Modern Warfare 2, Prestige edition, -or- hey, blow your wad on this!

[Cyrrex]

Well, fucking shit.  If they want to marginalize the PC player, then why can't they god damned get a mouse/kb solution working on the fucking PS3 or something?  I'm mean, I'm not married to the idea of playing this on the PC per se, I just don't want shit controls.  Console controllers are beyond worthless for shooters.

I don't know what to do about this game now.  I'm sure the single player will be nice.

[NiX]

Mail them half the money and pirate the game.

[Nightblade]

Well, fucking shit.  If they want to marginalize the PC player, then why can't they god damned get a mouse/kb solution working on the fucking PS3 or something?  I'm mean, I'm not married to the idea of playing this on the PC per se, I just don't want shit controls.  Console controllers are beyond worthless for shooters.

I don't know what to do about this game now.  I'm sure the single player will be nice.

About the closest thing you can get right now would be the Frag FX v2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_btqgh9JjU

For me, one of the most annoying aspects about console shooters is that most of your opponents (and teammates) are most likely going to be hobbled by shitty controls.

[ahoythematey]

This whole situation is the gift that keeps on giving  .  I never did jump into Call of Duty, but peer pressure at work and some genuine interest had me thinking about picking up Modern Warfare 2 and finally seeing what was so great about the series.  That's no longer the plan, but it doesn't even matter: Activision and IW have already done everything in their power to entertain me with their current shenanigans, with the internet picking up for the encore, and entertained I am.

[Azazel]

Mail them half the money and pirate the game.

Or only do half of that.

 

[NiX]

Or only do half of that.

 

This is the one time I'll do that and not put it on my "list of devs to support because I'm a cheap douche"

[Engels]

hah hah, the steam forums for the game aren't loading

[schild]

hah hah, the steam forums for the game aren't loading

For ANY game.

Probably due to the borderlands snafu.

[Venkman]

IW using Steamworks

Infinity Ward and publisher Activision will be using Steamworks for game authentication, auto-patching and updating, achievements, anti-cheating measures, and persistent player settings across multiple PCs by way of the Steam Cloud. Steamworks also has built-in support for free or paid downloadable content, although that feature was not mentioned in the announcement.
...
all PC copies of Modern Warfare 2 will ship with Steamworks support -- not just those sold on Steam itself

Besides patching and achievements, what does Windows Live actually have on Steam, even, what, two years on? I only ask because they mentioned it in the article.

[schild]

Windows live is the worst thing ever.

EVER.

And it has nothing to do with Steam. It's just shitty McShitShit. Achievements will be done through Steam it seems, as will patching. Unlike Fallout 3, which is the fucking devil for using Windows Live.

[caladein]

Games for Windows Live is pretty damn terrible.  Windows Live is actually where MS has added software that's pretty nice (Writer, Movie Maker) without getting into more anti-trust trouble.

[Hoax]

I like how they're painting PC gamers as some kind of hardcore fringe fanatic, on the level of those people who refuse to acknowledge FO3 as a real Fallout game. I disabled the matchmaker in L4D because I thought it was stupid. I like choosing, they should have made it an option.

Fuck, you can disable that?  I never played enough L4D to know, how do I do that?

[Nightblade]

http://www.geeks.co.uk/7282-activision%E2%80%99s-bobby-kotick-hates-developers-innovation-cheap-games-you

And he’s not just setting his sights on Guitar Hero and WoW fans. Talking about upcoming and expensive Activision titles such as Modern Warfare 2, Kotick said: “if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further.”

 

I like how they're painting PC gamers as some kind of hardcore fringe fanatic, on the level of those people who refuse to acknowledge FO3 as a real Fallout game. I disabled the matchmaker in L4D because I thought it was stupid. I like choosing, they should have made it an option.

I'd like to know how this is done as well.

[ashrik]

Options -> Keyboard/Mouse -> Allow Developer Console

Open it up with your ` key and type 'openserverbrowser'. It should show you the option to autocomplete it before you finish typing 'open'. I think I was a bit hyperbolic, since I definitely do make use of the matchmaker. It's just that sometimes I don't care what server I get into, so long as it "fits" a loose framework, and sometimes I do care to have it exact.

This matchmaking service, if it is as robust and as great as they claim it to be, will be a wonderful solution to a problem that didn't exist for me. They make several reasoned and good arguments as to why matchmaking will be a nice feature to have, but not so many that explain why dedicated servers need to be removed for it to happen. 

[ahoythematey]

God bless you, Infinity Ward.  You never stop giving.

There are some choice statements in that chat, such as...

LaGgY_42o
What kinds of pings did you get during your IWNet testing and what do you say is an acceptable ping?
Mackey-IW
I've been playing mainly with around 100ms ping and it was great.

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

 

[jakonovski]

God dammit, I was going to post that same chat quote but I was pre-empted. Curse you and your custom text chat ability!

[Azazel]

That's gonna be awesome! Possibly Wicked Awesome! Mouse control in a PC game!??!! IW is really innovating with MW2 - I can't wait to give them my money!

 

[Goreschach]

I'm glad I already decided to not buy this.

[caladein]

The other gem from that was that games will have the same size limit as 360/PS3 at 9v9 .

I guess you have to do that when you like... kill dedicated servers or whatever.

[Trippy]

It's better this way. Trust them, they are professionals.

[Comstar]

9 vs 9? I thought it was a joke when I read it on fark. The maps must be smaller than a WW2OL depot spawn building.

[NiX]

It's better this way. Trust them, they are professionals.

I picture you saying this with the utmost importance and seriousness.

Looks like DICE wins this round! Unless they royally fuck up BC2.

[Trippy]

9 vs 9? I thought it was a joke when I read it on fark. The maps must be smaller than a WW2OL depot spawn building.

I wrote about this on the previous page. Home Internet connections don't have the upstream bandwidth to support large numbers of players.

To give some actual numbers f I had to guess I would say the median DSL connection here in the US has an upstream bandwidth of 768 Kbps while the median cable has 1 Mbps. If we assume Infinity Ward has done a good job of keeping client-side bandwidth requirements down to analog modem levels (i.e. 56 Kbps) then 18 players would require 17 * 56 Kbps = 952 Kbps upstream bandwidth which a 1 Mbps upstream cable connection barely has enough bandwidth to support.

Servers in hosting facilities, on the other hand, typically connect to the Internet at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, which is how they are able to support many more players.

[ashrik]

Isn't the 9v9 limit only for the "ground warfare" mode? Someone had said that, somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure what that mode is. Just that it was going to mirror the 360/PS3 limits on game type. So 6v6 for everything else, 9v9 for that one in particular.

A COMMUNITY BIFURCATED WILL NOT STAND

[Mosesandstick]

Servers in hosting facilities, on the other hand, typically connect to the Internet at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, which is how they are able to support many more players.

I know sh*t about this, so do you mean that they have an equivalent 10/100 Mbps connection or their lines can support up to 10/100 Mbps upload. Consumers can get themselves 100Mbps lines in some places, no?

[Goreschach]

Servers in hosting facilities, on the other hand, typically connect to the Internet at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, which is how they are able to support many more players.

Consumers can get themselves 100Mbps lines in some places, no?

Only in a few places, unless you put down a couple hundred a month, at least, for business service.

[NiX]

I know sh*t about this, so do you mean that they have an equivalent 10/100 Mbps connection or their lines can support up to 10/100 Mbps upload. Consumers can get themselves 100Mbps lines in some places, no?

I think he means they can support up to those speeds. As for consumers getting them, the cost for that high of an upload would be a bit much just to host a server for a shooter.

[Trippy]

Servers in hosting facilities, on the other hand, typically connect to the Internet at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, which is how they are able to support many more players.

I know sh*t about this, so do you mean that they have an equivalent 10/100 Mbps connection or their lines can support up to 10/100 Mbps upload. Consumers can get themselves 100Mbps lines in some places, no?

At a hosting provider your Internet connection is "symmetric" so the upload and download speeds match and traffic in one direction doesn't affect the traffic in the other, unlike the asymmetric connections that's are usually used in consumer-level broadband connections.

In the US the fastest consumer broadband connection is Verizon's FiOS at 50 Mbps down/20 Mbps up. You can, if you have the money, pay for a "business-class" connection and get whatever the phone company is willing to install to your home but that sort of connection is rare.

[Mosesandstick]

Ah, thanks as always Trippy.

Are symmetric connections technically much more difficult than asymmetric ones? I.e. is it harder for ISPs to handle uploads than downloads?

50/20 sounds stupidly generous, in London the best non FiOS is 21/3, and you can get FiOS supposedly with around 50/3.

[jth]

Are symmetric connections technically much more difficult than asymmetric ones? I.e. is it harder for ISPs to handle uploads than downloads?

Not necessarily, it's just that >90% of consumers only care about the downstream bandwidth, so the ISP's want to reserve as much of the available bandwidth of the physical connection to downstream traffic, leaving less for upstream. So it's mostly about marketing and pricing. Also most ISP's discourage or explicitly disallow any kinds of servers on consumer class connections, since they want to sell more expensive deals for those purposes.

My cable connection for example is marketed as 110mbit/s, only in fine print you can see that the upstream is only 5mbit/s. But as 110mbit/s seems so high compared to most other available deals, they can charge 55 euros/month for it which they probably couldn't if they splitted the bandwith to 55/55 and marketed it as 55Mbit connection.

[bhodi]

We aren't going to seriously trot out this discussion again, are we?

Look, all online games are heavily optimized and if you make small sacrifices you can get very good vector information for dozens and dozens of objects for amazingly low bitrates.

This whole "no dedicated server" issue has a lot of dumb associated with it, but bandwidth requirements of a 9v9 game is not one.

[tgr]

Oh dear. I just went from "will buy for the SP experience" to "won't buy it, ever" after reading how it's going to be playing.

zach426: What was your guy's logic behind removing the lean feature for PC, a feature that was a mainstay from all of your previous call of duty titles?
Mackey-IW: The game is not balanced for lean.

Not balanced for lean? Not balanced for lean? Really? How the fuck does that feature unbalance anything? Or could it be that console users can't deal with such advanced features?

frzg: Is there a /record feature? Answer yes... please. We're trying to give you a 'chance'
Vince-IW: no

This should ruin it nicely for some of the guys making videos, I think.

Axen: Please explain how a 9v9 match is a multiplayer experience? I'd have more fun serving lunch at a local nursing home.
Vince-IW: Sounds like are a very compassionate and giving person. I hope the people at the nursing home appreciate you.

And I just love that answer. Completely avoiding answering the question in any way, shape or form.

If I were going to buy MW2 for MP, I would've been doing that just for one very particular LAN party, which I've been taking part twice annually of the last few years. At this LAN we've been 15v15 as a standard practice, and it's a hell of a lot of fun, and we usually do not have internet access on that LAN party. This means the guys arranging the party has all the latest patches on a central machine, and dedicated machines for servers. If I'm reading this correctly, you will HAVE to connect to IW.net to get a list of friends to match up to, instead of just taking an IP and connecting to it and there you go. And some player is going to have the added strain of being the server.

The only reason I can think of that's behind this whole debacle is, console gamers are (yet again) ruining it for PC gamers. And if I'm not much mistaken, a fair bit of PC gamers aren't going to buy this game because of this, which IW will probably look at and say "oh well, them thar damn pirates are at it on the PC again" and/or "I guess the PC market really is dying".

Nice. Thanks, IW.

[jakonovski]

Not balanced for lean? Not balanced for lean? Really? How the fuck does that feature unbalance anything?

Well duh, you fall over if you're not balanced for lean. It's a perfectly good reason for not leaning.

[Trippy]

This whole "no dedicated server" issue has a lot of dumb associated with it, but bandwidth requirements of a 9v9 game is not one.

You might believe that but you would be wrong.

[Venkman]

Holy shit? No lean now? Sure I can see why they say "balance problem", because there's enough primo locations in CoD4 from which to grief. But they could have, ya know, designed the maps around those occasions, or fixed them once discovered. Instead, they just remove the feature because the console controllers don't work well enough or some crap?

I'm sure the rest of you are just "add it to the list" on this, but for me, this was the breaking point. Which is fine. I've got more than enough to see me through until all the Q1 games.

I can see internet rage for what it is, and I'd guess their projected PC box sales are somewhere below 5% of total or something. But the more this nonsense comes out, the more I wonder if they'll really hit the kind of numbers in general they were touting earlier this year. Ya know, the kind that caused everyone else to scatter into the Q1 range I'm eagerly awaiting. No matter what they say, this is still CoD6, so your audience is CoD4 and CoD5 players first and foremost. And even just looking at the comparable console features, this is less of a game in continually more important ways.