Hope for Modern Warfare 2?
By Kevin “Phenom” Joyce

    A recent rumor has flourished that a patch coming soon will contain the capabilities to host dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2. This patch would serve to let players skip over the flaws of peer to peer gaming on IW:Net and host servers with less-lag, similar to other games on the market that this approach has been quite successful for. What this could additionally do, however, is correct one of the major blunders in MW2’s design and possibly allow for some competition to surface in the game. Though some leagues have already surfaced using the clan system to join onto a peer hosted game, dedicated servers would allow for some type of competition Promod, be it Promod or Damn Mod, and for a more structured type of competition that leagues like CEVO and XPL have.

    However, though it would be an interesting development to see what dedicated servers would be like and what types of competition mods would be popular with the game, I personally do not feel that dedicated servers will bolster an organized form of competition in the game for several reasons. First, the maps in Modern Warfare 2 do not seem to be well thought out for any kind of search and destroy competition. Though some maps are very well thought out and fun, most of the maps are too big for successful strategies to be put in place and carried out in a successful manner. For example, the map Derail is well thought out, but much too large to be fun in competition. MW2 counters this extreme with very small maps such as Rust or Highrise. There are perhaps four decent competition maps which I have seen which raises the question of how a league season would be set up with this few maps. I do not think that many people would rather play a league season repeating four maps, or substituting in modded maps from other games in. In addition to maps in the game being flawed, the game play has several flaws as well. For example, taking out the ability to lean means that it would be much harder for players to peek around corners, and giving this game a similar style of play to that of Counter-Strike Source, a game where competition has flourished and continues to grow to this day. In a competition between MW2, where competition is untested, and a game like Counter-Strike Source, which has had a following for years and is still one of the top played games online to date, Source will win every time.
  

    The last and most crucial flaw of MW2 is the lack of a developer’s console to type in commands and make game configs to use in servers. Configs have become a staple of leagues and competition in all games, from Counter-Strike Source to Call of Duty 4. Also, without the developers console, in game /rcon commands for servers to restart maps, or change maps would have to be put in through an outside manager, creating a hassle for admins of servers to successfully moderate and set up a server.

    In conclusion, though adding capabilities to set up dedicated servers would be overcoming one hurdle to establishing competition, there are many more that stand in the way of MW2 becoming a game with any serious competition or league play. However, to give Infinity Ward credit, showing that they are considering placing dedicated servers into the game shows that they obviously listen to the community, or are dedicated to supporting their products and continue to try and make them better, even after their release, which is becoming a rare quality in game companies today.