Letter to Infinity Ward

Infinity Ward, it's party time. As in, "Fix It."

First off, congrats on having the biggest “entertainment” launch in history, whatever that means. I’m sure you guys all got phat bonuses and are planning an all-inclusive to Sandals over the holidays. Good for you.

I, on the other hand, am planning on spending my holiday vacation hanging with the family, enjoying my time off and playing your game. This is both good and bad.

On the one hand, it’s a fun game. It looks awesome. You get to do cool stuff like ride snowmobiles and pop caps in terrorists (and Russians). To that, what’s not to like?

But there are a lot of problems with your game, and I’m not sure whether they come from negligence, ignorance, apathy, or perhaps some combination of all the aforementioned. Furthermore, I’m sure you really don’t care. You’ve made your millions. You have no impetus to actually go back and make these changes to your game. And no, I’m not talking about the glitches, but we can hit those real quick.

Glitches abound, apparently, such as the Javelin glitch (which apparently you’ve fixed), the rock glitch (also fixed), and the new glitches which pitch us from our playlist into some kind of private match hell where we’re given unlimited ammo, made to shoot our teammates and generally tormented by the high-pitched squeals of adolescent, still-forming douchebags of the future (working on being fixed?).

But never mind the glitches. Glitches happen (though they possibly could’ve been prevented with, you know, a public beta).

What I’m really here to complain about is the party system, which apparently you just trucked over from CoD4 whole cloth. Did you not read the forum posts complaining about CoD4’s lobby system? Apparently someone from Treyarch did because at the very least, they had an option to maintain party integrity when withdrawing from a pre-game lobby. How can you, who now have produced the latest incarnation of the franchise, not have added in that one simple thing? Your pride doesn’t let you concede that someone who borrowed your game code might’ve made an improvement to it?

So let’s talk about the CoD:MW2 lobby experience for a moment, just so we’re clear on the terms of engagement.

On any given night, we’ll get a room together – either six for most of the playlists, or nine for Ground War – and attempt to play an evening’s worth of matchmaking. Say we’re on for two hours. In that two hours, on average, we’ll play seven or eight games.  Sometimes, we’ll get more than that. Many times, it’ll be less. This is with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of players online playing.

When it’s less, it’s because your system, such as it is, is not working properly. Or maybe it is working properly, which makes the whole situation reprehensible.

Start with just getting a party together. It’s not as easy as it ought to be. Sure, you can send invites and people can accept. But you can’t tell who’s in a room with who, other than by guessing from the number of people on your friends list with matching status updates, i.e. “JoBlow is playing Domination on Afghan.” Even then, you don’t know how many people are in that room because they might not all be on your friends list. Being able to see who’s in a given room would be swell. In fact, as we’ve seen that feature before in other games in the past, we’ve sort of come to expect a feature like that.

In my clan, for instance, most of us would rather play a sixes game than Ground War, for any number of reasons. Maps are less chaotic. There’s more opportunity for teamwork. The connections are generally better. But it’s not so easy as just sending invites, because you might end up with a room of eight, nine or even 10. And then what do you do? Tell your friends to gtfo?

Which brings up the question, why can you not just limit the size of the room in the first place? Take a fancy little slider and move it back and forth until you’ve selected what you’d prefer the size of your room be. Sounds cool, eh? It should. We’ve seen it before.

Of course, once you get your party together, there’s the whole other matter of keeping it together. Some nights, every single time we try to enter a playlist, we lose someone in the transition. Now, I can be understanding about network problems, incompatible hosts, etc., but someone getting dropped is the catalyst for a whole shitstorm of inconvenience that directly impacts the quality of the experience.

So someone is dropped. As party leader, it would make sense if, upon seeing this (and parties are not kept together in the list to make it easy to take attendance, which again, should be a no-brainer), if I could just bounce my party back to our pre-playlist lobby and reacquire the lost player. But you can’t do that, can you?

Amongst my friends, we have a code word to tell people to back out. No, I won’t tell you what it is. Get your own. The party leader yells the code word, then drops back into pre-playlist (it’s not pre-game, yet another nonsensical problem), and waits and hopes his party heard him and/or notices he’s no longer there. If they leave before the party leader does, however, they’re dropped from the party entirely… wtf. Again, all this could be solved by just giving the host party control over the party. Not rocket science.

But then there’s the other thing. If the party leader backs out, it completely abolishes the party itself, which means if those players want to carry on playing together, someone has to start up a new party and send out invites to everyone who was just in the room, provided they can, of course, remember everyone. Again, this should be one of the basic functions of a decent party system.

Should be. It should be because that’s what we’ve come to expect from a good party system, which is where this whole thing tips into probably-going-to-piss-off-hardcore-CoD­-fans land. That’s not my intention. But you can’t have a discussion about your lobby system without bringing Halo into the conversation. Sure, I could beat around the bush and infer what game I’m referencing, but we’re adults here, right? The dirty truth is that no one has made a lobby on par with what Bungie rolls out routinely at this point.

And it’s not just that your lobby isn’t as good as that you can find in Halo 3. Your lobby system isn’t as good as the one in Halo 2, a game that dropped four-and-a-half years ago on the first iteration of Xbox Live. In fact, it was one of the first MP lobbies at all for Live. So here we are almost five years later and you mean to tell me all the other AAA-level developers are still playing catch up to Bungie?

I’m not getting into the game vs. game debate. I won’t debate the level of community support or online interactivity. That’s not why I’m here. I like your game. I enjoy playing it. You know, when me and mine actually get into a game. But it shouldn’t be so hard, and you should know that.

But here’s what I know. You won’t fix this. You won’t even read this most likely, and you sure as hell won’t put serious effort into fixing it. Why would you? You already have our money. We’re already playing your game. But I’m not a lonely voice in the wilderness. I’m not the only one who thinks thus.

This is a quote from someone on our forums (and we are a site of more than 16,000 members):

“When you sell 4.7 million copies at launch you don't need to care about these problems. Gamers are still making it the most played game on Live and they will still buy the next one at launch. The only way to make them care is to hit them in the revenue stream but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.”

In fact, I’m sure we’ll get the same sort of answer from you we got from Bungie, which was something like this: “Most people play the campaign, not multiplayer, so we cater to the campaign experience primarily, not the multiplayer.” If that’s the case with MW2 as well, then it sort of explains why you ported over your busted lobby from CoD4.

It doesn’t excuse it, but it might explain it.

The rub of this is that I like the game. I’ll be playing it in any case; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother with writing something so likely to be ignored. But what’s the line from the Rage song? “If you settle for nothing now, you’ll settle for nothing later.”

You want to be thought of as the best, you can’t skimp on the fundamentals. You can’t be oblivious to these problems, so what’s it going to be?