Why Modern Warfare 3 Multiplayer Is Not Fun

All the way back in May when information started coming out about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, I started to get excited about the game.  Then in September I was lucky enough to attend Call of Duty XP in Los Angeles and get a lot of hands on time with it.  I had a tremendous amount of fun playing it and, once back in the UK, the launch of MW3 was the one thing I’d been focusing on and waiting for.  I’d never anticipated a release so eagerly.  On Tuesday 8 November I finally had the game in my hands and couldn’t get the disc into my console fast enough.  This was the moment I’d been waiting for.  This was going to be the main use of my free time for the next year.  This was going to be the best shooter I’d ever played.  Sadly I couldn’t have been more wrong.  This game was the biggest disappointment in my gaming life since I’d realised I could only play the first level of Gods on Atari ST (I was six and my dad had got me a floppy disk of demos from a computer magazine).

Shattered Illusions

I play Call of Duty games for the multiplayer.  That is what I enjoy and that is what I want to spend my time doing.  Having jumped into my first match I soon began to realise that something was seriously wrong here.  I was dying before being aware of being shot at.  When I put a full clip into someone’s back they’d calmly turn around and drop me instantly.  So maybe it was a bad match?

I continued trying to play and switched to a submachine gun for a higher fire rate.  But match after match the same thing was happening.  I was going hugely negative in terms of kill/death ratio and barely getting any kills.  So maybe I just needed to improve my weaponry?

Also wrong!  I had a UMP45 with the Kick proficiency and Rapid Fire attachment, a deadly gun in anyone’s hands.  Except, apparently, mine.  I saw a guy in front of me, started shooting him and about a second and a half later he started shooting at me.  I lost the gunfight and chalked up another death.  The strange thing is that he was using a silenced UMP45 which shouldn’t have outgunned me at all, let alone when I got the drop on him.  So maybe I just suck at MW3?

Well no, frankly I do not.  Granted I’m not going to be calling in five chopper gunners every match, but at COD XP I was consistently coming out of matches as the MVP with 20+ kills.  I know some of the maps, I know the general dynamics of the gameplay and I know how to react quickly and shoot the guy in front of me.  So maybe this problem wasn’t with me, but with the game itself?

The Parasites

I started looking for some kind of factor common to all these people who wouldn’t die and who could drop me instantly.  It didn’t take much effort to find.  If you’ve played the game you may be surprised to hear that I didn’t find a hidden perk called Avada Kedavra allowing players to kill without the need to fire bullets.  What I did find was that these people (referred to going forward as “The Parasites”) all had a three bar connection in game versus my four bars.

Now this isn’t a new phenomena.  This happened in Black Ops too and is the reason that my time spent playing the game sharply declined over the past six months.  However, it is so much more of a problem in MW3 because the overall bullet damage is considerably higher.  This means that if you’re up against someone on a three bar connection you are going to lose pretty much every single gunfight.  All we’ve heard from Robert Bowling for months is that MW3 is all about the gunplay but I’m afraid he’s very much mistaken.  In reality it is all about connections, pings and ultimately those mocking little bars you see next to each name on the scoreboard.

So why didn’t I experience these issues when I played at COD XP?  Simple – I was playing on a LAN connection.  The game played really well in that splendidly isolated bubble, but it just doesn’t translate into a real world environment.  I think matchmaking probably doesn’t help matters.  US gamers will often find themselves playing with people from the same city, or at least the same state.  In the UK we get stuck in lobbies with people from Spain, Portugal, Belgium and so on.  That just isn’t local and really exacerbates matters.

Call of Duty titles incorporate something called lag compensation.  This is very technical stuff and not something I claim to have any great understanding of.  If you want to know more you can get some technical information on Wikipedia.  Basically it is supposed to smooth things out and improve the experience for those without great connections.  Problems caused by lag compensation are what the average player would probably recognise as poor hit detection.  Unfortunately it is something that favours The Parasites who are most likely trying to play using the wifi in Starbucks.  In fact they’re probably trying to simultaneously download porn to their laptop and wondering why 16MB of RAM and onboard graphics won’t play the .avi file smoothly!  But I digress.

Boosting

So I kept getting so angry that I’d have to go away for a few hours and then try playing the game again.  Every single time the same thing would happen.  Even playing with a group of friends we’d all be having the same problem.  Four seasoned Call of Duty players were consistently getting single digit kills and 20+ deaths.  The fact that we all have decent internet connections penalises us and our only role when playing is to essentially help The Parasites boost and bump up their K/D.

Whilst attempting to play the game for an hour I had to back out of every match I was in because it was simply unbearable.  There’s no enjoyment to be had as cannon fodder.  Try as I might to tolerate the problem, as I’d been doing for months in Black Ops, I just couldn’t do it as it is so much worse in MW3.

Last chance saloon

So desperate am I to enjoy MW3 and to be able to play it that I’ve spent the whole of today trying to alleviate the problem.  I found an excellent article on the Call of Duty forums by a knowledgeable guy called Maccabi who explains steps you can take to minimise the effects of the lag.  It’s well worth a read.  I’ve changed the DNS settings of my Xbox, redone port forwarding on my router and altered some other settings to try and help.  But ultimately there’s little that can be done as the problem isn’t with me.

Your ping when connected to a game plays a big part in determining you experience and by running tests at PingTest.net I was able to get some useful stats.  The lower the ping the better and here is what I was getting connecting to servers across the globe: 26ms within the UK, 165ms to the West coast of the US, 95ms to the East coast of the US, 73ms to Spain, 41ms to France.  By being matched with players further away the higher the ping and the more latency is experienced.

After trying all these experiments I jumped onto a game in the hope that something had magically improved.  I found myself 2-11 against three Parasites I couldn’t kill.  Somehow for the latter part of the match I was able to avoid them and actually finished 12-13.  I’d say no more than 2 or 3 of my deaths were legitimate, the rest down to connection.  I checked the scoreboard and saw that three of my opponents had four bars, two had three bars (from Belgium) and one had two bars.  Can you guess which three were The Parasites?

Encouraged by my chance recovery in the previous match I fired up another couple.  I resolved that, no matter how much I wanted to play Kill Confirmed, close quarters combat just wasn’t possible in MW3.  I put a Type 95 assault rifle in my class.  I hate three round burst weapons but I figured I needed the high damage.  I spent the matches being incredibly cautious and skulking around trying to avoid enemies.  I was by no means camping as I was constantly on the move, but I was playing extremely defensively.  I then tried to pick off the odd straggler from a long enough range that they couldn’t find me.  Enemies with four bars took one burst to kill (turns out it’s a nice weapon, although people who can’t use it will whine that it’s overpowered and it will get nerfed) and The Parasites took two to three bursts to put down.  Unfortunately there are still times when you can’t avoid running into them so I think I broke even in one match and slightly negative in the other.  The problem is that this just isn’t how I want to play.  I find it boring instead of fun.  Getting single digit kills is just tedious to me and if that’s the only way I can play the game I’d rather not play it at all.

Russian roulette

So there you have it.  For me multiplayer in MW3 is absolutely zero fun and, no matter how much I wish it wasn’t the case, I just have to accept that I won’t be able to play it.  There is no skill involved in playing it and every match is a game of Russian roulette where the outcome depends only on how many bars your opponents have.  Will you get lucky and encounter a full team of people with four bars?  Highly unlikely.  In my experience at least half of the opposing team will be made up of The Parasites.  I’m going to upgrade my network setup with a high-end router and CAT6 cables so I’ll probably have one last stab at playing MW3 but, barring divine intervention from the gaming gods, I don’t see that being successful.

So what of the future?  I mentioned at the top of the article about my disappointment at only being able to play the first level of Gods on Atari ST.  That problem was easily remedied – a couple of years later when my parents bought me a Sega Mega Drive they got me the game on there so I was able to play it in full after all.  Unfortunately I don’t think my disappointment with MW3 can be solved with such ease.  Patches will be released to fix game breaking bugs but the underlying problems which stop me enjoying the game will never be addressed.  Certainly not in this title and most likely not in future Call of Duty titles.  I’m not suggesting this is a problem unique to the franchise, in fact it is prevalent in online gaming.  I can only dream of a day where console manufacturers or game publishers introduce a minimum connection quality requirement for people who want to play games online.  Only then would The Parasites be weeded out so that they don’t ruin the experience for the rest of us.  This will never happen.  Publishers want to continue selling millions of copies of their games.  They won’t jeopardise sales to ensure that those with quality connections actually have a great experience once they’ve handed over their cash.

What then of the utopia that is dedicated servers?  These are expensive to run and bring issues of their own.  Take Battlefield 3 for example.  That has dedicated servers and at times gunfights are anything but fair.  But it is a great deal better than the situation on MW3.  From a gameplay perspective I don’t enjoy BF3 one little bit, but at least it is actually playable for the most part and it doesn’t trigger a bout of tourettes through constant injustice!  Even if dedicated servers were an optional extra in Call of Duty (perhaps tied to a Call of Duty Elite premium subscription) I would happily pay extra if it meant I could enjoy the game without major connection problems.  I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone and soon The Parasites would be left to play amongst themselves.

Reflections

Until such time as the problem of The Parasites is acknowledged and addressed I suspect I’ll be doing less and less online gaming.  I have been playing Spec Ops Survival mode in MW3 with a friend and it is very enjoyable but not something I can spend all day playing, let alone invest over 40 days worth of game time in!  In all likelihood I’ll end up trading in MW3 to fund some single player games.  I’d been intending holding off on those games until next year, but now I’ve ordered Assassin’s Creed Revelations and that will be followed by Skyrim and Arkham City amongst others.

In a way all this makes me rather sad as I’ll miss online gaming.  In recent years Call of Duty has taken up most of my free time and been a large part of my social life.  I’ve made many great friends online who I’ve gone on to meet in person.  I feel that MW3 has taken that experience away from me, at least for the next year.  That’s why it has hit me so hard and left me angry and frustrated.  I’d love to be able to do an in depth review of the game, as I did with Black Ops last year, but it is unplayable to the extent that I can’t even judge the gameplay or maps.  The glimpses I saw at XP made me believe that MW3 would be something special but ultimately I play video games to have fun and this game is, on real world connections, no fun at all.