Any PC player who's into shooters has probably heard the oncoming train-wreck that will be Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. Infinity Ward dropped a bomb earlier this week, officially confirming months-old concerns that it would not ship with dedicated server support. The official Modern Warfare 2 forums erupted into virtual civil war, forcing the separation of the single central board into platform-specific sub-forums.
Here's the skinny; Modern Warfare 2 will not ship with dedicated server support, nor is there any being considered. Instead, patch distribution (and presumably, DLC) will be handled through Steam, while matchmaking will operate through the new Battle.net clone, "IWNet". IWNet's matchmaking will function almost identically to console matchmaking, accomidating for player skill, connection strength, and a variety of other factors. On the technical side of things, the game will also function like the consoles - the player with the strongest connection will host, keeping track of the game and transmitting the game state to his fellow players.
While this sounds like a great model for the game, it suffers from major issues of practicality. Peer-to-peer hosting is a good model when you can flatten out a lot of the variables; identical hardware is a primary way of accomplishing this, which is why consoles can generally get away with it. From the perspective of PC, this idea falls apart. Players' hardware generally runs the gamut of cutting-edge new video cards are multi-cored processing, to two or three-year old rigs with graphics one step away from "off". Matchmaking could also be a disaster in and of itself. On consoles, an inevitably larger pool of players and slightly reduced variables (see same hardware) make the process reasonable. However, on PC, the process is significantly more complicated, as the number of variables skyrocket. Connection speed, hardware power, geographic position and player skill and rank must all be accommodated out of a player pool a fifth the size.
There are other sacrifices associated with losing dedicated servers. In the United States, there is a particular emphasis on gaming along either coast. Players in central North America are greatly hampered if they cannot host a server in close geographic proximity. Military players are particularly hit hard by the decision. An Air Force friend of mine is stationed at a base in North Dakota. While he can generally play MMOs and RTSes without problems, shooters are out of the question unless they host the server off of hardware in their town. I can only imagine how this may affect personnel stationed in Germany or Japan, where the player-base is even lower.
I also reject the weak arguments that Infinity Ward has put forward to defend its decision. Fourzerotwo, the community manager for Infinity Ward, posted this piece earlier today defending the choices made for multiplayer. He makes several unsubstantiated claims. The first and most dubious is the mythical gamer who can't figure out how to use the original title's server browser. Considering that I was able to figure it out with no assistance at the age of 10, I'm going to have to call bull****. Perhaps even more perplexing, he makes the claim that the matchmaking will place you with the most stable, speediest game possible. In the strictest sense, this is probably true - Modern Warfare's netcode was excellent and I have faith in their programmers - but it fails to account for the fact that average pings will probably be double that of a ping to a good dedicated server, across the board. In a separate editorial, IW's Jason West and Vince Zampella explain the company's desire to make the PC experience more accessible for the average PC user. The argument is floated by unsupported quantitative claims and straw-man arguments that are too numerous to address here, but the "politics" of the argument are certainly interesting. The cost of hardware and general headache of PC gaming caters to a more dedicated, capable crowd of gamers then consoles do, to the point where I question the actual existence of this disenfranchised softcore PCer.
Perhaps the biggest sticking point of this debacle is the price. Activision has decided to charge $60 for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, without the option for either of the collector's versions. I certainly think that Modern Warfare was an excellent game worthy of $60, so I'd certainly pay it for the sequel. However, I simply will not pay 20% more for a game with a dubious chance of being a strong online title, nor will I pay for less features. I am not some kind of online revolutionary, but I am not willing to simply sit around and accept whatever crumbs that a developer drops for me. Purchasing a game with reduced features for more money sets a dangerous precedent for future titles on the platform.
I leave you with a history lesson; I have been playing multiplayer PC games since 1998, beginning with Tribes. Dedicated servers have been a cornerstone of every PC shooter that I have ever played. In fact, I cannot recall a game (successful or unsuccessful) that I have played that utilized a peer-to-peer hosting model. Gaming history, however, is filled will such examples. Medal of Honor: Airborne is the most recent example of a PC game with a peer-to-peer hosting system - and quite notably, a failed example.
