In this week’s entry, mortifiedpenguin discusses the future of multiplayer gaming on the PC for Modern Warfare 2.

( Read the rest of the entry after the jump! )

This post was actually supposed to be published by last weekend but an unexpected piece of news took the PC gaming community by storm, making today a more appropriate time to publish this entry. So allow me to tie things together.

Nowadays when I’m feeling bored in front of my monitor and am lazy to hook up my Bose alarm clock to the Xbox, I double-click on the COD4 multiplayer desktop icon and try to play a game or two.

I say try because most of the time I’m faced with a plague of hackers, or the server is running Hardcore mode, or I just can’t join a server reserved for low-ping players.

This is really frustrating since COD4 was an excellent game, but looking forward to MW2’s release always takes away your pain of having to put up with aimbots and super-human soldiers jumping hundreds of feet into the air.

This is the part where I would suggest improvements to the multiplayer aspect of Modern Warfare 2.

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#1: Server name / IP search

This was a startling exclusion from the first game. Having played Battlefield 2 multiplayer since it was released in 2005, I was used to the user-friendliness of the lobby ststem. Searching for servers was as easy as typing the name of the server in the search bar and hitting the ‘Enter’ key. And if you faced a situation where your buddy could find the server but you could not, just get the IP address from him and type it in to connect directly. In Modern Warfare, it was just one long list of servers which needed refreshing a couple of times to find one missing server which your buddy is on. So hopefully MW2 would include this basic feature in its multiplayer mode.

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#2: Friend / Buddy list

Such a feature would make it easy for clan members to find one another online and join the server they’re already on ( World in Conflict had it already and it worked wonders ).

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Now, here’s the bad news which would contradict the first point above.

Infinity Ward announced that Modern Warfare 2 would not feature dedicated servers, but instead utilise an in-house system named IW.net which is powered by Steam.

At first I had no idea why there was such a big hoo-hah from the PC gaming community, from boycotts to even a massive online petition.

Until I realised no dedicated-server functionality means you couldn’t choose whichever type of game you wanted to join. Infinity Ward would dictate.

According to Bowling, IW’s Community Manager, IW.net would be a much better service for PC gamers as it makes finding games easier due to its matchmaking, and also eliminates cheaters. ( Link )

It’s good to look after the welfare of the PC community, but is it necessary to take such drastic measures that would actually destroy the very foundations of PC gaming? There’re ways to make finding games easier with the help of filters. Maybe IW thought the filter system in COD4 didn’t work very well but look at BF2! DICE provided so many filters like vehicles, mods, ranked etc that you could easily find a server which you could play on.

PC gaming had always had the upper hand over console gamers due to the amount of freedom we had with the game – mods and custom game rules were privileges which console gamers could not enjoy on their rigid lobby system online.

Now it seems that PC gamers are being integrated into the console family, and that really upset a lot of people.

To be honest, I don’t really play mods but I do want the freedom of being able to choose my own server. Now I wonder how I’m going to play an online game with webmaster03.

>> webmaster03: I clicked on your name but I can’t join the game. The server is full.

>> mortpenguin: What! Why don’t you wait a while and try again?

>> ( After 5 minutes ) webmaster03: I still can’t join! #@$%^%#^!!!

>> mortpenguin: Okay I’ll quit the game. You go join another server first.

>> mortpenguin: What the fuck now I can’t join your game. My level is too high!

Ubisoft did not include dedicated server support when Rainbow Six: Vegas was released and it worked as good as shit. So I have no idea why Infinity Ward would want to repeat history again.

As I recover from this bombshell and think about boycotting the PC version of MW2, give me your thoughts on this ridiculous decision by Infinity Ward. Would IW.net work or would it lead to the end of PC gaming?

Read more opinions about this catastrophe at Kotaku and BashandSlash. And if you don’t get the no-dedicated-server saga, read this excellent forum post.