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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

This author sounds like me minus a ban.

I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.

In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.

I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.

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IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.

I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.

> The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.

The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.

> We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 min

Elder Scrolls titles have been selling very well for a long time. I don't think this is new.

Is there a name for the phenomenon of people thinking that some behavior of humans is new when it's actually always been that way? I feel like there should be since it's so common to see the word "nowadays" followed by a statement like that.

It's usually called "being young and naive"

What a ridiculous statement to make about people who enjoyed the latest Pokemon games. Yes they perform like ass. Yes they're buggy. But they're still surprisingly fun.

I hated the frame rate issues and various bugs I ran into. I considered requesting a refund (like I did do for similar reasons very quickly after buying Cyberpunk 2077). But before I knew it I was hours into the game. This is actually the first mainline Pokemon game in 15 years that I've played up through the Elite Four on. For me, the fun of the gameplay was enough to outweigh the negatives.

Also, don't forget that even back when games were significantly simpler they were still loaded with issues. The original Pokemon games are a good example here. They had many bugs, some of which were quickly found to be exploitable. To me that's another data point to indicate that issues with the game's coding don't necessarily make the game bad.

Same experience here. I crash/bug-out multiple times per day. Every day I play, the first time I play a map it lags for the first 3-5 minutes, cycling between full speed and 20FPS. I have run into _several_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer, one of which locks me out of playing consistently (detailed in another comment in this thread).

I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.

If you can convince your crew to try something new, there are some great FPS games nowadays. I've enjoyed those, though I haven't been able to put in anywhere near your number of hours.

- Squad

- Escape from Tarkov

- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam

Squad is extremelly buggy and badly optimized though. Still my favorite game. Ever.

BTW... sometime ago there were people on Forums convinced they got banned on EFT due to WSL and Virtualbox, as there were hacks using VMs. Worth take a look first.

EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.

Never do multiplayer on Linux/WINE or on a VM.

Beauty with CoD is that you can turn it on, play for 10 minutes and then move on to other stuff in your life. None of those games (except maybe Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, I'm not familiar with that one) look like you'll be able to do so. CoD is essentially a arcade FPS, while the ones you listed are more on the "realistic" side of things.

Yep, this is what's kept my friends playing it for so long.

Tarkov looks great, but you need to plan. You can't hop on after a long day of work and realize you're too tired to play a good match.

- Hell let Loose

+1 for Tarkov, its what CoD's new DMZ mode is a watered down imitation of.

I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.

I remember when gaming "clans" were a thing and clans would play any number of selected games.

It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.

That still exists, it's just not as fashionable anymore.

My old Counter-Strike 'clan' Mousesports became a 'team', then it became an 'organisation'. These kids make a lot of money now and travel the whole world to play in their 'clan'.

Its not just the bugs though. Its the glaringly obvious "move fast" mentality as a dev. There is no way anyone looked at the warzone 2 ping system and thought "thats good enough, ship it". In all of the dev-run cycles, or the playtesting, or the beta testing you are telling me it wasnt _glaringly_ obvious that the system was broken?

QA can file all the bugs and tickets they want but when management says you can't work on anything that doesn't stop someone from playing the game they won't be fixed. Video game management doesn't care, and why should they? Bethesda games have been hot garbage from a bugs standpoint since the very very beginning and they only get more successful. Even after Fallout 76, I promise you the new elder scrolls will have quests that are impossible to complete for no reason sometimes, will struggle to function after a 100 hours of playtime for unexplained reasons, will have trivial exploits (though I don't think that's a problem) and just be unreliable and bad, but it will make millions of dollars still.

I understand theres a limit to your influence as a dev, but I disagree they are powerless. My point is that they are theoretically closing tickets without fully testing the thing they are actually implementing. They are the ones introducing the bugs in the first place. They are also the first ones to actually use the designed systems (e.g. for the pinging issue). Its much faster to just fix it then.

Nit: mw2 is the new game, you meant mw1 (2019) presumably.

Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.

I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.

He might mean the actual original MW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_2

I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>

You're right. I meant MW2019.

Though, MW2 (og) is where I got hooked on cod.

I have a _bunch_ of issues with MW2 in warzone, but by far the most absolutely frustrating is a multiplayer bug. It seems that if I get a UAV and then die in a S&D style map (e.g. S&D, prisoner rescue, Knockout) then about 50% of the time I am soft-locked for the remainder of the _game_. By this I mean my HUD goes away, the game runs at 5FPS, and I _cant use the UAV I got_. I used to be able to unglitch it by killing myself and spectating a teammate before the next round, but that doesnt work any more. I just have to wait for the game to finish. So incredibly frustrating.

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