It’s the online video gaming experience I am talking about. The funny thing is most people including myself don’t realize that while we are at it. We just drift through that misery. It only hits you if you look back analyze what happened which most people don’t bother to do.
Here are some of the things I noted down while playing. There is more but haven’t noted down them all.
Auto aim doesn’t work for me. It does for some others so well that it will track me when I am running with marathon pro + lightweight pro + commando pro. Even at far distances with just a regular rifle. When I aim at someone, nothing happens. I have auto aim enabled. Then when I really do not want it, it will move the gun away from the target I am currently aiming and shooting because someone else moved close by. Sometimes this happens when the current target and the auto aim target are at different horizontal locations but on the same vertical line. Other times I have no idea why it pulls away my from target.
Developers cannot fix the players. Some don’t care. Some have no skills. Others have bad connections. This game also doesn’t have a good match making logic. Some people should stick to playing solitaire or Mario kart. Almost every girl that plays this game is better than more than half of the guys who plays online. I get the feeling that these guys play it to just brag. The game rewards these people in many ways so they stick around. I have no problem with that. Just lump them together in their own league. Just like Infinity Ward wouldn’t hire anyone inferior in to their team. Personally I prefer not to be playing with people way out of my league. My presence will just annoy them. Sometimes I feel that a lot of experienced players out there are playing just to annoy the hell out of others.
Re-spawn logic is kind of retarded. In most matches, people are cursing the re-spawn logic. Why did I spawn here? One new discovery is that if you have unlimited sprint and move faster perks, the game almost always spawn you far from the action. This must be “fix” for running and slashing kind.
Then I found that not all commandos are equal. Even if you have same perks and guns. The range and accuracy of the guns also vary by player. Some akimbos can stil shoot and kill you from half way across the map.
Some physics are strange in every game from Infinity Ward. You get stuck on the strangest objects. Small and tiny. I keep wondering why I am not able to move. It will turn out that a small piece of rock is blocking me. Other times I will just move over even bigger objects just fine. That is not because of that perk that allows you to climb obstacles faster. What are those things flying around like they are in a zero gravity well? Totally unnatural. They look so big even at large distances. Are these things in the game just to annoy us?
Your Internet connection can greatly affect your game experience. Try watching the kill cam. What you see on your screen while playing is not always what you see in a kill cam. No matter how fast your connection your ISP claims, the latency will ruin your games. This is especially true about cable Internet which seem to have higher latency than say, Verizon FIOS. Your ISP also may be compressing upload data which will add even greater latency. You can verify ISP upload compression at dslreports.com. Note that not all of them will show the ISP upload compression. In my case I saw it when I selected LinkLine. Or is it just throttling? You won’t hear anyone talking about how your ISP is impacting your online game experience than saying get a faster connection. Sure I do have a fast connection that some times shows 25 Mbps download and up to 3Mbps upload. the game shows 4 bars and it still gets laggy and choppy. It’s like the bars on iPhone on AT&T network. Bars and experience do match well.
This other problem is common among most games I played online. There is a short period while the map is being loaded at the beginning of each match. At that time you can shout any homophobic or racial slurs you want and no one would know who shouted it. You would think it is just some southerners who make such comments. Not really. Let me say people with all kinds of accents make such slurs on Xbox live. There is no way to report it without pointing at someone.
These are just random observations I had during the online play. I wasn’t usually noting down them. After not playing for a week due to other priorities I went back and all these things came back to me within a few hours. That is when I decided to note down things on my iPhone so I can blog it.
