Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling has blogged to dispel ”assumptions, and speculation” about the developer’s new IWNet match hosting system, replacing PC dedicated servers.
He defends it, saying it takes the ”benefits” of dedicated servers and lets them be ”utilized and accessed” by all players. Still scant on mod support talk. IWNet features Valve-Anti-Cheat.
”I recently broke news on a PC community member’s podcast that Modern Warfare 2 would be introducing a completely new backend infastructure called IWNET that would allow matchmaking for multiplayer games on PC,” blogged Bowling.
This news caused a big uproar among the PC gamer community with an online petition created Monday, and within almost a day it exploded with signatures. Even fellow developer DICE took the chance to dig at Infinity Ward a little, saying they fully support dedicated servers.
”IWNET takes the benefits of dedicated servers and allows them to be utilized and accessed by every player, out of the box, while removing the barrier to entry for players unaware of how to maintain a server on their own,” he continued.
Bowling goes on to say the system doesn’t just drop you into random games, but makes sure it gives you the ”best quality” matches via ping. It takes into account custom rules and gametypes for you when searching for suitable games. It teams up equally skilled players.
”It will put you in the game that will give you the smoothest gameplay possible without you having to manually find a server with the best ping.”
You can fire up private matches, ”which is essentially like running your own private server”, for starting things like Clan practice games. These give users ”complete control over the rules, who can join, boot players you don’t want, and essentially control the entire game or tweak it to your liking.”
”This now allows you to play custom games out of the box without the need to install mods, find a modded server with the rules you like, or worry about not being in control of the match.” Again, Bowling mentions mods but only when referring to the past, and not specifically tied with Modern Warfare 2 and the IWNet service.
”The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don’t have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters. Or relying on the server admin of the server to constantly be monitoring, banning, and policing it,” he explained.
”Modern Warfare 2 on PC allows us to control the quality of the game much more than ever before as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system to keep games clean of hackers and cheaters.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is being released on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 10th. Do you accept Bowling and Infinity Ward’s defence of no dedicated server for PC gamers?
Source: Kotaku
