Been to the leaderboards in Modern Warfare 2 much? It’s truly a disaster, the amount of glitched profiles rendering skill all but useless. You can scroll through thousands of players before finding a legit one. Never mind the lack of a crackdown on 1600 MS Point boosting rooms and colorful, hacked Gamertags which make you look so cool.*
Treyarch is taking a stance that Infinity Ward never seemed to beyond some of the heaviest glitches. They’re pushing a lot of the entry level stuff down to make it harder to cheat, but they’re also hiring a full-time employee to examine the complaints via the game’s Theater mode. Note that does say one full time employee, so hopefully Microsoft and their team of Xbox Live mods can lend some type of a helping hand. The number of reports for a game this active and large will be unbelievable.
Multiplayer designer David Vonderhaar is also a bit distressed that only 60% of COD players actually played the online segment, sticking solely with the single player. Why? Vonderhaar cites the irritation of the online community and a difference in difficulty, the latter why they’re included a set of game modes against bots, allowing players to acclimate themselves to the mechanics. Not much they can do for the former.
There’s certainly another layer here, which is the increasing cost of multiplayer, from the $15 map packs, yearly updates to the series, and the cost of Live itself (not PSN of course). Surely some of that 40% were Silver members who simply don’t want to deal with all of that, and who can blame them?
(*sarcasm)
