Generally those grouped into a party are using voice chat to coordinate amongst themselves. This gives them a very apparent edge, because while it’s true that anyone can chat within the team, in my PS3 experiences most people do not. Those who do chat are usually too busy being off topic, singing, or calling the various players and game components “gay.”

Three Domination games I played yesterday prompted this post. Of course, I use “play” in the broadest of senses as I wasn’t playing as much as I was hiding, shooting down air support all on my own, and generally being as much as of an annoyance to the partied-up enemy team as I could be.

The problem

On the enemy team there were at least three high-level guys in a party. They weren’t that good, all things considered, but they were far better than the incredibly bad players I had on my own team. Their consistent coordination and usage of UAV and Counter UAV effectively stymied the young and clueless players with whom I was so unfortunately partnered up.

The enemy team was playing Domination as Domination should be played — they would capture and hold two points and then proceed to literally dominate via spawn trapping. That’s the way Domination works — you spawn at one of your held points and if you don’t have a point you spawn randomly. So, by letting us keep a point they knew where we were spawning for the duration of the match and guarded our exits accordingly.

Between the constant harrier strikes, pave low runs, and chopper gun rapes, there was nothing we could do. One guy on the enemy team was even using a javelin to pound the area around the spawn into submission. We weren’t getting out this alive.

The setup

• P90 + silencer
• Stinger
• Semtex
• Stun grenades
• Marathon Pro
• Cold-Blooded Pro
• Ninja Pro

It’s pretty self-explanatory — Marathon and a submachine gun for quick relocation, Ninja to stay quiet, a silenced weapon to avoid pinging the radar, and a stinger to take out enemy air support. The stuns and semtex are interchangeable with whatever you’d rather use. I enjoy stunning enemies so they can’t escape my semtex. You could also employ the UMP for three-shot kills at a distance but I don’t really enjoy that gun. Its recoil, slow rate of fire, and pretty terrible iron sights have turned me off of it.

Cold-Blooded is fantastic in that it prevents you from being targeted by automatic air support. It also prevents you from being highlighted by a red box for predator missiles, the chopper gunner, and the AC-130, so if you stop moving and hide intelligently (often as far away from your teammates as possible), odds are these weapons of usually impending doom will not kill you. This makes the perk an essential part of your repertoire if your team is being constantly harassed by air support.

I joined the first game in the middle of a match on Estate and I started out using a silenced FAMAS since it’s a good setup for distance shooting. Pretty soon, however, I realized that things were going very, very wrong. We were trapped at C and we were getting destroyed. After my first death via harrier I switched to the stealth class I showed above. I tried sprinting or sneaking out of harm’s way on several occasions but never made it very far. It was then that I decided to do the only thing I could do — be annoying.

I don’t know about you but getting my hard-earned air support shot out of the sky ticks me off. That in itself is kind of sad because taking out air support should be a given. However, lots of people simply try to ignore it — “someone else can deal with it.” And then they wonder how they got beaten so badly? Gee, I wonder!

Knowing full well that the entire enemy team had its sights trained on and around the C-point area, I hid in the corner behind the garage or whatever that building is and shot down enemy air support. I couldn’t do much else. Although I did manage a few kills here and there as people tried to sneak around back of the point to capture it.

The play style

That match ended with a score of 200 to sub-100. The guys in the party seemed very impressed with themselves after the game and had a nice circlejerk. Next we found ourselves on Afghan. I’m not too big a fan of this map due to the lack of routes around it — it’s very easy to hold down defensively.

As a result, my inept team could never hold more than one point at a time. Thus, I did what I could once the never-ending stream of air support started to roll out — I shot it the hell down. I kept to our one point (either A or C; never B), guarded it, and shot as many planes and choppers from the sky as I could. I even managed to get some air support of my own a couple times. Having run out of stingers I was forced to take out an enemy chopper gunner with one of my predator missiles on more than one occasion!

I managed to walk out of that match with a score of 18-6. My all-star teammates had scores like 4-19 and 5-26. Thanks for the help, guys! The next match was on Wasteland and followed a similar path to the Afghan match. Once again I found myself doing nothing but taking out air support and hiding from it. In one instance I found myself trying to wedge my prone player as far under the broken tank tread as I could to avoid an AC-130. Those take more missiles to destroy than one player’s got and no one else was helping, so it was all I could do to hide from the explosions. I was hidden from the plane via Cold-Blooded but then my stupid teammates started spawning right next to me. I didn’t die but it got a little tense there for awhile as I watched them get blown up right in front of me.

And that’s pretty much how it all went down. I played sneakily, tried to capture points when I could, shot down another chopper gun with a predator missile, and took out quite a few UAVs and Counter UAVs. In both of these last two matches I was the only person on my team with a positive kill-death ratio.

The solution

There’s no reason at all to subject randoms to the torture of playing against a coordinated team. The very nature of pubbing goes against allowing this. Couple the unfairness there with the unbalanced remainder of the game and the resulting matches are not fun for the casual bad player. Unless, of course, the party guys all suck too, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

The best way to handle parties would be to have mercenary modes for all gametypes rather than only TDM. I don’t care that TDM is the most-played gametype. Some people don’t like TDM as the other game modes are generally more dynamic and often last longer. But if you’re hell-bent on avoiding coming up against a coordinated party, you have no other option but to play TDM.

Rather than a distinct gametype, “mercenary mode” could be an option to enable if you ever didn’t want to play against parties. Sure, that might lessen the party-goers’ pool of available games but who cares about those guys? Anyone who teams up against random baddies in order to boost their ego is an idiot not worth catering to.

I got the PS3 for Christmas. My mom, who likes buying me things and always hooks me up at Christmastime, was wondering what she could possibly get me. I’d been thinking about getting a PS3 for awhile but before I told her about it she mentioned she’d seen it in some store and thought it looked interesting. I said, “Sure, why not?” and thus ended up with a PS3 on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t play it until I had an HDMI-capable TV or monitor. I took a couple days tossing ideas around — TVs are fucking expensive and I didn’t want to spend that much money. I also have no speakers for a good TV setup. I settled on a monitor instead and wound up purchasing a 24″ Samsung T240HD. The idea was that I could hook both my computer and PS3 up to it and switch between them at will. Then, once I had the proper type of adapter, I could also switch my speakers between the two.

It sounded like a plan, so I finally committed to a purchase on the 30th of December. I could have done it sooner, and looking back I definitely should have. Due to my order date I inadvertently ensured the delivery of my monitor would take the longest time possible. My order wasn’t processed until the next day, there was a holiday that Friday (the New Year), and then no one ships over the weekend. My monitor sat in Maryland for days on end while I amused myself with CoD4 and L4D the best I could.

The next Tuesday was its slated arrival date. Since I’d thought it might come sooner I had told NewEgg to ship it to my apartment rather than my office, and now it was going to arrive when I wasn’t there to sign for it. Luckily, my roommate’s friend was to be hanging around the apartment all day and he said he’d sign for it. Just in case, I left a note saying a neighbor could sign for it if no one was home. Everything was peachy. Wrong! When I got home there was a UPS slip on the door saying no one had been there to sign. The driver wrote his own note: “CANNOT LEAVE PACKAGE.” They’d try again the next day.

Why my roommate’s friend hadn’t been there to sign for it I’m not sure. He even said later that he had indeed been there all day. Whatever. Wednesday I hatched a plan and my bosses went with it. Since the new delivery time was set to be between 10:30 and 2:00, I could leave work after an hour, work from home during that time slot, and return to work after finally getting my monitor. I did just that and the UPS driver showed up at a punctual 1:58. The wait had started to cause me anxiety due to what my roommate’s friend had said — what if I somehow missed them again? If I missed UPS three times they’d ship it back to NewEgg and I’d have to buy the damn thing and start the process all over again.

Now I was set. Or so I thought; it couldn’t be that easy. For some reason I had majorly brainfarted and hadn’t gotten an HDMI cable. On NewEgg the product images showed a bunch of cables and for some reason my dumb brain assumed HDMI would be one of them. Thus, I needed one as soon as possible, but faced with overpaying three to ten times more than necessary in a retail store, I decided to try online first. I’d waited this long; what was another two days? Well, turned out that the cable I wanted was backordered until Friday, so even if I paid the $4 for one-day shipping (Amazon Prime kicks ass) it would arrive Monday at the earliest. It was whatever at that point so I went ahead and ordered it.

I then tried my hand at hooking up the PS3 with the AV cables that come with it. Well, that was fucking terrible. For whatever reason the picture came through as black and white, so I was getting a blotchy, grayscale picture at 480i stretched to 1920×1080. It was fucking beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I couldn’t even get through the second Spec Ops section of MW2 on the easy difficulty because I couldn’t make out the enemies from the background. Sigh.

Come Friday, which is when my HDMI cable order was finally processed (but not shipped), I was tired of waiting around. I bit the bullet and headed to Walmart. Surely Walmart of all places wouldn’t try to gouge me with overpriced cables — it’s Radioshack and Best Buy who are famous for their $130 HDMI cables. Walmart didn’t have cables quite that expensive but my options were limited to a $19 3′ cable or a $30 6′ one. I went with the latter even though it was still at least three times what a good HDMI cable is worth. When I returned home I attempted to cancel my Amazon order for the other one but was unable to do so. The window for canceling is pretty small apparently.

No matter. My PS3 was finally playable a full two weeks after I’d gotten it. I played the MW2 campaign for a little while and admired it for all its ridiculousness. Seriously, that game is so far beyond ridiculous that it wraps around lame and ends up back at awesome. The HDMI cable I’d ordered previously arrived Monday and I’ve hooked that one up instead. If I ever make it back to Walmart I’ll return the $30 one. Then again maybe I should keep it for the next time I brainfart and leave myself cableless for no good reason.

• No dedicated servers even after that petition.
• Maximum player count per game is 9v9 (due to lack of dedicated servers).
• You cannot adjust your field of view.
• Leaning has been removed because the game isn’t balanced for lean.
• No client-side demo recording (i.e. no frag videos).
• IWNET decides who will host; the players have no say (just like Xbox Live).
• In tests under what were likely rather ideal circumstances the developer guys were seeing pings around 100 ms.
• Text chat, graphics settings, and mouse control are the PC version’s sole features.

The last one is real, you guys!

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.

At this point it’s laughable. MW2 is looking like one of the worst console-to-PC ports (if not the worst) in the history of gaming. They’re really phoning it in by now — who’d have thought a PC game would have text-based chat and mouse control?!

MW2 is quite literally a console experience via PC. Why anyone would pay $60 for that is beyond me. The multiplayer portion will probably be fucked, and the single-player is guaranteed to be all of six hours, I’m sure. But let’s move on to the real point of this post…

Infinity Ward has learned nothing.

At least as far as multiplayer balance goes. We should all be pretty aware of how messed up CoD4’s air support is. You do nothing at all and you get rewarded for it. You crouch in a corner while your air strike kills two people and you get a chopper given to you for free. That chopper can, in turn, get your next UAV and air strike. Positive feedback loops, no balance, etc. I’ve been over it time and time again.

But check out this new gameplay video. In it you will see the following ridiculous things:

• A burst-fire gun that looks to be more powerful than the CoD4 M16 (which is the gun all console babies cried about).
• A spamtacular automatic shotgun.
• A guy “earning” an Apache chopper with an air strike.
• That same guy going from 11 to 25 kills in 30 fucking seconds using the Apache’s wall hacks.
• Our buddy using the stupidest perk ever conceived — a tactical nuke that automatically ends the game as a win for your team.
• The game going from start to finish in less than four minutes. Seriously, what a waste.

Ho. Ly. Shit. This is the worst example of gameplay balance I have ever seen in my gaming days. There isn’t any balance at all! He got all of nine legit kills before air strikes, choppers, and the nuke took care of the rest of the match. That Apache chopper is far more deadly than CoD4’s… and people whined about that thing incessantly! And then, once you’re finished raping with it, you just end the match whenever you feel like it with your nuke. Bewm. The end. So long and thanks for all the fish.

It’s just… I… I don’t even know what to say anymore. This game has turned into some kind of macabre joke. Whoever is pushing these design decisions has got to be the biggest Real Life™ troll I’ve ever seen.

In the end, maybe Infinity Ward has learned a lot — they seem to have randomly filled MW2 with anything and everything an unskilled, casual gamer would like. Screw balance — it’s all about pulling in players. They have painted the broadest target possible by pandering to every subset of deluded fan, and as a result the game will likely break all kinds console sales records.

It won’t work on me, though. I’ll stick to Borderlands for now and look forward to Bad Company 2. At least that one will have dedicated servers.

Update. Things are continuing to unwind it seems. FourZeroSheep posted an explanation of what the dedicated server-less system would be like. At this point it’s rocking nearly 3,100 comments. That petition I linked to below is now at nearly 130,000 signatures (whether or not online petitions mean squat is another story). The forum continues to fill up with ill will toward IWNET. Humorously, both CoD4 and WaW server admins have been changing their server names to reflect their thoughts on the matter.

It came to light yesterday that Infinity Ward is doing something crazy with multiplayer for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. Rather than going with the usual dedicated server setup of most games (including CoD4), they’re apparently pushing out this system called IWNet or IW.NET or something equally lame. Basically, it will be a closed system that Infinity Ward themselves control in order to wrangle the multiplayer community. It’s kind of like Epic using GameSpy as the server browser for UT3… only a lot more central and (very possibly) a lot worse.

Bash and Slash conducted an interview with Infinity Ward sheep Rob Bowling. Here’s some of the things they found out:

General

• IW partnering through Steam is what you will see in the future. Match-making is not through Steam, but IW.NET is run in conjunction with Steam.
• GSP’s will no longer be renting out servers.
• No PunkBuster. VAC will be used as an anti-cheat.
• Retail distribution: Pre-orders will get a disk. Or you could order from Steam.
• DLC may now need to be paid for – not confirmed [but, of course, will definitely be true].
• Piracy was only a small reason for going to IW.NET – not the whole reason [obviously not a small reason].

Clans

• No more clan [i.e. dedicated] servers. Private matches via IW.NET replace clan servers.
• Listen servers [i.e. people's computers] will connect to each other.
• IW.NET/Steam will replace the community server admin [interface].

Modding

• Modding the game is now very much in question. fourzerotwo had no info on modding. However, it appears that there will be no mods or maps for MW2.
• Modding in SpecOps? Unknown.

Competitive Gaming

• Competitive gaming has changed forever [with respect to MW2].
• It might be possible in the future for IW engineers to load a “competitive” setting on IW.NET, but it is far from a guarantee. It might also never happen.

Why have Infinity Ward decided to do this?

Piracy is a factor. Piracy is always a factor because the higher-ups in any company (in this case Activision) are out of touch with reality. In other words, the same people that push DRM as an effect method of piracy control are the same who decided this central IW.NET system was a good idea.

A very plausible explanation lies in the fact that this theoretically forces more sales. One of the reasons CoD4 is still going strong is because of mods, custom maps, custom rules, etc. By removing all of that the game’s replayability is diminished, and it would thereby be easier to convince gamers to purchase the next game in the CoD series six months down the road.

Quite naturally, many enthusiasts are now pissed the fuck off. And this is just scraping the surface. Any forum or site that discusses MW2 is now focused solely on this issue. There’s even a petition.

Edit: It seems most of those posts on IW’s board have been deleted under the guise of “spam.” Still, people aren’t giving up. There is an “official” online petition now (it was previously a forum post that got deleted after 1500 replies) and I found this MW2 boycott Steam group.

And why wouldn’t they be pissed off? No dedicated servers? No mods? What the fuck?! If people wanted the console experience they would — get this — buy the game on a console. It appears that once again PC gamers are getting fucked, and it probably won’t end well. This comment from the Kotaku post sums it up rather nicely.

The worst part is that MW2 is sure to sell poorly on PC in light of this news, and piracy rates are sure to go through the roof. Companies will just be able to use it’s poor sales as an example of piracy, a decline in PC gaming, and whatever other bullshit excuses they use to try to force out the PC market and push the consoles even further on top.

Maybe it won’t be so bad in the end but until we know what’s going on, I implore everyone to cancel any pre-orders that you have.

It's sad that it's come to this.

I’ve attempted to cancel my pre-order from Walmart. I was unable to cancel it automatically so I had to send a message to them saying that because it was, in fact, a pre-order that I should be able to cancel it. We’ll see what happens.

Perhaps the saddest bit of all is that any boycotts and cancellations probably won’t have much of an effect. Selection bias says that there are probably far, far more people who don’t and won’t care how the multiplayer portion is handled compared to the ones who do and are currently being very vocal about these latest happenings. Statistically this could very easily turn out to be a hugely successful game regardless, and that’ll only pave the way for other developers to follow Infinity Ward’s lead in giving PC gamers the finger.

First, I moved circa mid-April. I went from a house in the woods to the lower floor of a duplex in the middle of the city. Well, not the middle — I’m not downtown but in a bustling commercial area filled with bars, restaurants, and white people. So, I was preoccupied with the move for awhile. For instance, before I’d even gotten all my stuff set up there were 4/20 things to take care of in which I ended up in someone’s apartment with two girls and a guy I’d just met. And I went to a bikini contest last week and cheered loudly (drunkenly) for nearly-naked babes and their wonderful booties — it’s not even summer! Oh, city life. You’re crazy sometimes.

But other than that, what’s been the problem? Well, CoD4 itself. Specifically, I’ve grown tired of the pub scene, and since I don’t have any desire to take it up competitively, that doesn’t leave me with many options. Not that I consider TWL or any ladder that advocates the usage of scrub mode competitive, but still. Someone does want to partner up with me for the Million Man LAN, so I suppose we’ll see what happens. The last LAN I went to I played UT2003 with a few friends if that’s any indication as to how much I don’t LAN. It just never seems like it’s worth the trouble. And with this sort of well-known LAN, I’m not guaranteed to bring home any prizes. Locally I’d probably dominate but this is different, obviously. But I guess you can get drunk and say stupid things that don’t get you laid to pretty girls anywhere, so it’d be worth the trip.

But onto CoD4! Its pub scene has become draining. It’s rare to see a good player (or even one I’d call decent) on one of the very few normal-mode servers anymore. Unless something goes terribly wrong (it happens), I generally steamroll the entire server — I played two games today and my scores were 60-8 and 83-11. While it is moderately entertaining to keep count of how many bad players I cause to rage-quit the server in any given game, it’s frustrating at the same time when I remember back to when this game had seemingly thousands of server choices.

The other day I ended up getting banned from one of the few decent servers left in this unappealing scrub-mode-laden landscape. The reason? I was doing too well. Usually when I rail on some server people just leave or call me a hacker, but in this case one of the negative-ratio neckbeards playing had admin access, so he kicked and banned me and a couple other people for either destroying everyone or having an annoying play style involving C4 and spamming LMGs through walls. Dumb. If you’re wondering, the server was called something along the lines of “A FRAGGN GOOD TIME.” The admins are easy to spot — they wear ROW| tags and they’re bad at the game.

In the end, the game is losing its appeal because I can be assured of a few things damn near every time I play.

• There won’t be many servers to play on (normal mode, 20 or less players).
• People will leave while I’m there. Maybe I’ll get in two decently populated games.
• I’ll probably be called a hacker.

So, like I said via text chat after the 83-11 game I mentioned above, “God, I need to find a new game. Nothing left in this one but terribads.” That is the crossroads I’m currently situated in. I need a new game to get pulled into. I have a few options, but unfortunately it takes a certain something for a game to grab my attention enough for me to play it for more than a week (or a month if it’s decent). That’s why I’ve been playing CoD4 for as long as I have — nothing has grabbed me since.

My options are limited but good, I think. I recently started playing Chrono Trigger (old school, bitches!) and I bought Left 4 Dead a few weeks ago, so that’s something. However, I haven’t played L4D a single time since it arrived. Perhaps the thought of having to actually talk to and work with other Internet people is turning me off to it; I’m used to silently lone-wolfing it and doing better than everyone. Then there’s TF2. I played it for a month a long time ago and then promptly lost any and all interest in it for some reason. It’s been updated a ton since then and is probably quite different, so I should give that one another shot.

Then there are RL™ games like D&D and Magic that I could pick up. My boss is a huge nerd (with a hot wife), so he’s into this sort of stuff and wants to be a dungeon master. I’ve never played these types of games, mainly because when I was exposed to them in middle/high school it was always a bunch of fat fuglies playing them, and I didn’t want to be like them. Now that I have proof that one can play these and still bang hotties, I’m more open to the idea.

I’ve mentioned this kind of thing before, and it will probably always ring true. The clueless players of the world make up the vast majority, and if they’re convinced you’re cheating, you’re cheating. The conundrum is that they’re simply too bad at the game to ever understand that you’re not cheating. It’s simply beyond their comprehension. In response to their complete lack of talent, the only thing they can do is lash out with false accusations.

Generally, this is fine. Let the noobs vent; if you don’t they’ll probably end up too frustrated and will stop playing the game entirely, and that’s not good for the overall community. The only time whining, accusatory, talentless dorks affect anything at all is in one case…

…when the power to vote is left enabled on the server.

This is stupid, and no server admin should ever, ever let this happen. Sure, it might be useful from time to time to remove asshats, but more often than not it’s going to be used to ill effect. Legit players will be kicked, stupid maps will be voted in when half the players are having fun currently, and you can be quite assured that votes will pop up several times in every ten minute span. It’s going to be abused far more than it will be legitimately useful.

This happened to be the case tonight. So, while I quite obviously don’t hack, I was accused many times over (by the same guy), and that eventually led to my kicking. The funny thing is that the kill cam was disabled, so the idiot who did all the accusing literally had no way of knowing how I was playing because he refused to spectate me. I’d like to think that if it’d been enabled that he’d see the error of his ways, but who am I kidding? A bad player will always accuse a good player regardless of evidence that contradicts his accusation. Ego makes people retarded.

The subconscious thought process is something along these lines: I’m bad but I don’t want to admit to myself that I’m bad. Therefore, this guy who is a lot better than me is obviously cheating. This way I don’t have to take responsibility for my own lack of talent and ambition. Naturally, this is stupid, and if you’ve ever seriously accused anyone of hacking when it wasn’t blatantly obvious just because he was beating you, you are stupid.

Nothing I said in response to his claims made any difference. Never mind that I was barely going 2:1 for all the spam; I was much better than the loser who called me out and his 0.3/1 ratio. When I mentioned that I wasn’t even doing that well, he said I was merely controlling my deaths — that I was letting myself be killed at strategic times so my score wouldn’t look hacker-like.

My only response to that was (and still is), “What the fuck?” Do people actually do this? Doesn’t that completely contradict the point of hacking in the first place? If I were to hack I’d do it to piss everyone off and go 200 – 10, not to barely string together a 2:1 on Killhouse. What the hell would be the point?

Of course, I’m sure my responses to him didn’t help my case. Here’s an example of one of our exchanges prior to about the eighth time he tried to get me kicked.

• “Come on, guys. Kick this hacker fuck.”
• “Dude, I’ve been playing [this game] for a year. You just suck, bro.”
• “I’ve been playing [games] for years.”
• “Badly.”
• “So I think I know a hacker when I see one.”
• “Obviously you don’t. Obviously you’re just a delusional fat loser who lives with his mom.”

Lucky for you guys, I have found this guy on the Internet. It’s not really him but this guy is exactly the kind of idiot I’m talking about. He’s bad at the game, whiny, accusatory, and a self-admitted 30-year-old virgin. Seriously, look at him delude himself. Psychological projection much? These are the types of guys who accuse good players of cheating all the time. It’s mostly because their lives suck and they can’t take the mental stress of also sucking at video games, the only things that haven’t rejected them.

Sigh. Gaming would be so much more enjoyable if noobs would just shut the hell up. Take your beating and go cry to yourself afterward.

It’s now somewhat difficult to find a decent normal-mode server without mods and the player limit set low enough that the game doesn’t devolve into this pointless… spamfest. A spamfest where skill is mostly made null and void and camping/playing a zone is the only thing you can do lest you die by a grenade to the groin for the fourteenth time in the past five minutes. That player limit is roughly 20 — any more and the game ceases to be a battle of talent and turns into Halo.

…Where was I? Oh. “Hardcore” mode. This might just qualify for misnomer of the year. There is, quite literally, nothing hardcore about “hardcore” mode. It’s merely a different way of approaching the same basic game, and while the changes are small — no radar, no HUD, 30 health — the overall effect on the gameplay is quite large.

I’m really bad with being terse, so I’ll summarize things first with a list in attempts to keep those with attention span problems around. Longer-winded explanations follow.

Ways “hardcore” mode makes CoD4 easier.

1. Explosives are overpowered with huge killing radii.
2. Health is so low any gun can kill with one bullet.
3. Many weapons become needlessly obsolete.
4. You can run the ideal perk setup every time without penalty.
5. Aim isn’t required to do well.
6. Camping is much more effective.

1) In normal mode all explosives have both a kill and non-kill radius that varies depending on the type. For instance, the noob tube has the smallest kill radius because it’s the easiest to use by way of its explosions being unavoidable. “Hardcore” mode does away with this non-kill radius balance because all explosives kill within it anyway, so the tube becomes quite overpowered. All explosives now gain a huge kill radius, making grenade spamming that much more effective, especially since there’s no icon to let you know one is nearby.

2) Every single gun in CoD4 has the ability to kill with a single bullet in “hardcore” mode, a feat that is supposed to be reserved for highly specialized weapons like shotguns and sniper rifles. The range for one-bullet kills varies, of course, but some of them will always be a one-bullet kill. I don’t know about you, but rapid-fire instagib isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I bought this game. “Hardcore” mode even makes shot location more useless than it is already — within a gun’s one-bullet kill range, a shot to the foot is equally as deadly as one to the forehead.

3) This is related to the last point. A gun’s power is almost entirely obsolete in “hardcore” mode. Why use a sniper rifle when a Desert Eagle is just as deadly from the same distance? You can completely avoid all difficult-to-use weapons and their annoyingly high recoil and stick with all the easy weapons that are suddenly overpowered — M4, P90, M16A4, etc.

4) In normal mode you’re given a choice — do you run Stopping Power for the brute force or do you try something else? By going with another setup, you willingly make your gun less powerful in the hope that you’ll make it up elsewhere. Same goes for using a silencer — is it worth it to take the range hit and thus make most of you kills take an extra bullet? None of this matters in “hardcore” mode. The notion of “power” is completely irrelevant, so you’re free to use the best perk and weapon setup in every situation. A silenced gun, Bomb Squad, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence. No one will ever hear you and you’ll never get a face full of claymore. Use the M16A4, G3, or M14 and you’ll also have a silent one-bullet-kill weapon with unlimited range. There is absolutely no penalty to this setup in “hardcore” mode. In normal mode your weapon would be considerably less powerful, but since power is no longer an issue, you get to play the ninja without any repercussions whatsoever.

5) Aim is nearly a foreign concept in many firefights due to the ease of downing an enemy. Inaccurately sweeping your sights over a target while holding the fire button nearly always results in a kill. In effect, “hardcore” mode is no longer about out-playing or out-aiming the other guy. In most circumstances it’s merely a matter of who was more prepared to see an enemy in that instant. If you shoot first, odds are you’re golden.

6) Without a radar to betray your position, and with the ridiculously effective perk setup above, the effectiveness of camping skyrockets. Camping can be tactically useful, but most people overuse it because they can’t do anything else. “Hardcore” mode tells them this is okay because they don’t have to do anything else — just sit there are spray your one-shot kill bullets. No aim or skill required. Just wait for some poor sap to make the grave mistake of moving and he’s all yours.

In the end, it’s obvious to see why “hardcore” mode is so popular. By requiring less talent to do decently and feel useful to the team, the community’s bad players, newbies, and old people naturally gravitate toward it. It is, in fact, the only way they can hope to keep up. The end result is that “hardcore” mode is generally paced a lot slower because most everyone is either camping to pick people off or moving cautiously worried about the fact that they die with a single bullet.

This is fine in theory, but in the end it’s nothing more than an annoyance to people like me who regularly lay waste to public servers but have no desire whatsoever to do the clan/competitive thing. Whenever I can’t find a decent normal-mode pub, I’m forced to hop into some “hardcore” ultra-ninja bullshit mode and go 5:1. I can only hope that Infinity Ward has half a clue about gameplay balance for the next CoD and can create a hardcore mode that is actually hardcore, but I’m definitely not holding my breath.

After all, with today’s gamers, a game that requires individual talent is a dead game.

Back at school I had this friend. We’ll call her Mia. Mia had a roommate her freshman year (my sophomore year) whom we’ll call Molly. I, of course, noticed immediately that Molly was very cute, but like most other cute/hot girls, I just as quickly stuck her up on the “you can’t have that” shelf. Holes in your self-confidence will do that to you.

And it made sense — Molly had a boyfriend from back home at the time. There was nothing I could do. Fast-forward to my junior year I’m becoming aware of Mia and Molly’s increased presence in my room. They never seemed to stick around, but they drop by for a bit on a frequent basis. Often they show up twice in a given day — once before going to do a thing and then once after. Sometimes they are quite drunk. Sometimes I instead find myself over in the their room watching movies.

More often than not I just happened to notice Molly liked to wear low-cut tops. Very low-cut. All the time it seemed. It was rare that I wasn’t greeted by gratuitous cleavage — enough to faceplant in — whenever she came around. There was one instance in particular where she wasn’t quite sober and I practically got a front-row seat to Boobtown as her shirt hung carelessly and loosely in all the right places.

This was all fine and dandy except that, well, she was off-limits. Cute, probably too cute for me, unavailable, and perpetually off with Mia to do things that didn’t involve me. She and Mia also hung out with this tall guy all the time; if anything I figured Molly would’ve liked him. Not only that but we didn’t talk that much; for the most part Molly was simply a friend of a friend. One who happened to enjoy showing off a large percentage of her breasts to strangers.

That’s just the thing, however. Not even two weeks ago I was told by Mia, in discussing how oblivious I am to things, that there was a very specific reason I was privy to Molly’s curves back then — she had been interested in me. She didn’t actually like showing herself off to strangers. I mean, she did, of course, because all girls do, but apparently the cleavage I saw frequently was specially tailored for me. Additionally, by the time the boobs were coming out around me she was boyfriendless.

I, of course, was oblivious to this because that’s how I am. And why wouldn’t I have been? Molly and I didn’t really talk, so we never hung out in any capacity, and, since my room always seemed to be an intermediary stop between other more important activities, I figured Mia was merely dragging Molly into my presence while she said hi. The two of them were frat party frequenters too, so surely the boobage was intended for someone else. It only made sense that this be case. To me, at least.

Upon hearing this claim of interest back then, I didn’t find myself getting happy at the thought. Rather, I became somewhat agitated over the ordeal. Why hadn’t Mia let me know this back then when it would have been very useful information? Even the slightest, most noncommittal hint — “I think Molly might kind of like you a little. Maybe.” — would have sufficed. As vague as that is it would have clued me in to pay a little more attention to Molly and the things she did. But the boobs should have been enough, right? Why would I need another hint when there is so much excess skin involved, right? Wrong!

On its own cleavage is never enough.

And that, my friends, is the ultimate issue. Girls love displaying their cleavage if they’ve got some display. It’s a normal, casual, everyday occurrence. And guys, growing up in a never-ending sea of half-covered breasts, learn early on not to give it too much mind. Look at them, sure, but don’t look at them. They’re there, acknowledge them, but don’t pay them much mind unless you want to get labeled a pervert.

And so I’m posed with a quandary. How the hell could Molly expect me to notice her supposed interest by merely adjusting herself for extra boobage before she saw me? It strikes me as illogical. Unless you’re doing something directly for or to a guy, no amount of cleavage says “I want you.” Flirting, for instance, is a very good way accentuate cleavage’s message. Without something extra involved, even the greatest of cleavage is most likely to say, “Hi. I have great breasts. Don’t you wish you could squeeze them? Too bad!” Because that’s pretty much what cleavage means to a guy when it’s on a random girl. Without proper accentuation, there is a fairly large jump in logic:

1. Cleavage.
2. ???
3. Making out, dry humping, and sex.

There must be a second step if the goal is to show you’re interested, dammit! And there wasn’t one with Molly! No flirting, no hanging out, no sexy eyes. Nothing. There simply has to be more than me going, “God damn, woman!” in my head whenever you come into my room with half your boobs showing. Especially when you feel unavailable and you’re about to head off to a party and rub your junk all other some other guy’s junk. Do you know how hot it would have been if she’d looked at me and then adjusted herself and looked back? That’s an effective second step! As is dragging me off to your little party and rubbing your junk on my junk.

Alas, I was never able to bridge the logical gap, so I never knew Molly was interested in me back then. And why would I? Guys are usually fairly logical about things even when there are boobs involved. I know it’s hard to believe, but even when faced with such seemingly unsurpassable obstacles, the logical wiring of our brains is still present. Thus, I never did anything with Molly even though the potential was there for greatness.

Sigh.

Half the people in my house have caught the stomach flu that’s been going around recently. It’s the kind that makes you spew liquidy things at high velocity from both ends with enough frequency to dehydrate in a matter of hours. The toilets end up getting major workouts as they’re put through five times their normal paces, and the scent of Lysol hangs ever so delicately (<Borat>not!</Borat>) in the air because disinfectants must be sprayed on everything.

And that leaves me in my current predicament. I’m now an unwilling participant in a game of Diarrhea Roulette. I’ve managed to dodge the bullet thus far (knock on wood), but there’s no telling if in a day or two I’ll end up spending half my waking hours practicing contortionism to get my ass over the toilet and my head within suitable range of the bathtub.

One of the flu catchers is over it by now, but these past few days she’s taken to coughing wildly at night loud enough to keep everyone (including herself, of course) awake. Given the options, however, I’d take the coughs over violent double-ended squirts in an instant if I had to choose. While watery eyes and a painfully red throat aren’t that cool, it definitely beats pooping stinky water 14 times a day. And it beats getting your asshole rubbed raw by toilet paper that seems moderately comfortable the first two times but subsequently makes your sphincter pucker up in fear whenever it approaches.

The last time I was sick — like, really sick, not “Oh, noes! A cold!” sick — was when I contracted pneumonia during my sophomore year at school. Being sick is something I’ve mostly managed to avoid, though I guess my punishment for that might be my constant sinus problems. It’s been years since I last vomited, and the prospect is not one I enjoy, especially when I wouldn’t even be able to properly concentrate on it because I’d be more worried about flinging poo goo about the room.

As far as the pneumonia, during the summer preceding that school year I managed to get two centimeter-long wooden splinters jammed up under my right ring fingernail. It still gives me the willies thinking about that and how much it fucking hurt. I had to go to the doctor and get the nail ripped off with a pair of pliers — no joke! — so they could extract the stabby bits of wood. By the time they were wrapping my finger up the local anesthetic had worn off and I had to endure direct touches to the squishy nougat (comprised of ten million nerve endings of death) where my fingernail had once been.

Fast-forward at least six months and my nail is starting to grow back to its normal state, but I soon realized it had begun to hurt a lot with even the lightest of contact, similar to when the splinters so generously tore their way into what’s got to be one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. And then the nail started turning green on its right side. Turns out it’d managed to get infected, and it was this infection that paved the way for the pneumonia.

While my immune system is usually somewhat strong (I guess; it might just be my avoidant personality keeping me away from people and their cooties), the fingernail infection definitely toppled its defenses, and I guess the bacteria took up residence in one of my lungs. After three days of flu-like symptoms I couldn’t even move out of my chair/bed because I was so weak and sore. A trip to the doctor got me a prescription of some antibacterial pills big enough for a large mammalian being from eons past, and those things cleared both infections right up.

The end? I don’t know where I was going with that little anecdote, but I guess it kept the entire post from being about poop, and that’s good, right?

But sometimes there are instances where 60 FPS is provably and truly not enough. CoD4 provides us with such an example. Being built on some version of the Quake engine, CoD4 has some interesting (and old) relics to show us. One of these is the following, and it has a relatively large effect on gameplay:

At 125 FPS you can jump higher and further than at any other framerate.

Theoretically; I haven’t tested what happens at, say, 250. But isn’t the premise ridiculous? This mess stems from old Quake (3?) code in which a client’s physics simulation is in some part affected by his framerate. Why this ever happened I don’t know, but it still exists in CoD4 a year after release and seven patches later.

In short, those not running the game at 125 FPS simply can’t do some of the movements they could otherwise. If you’re one to use jumping as a tactical way to engage enemies instead of camping corners and whining about “hoppers” (i.e., if you’re decent and not terrible at the game), it’s in your best interest to run 125 FPS if possible.

It’s easy enough to accomplish this (with a suitable computer) by editing your config file. Pop that sucker (config_mp.cfg) open, find com_maxfps, and set it to 125. Before saving, though, find cl_maxpackets and set that to 63. Don’t bother asking me about the last one; I’ve merely heard on multiple occasions that this is what you’re supposed to do. Apparently 125/63 is a smoother experience than otherwise.

Another popular configuration is to set both the above variables to 100. The idea there is that matching these means updates are sent to the server at the same rate as frames are being displayed, so it’s feels more accurate or something. Again, I don’t actually know the ins and outs of it, and it seems not to make a difference, especially since my monitor can do only 75 Hz. I’ve run both setups and other combinations of values but I never felt much of a difference. Aside from the fact, of course, that at 100 FPS my character felt decidedly less limber. Feeling gimped isn’t cool, so I went back to 125 almost immediately.

The best and simplest way I know to demonstrate the difference between 100 and 125 FPS is to load up Crash. There’s a wall by the three-story building that can be mantled but only when running the higher framerate. Below is a shot of where it is (it’s the one in the crosshairs and shot up). Stand next to the wall, look straight up, and jump and hold the key. At 125 you’ll latch onto the top and hoist yourself over; at 100 you’ll slide back down the wall in abject failure.

Forgive me, as I completely forgot how to take screenshots without all the HUD and gun. But no matter. With this post I’ve let you in on a little secret (maybe it’s not that secret, but still), so go forth and experiment. Feel the true power of the MP5 when you can outmaneuver anyone and everyone… but only at 125 FPS.