I. Can’t. Stop. Playing.

It’s only been two days, and already I’ve lost sleep, put off my workouts, and became sedentary like when I was unemployed. I’m lucky I’m still getting to work on time, because I play in the mornings. Despite the glaring flaws in Black Ops, what drives me and millions of others into putting aside their social live and burn millions of man hours on this game.

I dread what happens when Treyarch start patching the issues.

It turns into a lag fest. You may think I benefit as host, but no. I’m lagging too.

People time out and others cannot connect. Games do not have enough players.

Despite these problems, MW2 continues to choose me as host.

Why?

Perhaps there should be a “you suck at hosting” list or even an opt out of hosting option. But Big Brother IW is rolling in $$$ so I doubt anything will change.

Bitch, that one care package is mine! I killed 4 mf’ers in row, not you! Now we’re both sniper bait. And why the hell would you steal an ammo package? Maybe I want to set a trap for the enemy, not you, my teammate!

I’m dead and a hijacking is imminent… go ahead and take it. Else, earn your own.

Emergency Airdrops, those are traps. Here’s the deal, I get the good shit. You can have rest once the coast is clear. Yes clear, since the enemy will close in like flies on shit. I want to ambush, but that depends on you not being a greedy SOB.

Follow these guidelines and you can be sure I don’t realize you’re an asshole.

I’ve already covered how much I despised the little Fidel Castros running hosted server that caused me to almost quit the game. Now my ire is raised towards Infinity Ward’s matchmaking system.

How did I end up in a dozen laggy games in a row?

First of all, it’s about as transparent as North Korea. What determines who hosted the game? No idea, but they sure suck at it. How do I report cheaters? Let IW take of it, while I see the same cheaters in games over and over again. Patches? That may be happening, but there’s no way to see the changes.

Tens of thousands of gamers depend on a single entity to make sure games run smoothly. Might as well call it healthcare reform.

I think I prefer return to the thousands of little fiefdoms that are hosted servers. They can’t be bad? I mean mostly bad, but not all bad right?

Also, in order to have a productive life, I am trying to get other things done in between the 1-2 minute intermissions between MW2 matches. Yesterday, I managed to clean up my room… in like 3 hours. I’m planning to add some push-ups or sit ups.

Next segment, playing while on some sort of pharmaceutical. I was taking antibiotics last week but that was boring and nothing changed. I’d have to take something with some “effect”.

15 minutes a hit. This is the FPS version of “just one more turn”. Why rely on dedicated servers when IW has built the perfectly proportioned match? It used to be that I could enter a server, spend a few minutes wrapping up the match, and then decide whether to keep playing or do something else. Thanks to the new matchmaking system, 90% of the time I’m entering a brand new match that is expected to last 10-15 minutes, shames me into not leaving a 6-6 match early, and gives me sufficient time to tweak my classes before the next match. Seriously, even now at the office every time I exit Modern Warfare 2 I feel sense of lack of accomplishment which drives me back to the game. I believe in drug terms that’s called a “withdrawal”.

Put the popular weapons from COD4 as a high level unlockable I just unlocked the M16 at a mid-40 level. The AK-47, my favorite weapon in COD4, is a level 70 unlock. So yeah, I’m going there. Hard.

Attract the Counter-strike crowd. FAMAS? UMP? Aug? TMP? These are just the new weapons from MW2 that were in Counter-strike along with the Desert Eagle, AK-47, M4A1, MP5, P90, Uzi etc. from the first game. Even I noticed that MW2 plays a lot like CS more than ever. What was the point of adding the akimbo attachment to every pistol, machine pistol, and sub-machine gun other than that is was cool but underpowered in CS?

Lightning fast start-up time. As I pointed out before, the matching making system in MW2 is even faster than COD4. Makes entering a game as easy as popping a pill, or ten.

The only shocking thing is that IW didn’t decide to charge a monthly fee to its PC port. So unlike, WoW, there’s a chance that there will be an end-game for most players and they can go back to their families and jobs and education once again. Until MW3.

Some people may miss the community aspects of dedicated servers, but as someone who’s been screwed over by the judgments of these folks, I don’t miss it. In place, I get a match making service that was even more blazing fast than MW1. Somehow, with only a Windows 7 upgrade, the game is running on my rig just as fast as MW1 (thank you Microsoft?).

I am more than impressed by MW2 so far, and I will have a full impression later.

Fallout 3 – frequent crashes. This is game crashes and crashes often. Good thing auto-saves are frequent or else I’d be sending it to the scrap heap.

Dealbreaker? Not anymore actually. The 1.7 patch that came with Mothership Zeta fixed pretty much all the crashes.

Assassin’s Creed – takes forever to exit the game. First, as Altair you exit that game, which take you back to being Desmond Miles. A short cutscene later, then you have to exit that, which take you to the account selection menu. Select your account, then can you actually exit the game. Let’s hope AC2 doesn’t have me jumping through that many hoops again.

Dealbreaker? No, but then again I deleted the game after finishing once.

Call of Duty 4 – long ass loading time in the beginning for multiplayer. This was not always the case. As a matter of fact, it used to be lightning fast. Now for some reason (due to some minor update), it takes over a minute to load the game, which extra annoying if I’m finding servers with xFire. Unfortunately, thanks to Modern Warfare 2 the game is no longer supported.

Dealbreaker? Yeah, but it has more to do with anticipating Modern Warfare 2 than anything.

Grand Theft Auto 4 – automatically sets my graphical settings. I hate ports that do not have the correct aspect ratio for my monitor (16:10, I’m looking at you Mercenaries 2). I really hate it when GTA4 doesn’t let me change any of the settings (at least without doing a bit of hackery). For a game that encourages sandbox behavior, it sure is strict about what I want to do with my graphics.

Dealbreaker? Yes, and because I hate the ending.

Neverwinter Nights 2 – Crappiest camera in all the land. I played the first Neverwinter Nights to death. Thanks to the camera, I couldn’t get into this one.

Dealbreaker? Ef yeah!

Bonus: Load Anno 1404. Load a game. Take out a magazine. Finish feature article. Play the game. Never again.

No more.

Mainly because of the unbalanced game play, but this weekend I guess one could say I snapped.

I was banned from another server for no good reason.

Keep this in mind, NRNS-Obake-Ryu has no integrity.

Who is this individual, this was the server admin I was playing with at the time. I was having a really good run. But because I refuse to play SMG’s in World at War for most part, I was mainly switching between the FG-42 and Browning .30 Cal machine guns, two of the least commonly used weapons in the game.

Here I was racking up a decent KDR in a game dominated by rifle and SMG users. It didn’t help that kill cams and spec mode in the game do accurately portray recoil. Needless to say, the cheating allegations pop.

First it was one person making the accusations, then another, then another, then another. Then the admins took turns specing me. At this point, I’ve been ignoring all the messages because 1. I rather be playing. 2. I don’t respond to sore losers.

The admins could have spec me, decide they have no conclusive evidence (having a good score is not evidence, especially when one of the admins was racking up an even better score at the time) and dismissed the accusations.

But keep this in mind, NRNS-Obake-Ryu has no integrity.

The admin allowed a few players for whatever reason to punish me for playing well. What’s the point of getting better if I were to be punished for it? I tried to be different, I got burned for it.

So what now? First, remove Call of Duty World at War from my system. For now, I’m going to stop playing all FPS and save my energy for Modern Warfare 2. I’m on the verge of acquiring Street Fighter 4 so I’ll trying to master that.

I don’t know how much input other NRNS has in my ban, so I’ll refrain from question the integrity of their entire clan. As for NRNS-Obake-Ryu, if I knew your actual identity I’d gladly post it here. You might as well put my name on the banned list in your COD4 server. You have no integrity and I hope my name on your ban list is a reminder of your lack of integrity.

If you are wondering why I’m making such accusations, now you know how I feel.

Signed,

Tango 1