It is a Day of Infamy,
Infinity Ward, through its representative FourZeroTwo, had officially announced the death of Call of Duty gaming as we knew it. We were hoping about great news about functionality, new maps and various other awesome features. However, we were left with nothing but disgust and despair as our community has now become seriously challenged as FourZeroTwo on a live webcast by my good friend Jock Yitch officially stated on record that there will be NO DEDICATED GAMING servers. This has many implications, but it also means that G-Fam will take a steady hand in ensuring that the other Call of Duty games will remain steadfast and strongly supported. We will even try hard to make sure that previous games such as Call of Duty 2 and also World at War will be hosted by our clan in an attempt to prevent this blatant disregard for one of the greatest benefits and extraordinary feature that PC Gaming had to offer its fans. This is no doubt one of the times in which the PC community must bind itself together and become strong and learn how to combat the evils of corporate superiority and their stranglehold on game development.
This situation has a direct analogue to history in which our gaming community is being forced to socialize itself
due to the current economic situation. I liken our community as a basis of free market and capitalism in which
everyone was able to play Call of Duty 4 without any issues just by opening the box and installing due to the massive
availability of dedicated Call of Duty 4 servers hosted at datacenters, not houses, which allowed for lag-free high performance
gaming with 32+ players without issue. Anyone could get a server setup, anyway they wanted, with any type of players. It was
true freedom, to do what the game you saw fit with any mod you wanted. Our freedom was marred recently due to the
economy causing certain gamers to let go of their game servers, but Infinity Ward failed to realize that the community
was still strong up until now. There were still plenty of new game servers arising with massive support from their respective clans.
Our freedom has been replaced by a socialistic IWnet which will force gamers to use only IW's system to connect to games.
This doesn't sound all bad, except this will force the game server to be hosted on the person with the largest connection.
Considering that a minority of broadband users have good upload speeds, this will handicap max server player limits to 10-14 without extreme lag. Also, the ability to host mods will be effectively taken out. You can only change a few settings, and these will not be allowed to be altered further by IWnet. This is essentially taking away all of our freedoms, as we are forced to play the game as IW sees fit. The competitive gaming scene will be running away from this game no doubt, and there is a fair chance that an all-out boycott would be the only thing to prevent such a catastrophe. I am confident that piracy will run wild on this game more than any recent release due to the crappy and crippled multiplayer system which will no doubt make the game suitable for single player use only, for which you technically don't even have to pay. The specifics of which will not be endorsed or discussed here, but there is no doubt that this is a sad day for gaming.
Fourzerotwo was on our BASH webcast this morning and he had a few surprises for the PC community. Here are the snippets:
* We're doing a lot on the backend to make the game accessible for everyone.
* There is no delay for the PC version of MW2
* There's prestige mode
* Jason West at the MP event, said that he was dead on, on the matchmaking servers. We've been building a system on the backend called IW.NET.
* You are completely reliant on IW.NET. There are no server lists. There are no dedicated servers.
* You have private matches where you can customize the game
* You cannot put MW2 on a dedicated server.
* This is the first time we've ever done something like this and the team has huge plans for what IW.NET develops into.
* Customizing your game...you have quite a few options in a private match
* You're getting same game (as in Console), plus matchmaking and private match.
* Server admin point-of view, NO DEDICATED SERVERS
General
* IW partnering through Steam is what you will see in the future. Matchmaking is not through Steam, but IW.NET is run in conjunction with Steam.
* GSP's will no longer be renting out servers.
* No PunkBuster. VAC will be used as an anti cheat.
* Retail distribution: Pre-orders will get a disk. Or you could order from Steam.
* DLC may now need to be paid for - not confirmed.
* Piracy was only a small reason for going to IW.NET - not the whole reason.
Clans:
* No more clan servers. Private matches, replace clan servers.
* Listen servers will connect to each other.
* IW.NET/Steam will replace the community server admin Competitive Gaming
* Competitive gaming has changed forever.
* It might be possible in the future for IW engineers to load a "competitive" setting on IW.NET, but it is far from a guarantee. It might also never happen.
Modding
* Modding the game is now very much in question. Fourzerotwo had no info on modding. However, it appears that there will be no mods or maps for MW2.
* Modding in SpecOps? Unknown.
[5] comments latest by Slothy - 07.11.2009 - 22:54
G-Fam has been resurrected from the dead after 5 months of inactivity and loss of both our old website, servers, and our ventrilo server. However, this sad news will not continue as PsyberGaming, founded by XGuju, has setup all of these new servers that are bigger and before than before as well as an awesome site that G-Fam can utilize to help it become one of the premier gaming clans as it once was. We ask all of our old members to stay active on the forums, and we ask any potential new members who have what it takes to join our amazing clan. We know that hard work and perseverance always pays off, and we are almost there to achieving what we had done so before.
