What about IWNet?

As many people are aware, Infinity Ward decided to abandon an old adage of PC gaming with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - dedicated servers.

Anybody who has played a P2P multiplayer game on their computer will know what dedicated servers are. It is in direct contrast to the system employed by the current generation of consoles, matchmaking. The way a dedicated server system works is that it allows end users to purchase their own servers for the game and run custom games 24/7. The server list becomes populated with these and players can then find a server that meets their tastes. Some people like to play the game entirely vanilla, with no changes made and some prefer to find quirky servers with weird, custom game types. One such example would be the 'low gravity, infinite grenade launcher' mod servers seen on the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It works in two ways - it allows the game to be played in the way the end user wishes and it also allows for friends to easily join each other's games. Not only that, but it allows for effective moderation of games. If a hacker is playing on the server, the server administrators can quickly and easily kick and ban the player, preventing them from playing on their server in the future. The same goes for abusive language and glitch abusers.

Now, Infinity Ward have seen fit to employ the matchmaking system used in console multiplayer games using a system known as 'IWNet'. The system was employed to address a multitude of problems with the PC multiplayer community - piracy, hacking, abusive players... Basically, everything that server admins can and do deal with on a daily basis in other games. They also cited one reason as trying to take the pressure off of these admins to deal with their games constantly. Now, anyone who's been part of a server community for any game knows that the admins do not feel pressure at all - in fact, they're usually on the server joining in with the community and if not, can often ban users without even joining the game using a server console. While we're on that subject, the system does very little if not nothing to prevent hackers from ruining games. The worst thing about this is that they are running about freely, due to a lack of moderation on Infinity Ward's part - whether this is due to their reliance on the VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) system is unclear, but I'm fairly sure thet they are now feeling the pressure to monitor and moderate their player load.

The system also forces users to host the games themselves and will choose the player who hosts automatically - often resulting in poor choice of host and, subsequently, lagged-up matches rendering the game practically unplayable. It's also not uncommon to be sitting in a game lobby and during the pre-match countdown, watching half of the players booted for no reason, forcing the system to search for another 4-8 players to fill their now-vacant slots. This is brought into more light when attempting to join a game with a friend in tow - they or you will often be the result of disconnection from the host due to conflicting NAT settings, which then forces both players to restart their game search. This often results in 30-minute long periods of inactivity while desparately trying to join a game together. If a friend is already in a game and a player leaves said game, you would think that they could invite their friend to join mid-game, right? Like every other online FPS, right? Wrong. You can invite them, but the chances of them getting into the game successfully seem to be... Well, zero from my experience.

It's needless to say that all of these problems caused by the pile of shit that is IWNet could be fixed with one quick, simple solution - the reinstatement of dedicated servers. The core reason behind IWNet and the non-existent support for custom modifications remains that the developers would like you to play the game as they intended it. Saying nothing of the outdated nature of this view, it pretty much roughly translates as "We don't want you making custom maps, so we can charge you premium prices for the map packs we release, when we release them". This is pretty unheard of within PC gaming so it's understandably caused a lot of criticism, and rightly so. The system is fucking awful and is the only thing stopping me from playing this incredibly fun game 24/7.

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