Well, I don't understand why you would buy it. For example, I didn't buy the new Starcraft because I knew I would get smashed.

Ultimately in this game, the gun I like the best is the M16, the one you start with. I think you have to make the game for the average player. The worse the player you design the game for, the closer to "press the button before the light changes" the game becomes.

If you aren't going to either have fun losing, or try and get good, then their isn't much of a point in owning it unless you think the single player is good enough.

Quote from: Cranewings;417419Well, I don't understand why you would buy it. For example, I didn't buy the new Starcraft because I knew I would get smashed.

Ultimately in this game, the gun I like the best is the M16, the one you start with. I think you have to make the game for the average player. The worse the player you design the game for, the closer to "press the button before the light changes" the game becomes.

If you aren't going to either have fun losing, or try and get good, then their isn't much of a point in owning it unless you think the single player is good enough.

I thought T had really made some changes to the core gameplay, but stupidly I fell for their hype. Whiel there is some good stuff in the game, and if they ever bothered to fix the shocking matchmaking, spawning and lag that would go some way to improving things, at the moment it's just a fucking joke. You need eyes on the back of your head.

Just to give you some idea of why it's so busy at the Black Ops servers:

In it's first five days, Call of Duty: Black ops grossed $160 million in sales.

The highest grossing movie of the last two weeks, Disney's Megamind has grossed $90 million in ticket sales it's first two weeks.

CoD: Black Ops has grossed more than last three top movie theatre releases combined!

Quote from: GameDaddy;418561Just to give you some idea of why it's so busy at the Black Ops servers:

In it's first five days, Call of Duty: Black ops grossed $160 million in sales.

The highest grossing movie of the last two weeks, Disney's Megamind has grossed $90 million in ticket sales it's first two weeks.

CoD: Black Ops has grossed more than last three top movie theatre releases combined!

Busy servers aren't the problem.
An inexperienced software developer that's not up to the job and lacks the means to properly test their software is.
Treyarch are out of their depth and then some.

I put in about 10 hours of multiplayer on the PS3 before I gave up. The lag, certain aspects of gameplay, and the lack of my favorite weapon all led me to drop it. Compare that to the 32 days I put in playing World at War. The series took a downturn with Modern Warfare 2.

I have little hope that the series will ever again be as good as CoD4 and WaW.

I kinda figured this was'nt gonna be a very good game when 2 of my brothers who are usually massive fps console gamers decided not to pre order the game and neither plans to bother with it(one told me the cod series has gone shit and activision are the main reason).

CoD always drove me nuts as a design, CoD4 had me raging repeatedly when I wasn't bored with it.

Many of the design decisions make for good SP, but lousy MP. The whole "healing over time" thing, for example, does a great job of idiot-proofing the SP games, no way you can save and not be able to come back. But in MP, weaker players can't wear down the better players with the occasional lucky shot, leading to easy domination if not playing hard core.

Toss in those horrid random spawn rules, and ghastly damage rules and atrocious 'consecutive kill' rules, and you've got a game that simply couldn't overcome bad design decisions. Once you know how to exploit the system, CoD4 got pretty easy:

Once you get the map down, and learn the initial spawns, the game turns into "toss a grenade to where the enemy players will be, then camp". Get a few kills, order to airstrike the spawn (sometimes you can spawnkill a guy TWICE with one airstrike, seriously stupid design)....then get the chopper. Don't spawn the chopper, die instead.

Respawn, spawn the chopper. Nade, camp, and chopper will get you another airstrike...then strike the spawn, get another chopper, die and repeat. I'd go 44/2 repeatedly, sometimes eating pistachios throughout the game (i.e., playing  one-handed) because camping is so trivially easy.

I can't think of any other fps game I can play one-handed and do well on.

Anyone played Black Ops enough to say it's about as badly made?

Doom, we all have a lucky game from time to time. My kdr is about 1.0 and I've gone +40 repeatedly. If your strategy was so good, why doesn't everyone do it? Because the first time a camper kills you, you go find him and get the kill back. If you end up against a whole team of noobs too stupid to do that, you are lucky and desearve a good game.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the games design, in terms of health, kill streaks, or weapons. The problem is people who fail to play the game optimally instead of playing it like a different game and bitching that they lose.

The new game is different. Some issues were removed, but there are new problems for bitches to bitch about.

Quote from: Doom;423255CoD always drove me nuts as a design, CoD4 had me raging repeatedly when I wasn't bored with it.

Many of the design decisions make for good SP, but lousy MP. The whole "healing over time" thing, for example, does a great job of idiot-proofing the SP games, no way you can save and not be able to come back. But in MP, weaker players can't wear down the better players with the occasional lucky shot, leading to easy domination if not playing hard core.

Toss in those horrid random spawn rules, and ghastly damage rules and atrocious 'consecutive kill' rules, and you've got a game that simply couldn't overcome bad design decisions. Once you know how to exploit the system, CoD4 got pretty easy:

Once you get the map down, and learn the initial spawns, the game turns into "toss a grenade to where the enemy players will be, then camp". Get a few kills, order to airstrike the spawn (sometimes you can spawnkill a guy TWICE with one airstrike, seriously stupid design)....then get the chopper. Don't spawn the chopper, die instead.

Respawn, spawn the chopper. Nade, camp, and chopper will get you another airstrike...then strike the spawn, get another chopper, die and repeat. I'd go 44/2 repeatedly, sometimes eating pistachios throughout the game (i.e., playing  one-handed) because camping is so trivially easy.

I can't think of any other fps game I can play one-handed and do well on.

Anyone played Black Ops enough to say it's about as badly made?

Killstreaks don't chain, so that's not possible. One of the very few decent descissions made by Treyarch. But T are totally out of their depth. BO has many many problems, none of which have been resolved despite updates and server side patches. They released a major update that was supposed to include significant alterations, notably to the dreadful audio, that didn't make one iota of difference. You still cannot hear any other character moving at all, no matter their distance or the surface. It's utterly ridiculous, and their response when this was pointed out was to throw a hissy fit.

Camping is still prevalent and still annoying. It won't ever go unless CoD is radically redesigned. Hit detection is just dire; no other word for it. You can shoot directly at someone and score hit markers to no effect. Shotguns are functionally useless as a result, and because they are primary weapons. Launchers - this is extraordinary - are utter wank. You can lock on to a chopper and still miss, and you only get one or two shots! The Chopper Gunner killstreak is absolutely overpowered. Grenade timers are broken. Quickscoping is still in the game. The spawns are beyond a joke; firing range (a map that's very very overused) and WMD have some of the worst starting spawns i've ever seen. Nuketown isn't even playable. Treyarch still can't understand why people are pissed off about the constant 'RC car in your area': a 2 kill predator drone if you have hardline. The perk categories are just wrong (Hacker is by far the most powerful for slot 3); the requirements for pro perks include ridiculous requirements, many of which have nothing to do with your efforts as a player. The COD point system is, frankly, pointless; it's entirely redundant gameplay. The contracts are badly designed and the emblem system gives free reign for people to create very questionable content that T have taken it upon themselves to moderate - as if they didn't know that's what people would do.

And the game lags to the point of stupidity. It's unplayable online, simple as that. Nothing to do with individual connection strength; the matchmaking and hosting setup are dreadful which is why it constantly seeks to migrate host. The regional serach filters don't work either.

Overall, the online component is, in its current state, a complete beta. It should never ever have been released and this is now the fourth game in as many months that has been released before it's time to have problems.

Quote from: Cranewings;423292Doom, we all have a lucky game from time to time. My kdr is about 1.0 and I've gone +40 repeatedly. If your strategy was so good, why doesn't everyone do it?

Lag.

Host advantage is massive in CoD. This is evident from the scoreboards and the results in a given match. So many times a few players will get scores far and away in excess of anyone else and/or their team will go 250/0. Such huge divides just prove the point.

For me, BO is functionally unplayable. I traded mine in and I certainly won't be paying for another installment of this crap unless activision allow for a much improved online setup (ie servers) and the game's design enjoys a serious overall much as the original MW provided.

But the worst part about it is how the problems are handled: Treyarch have made no effort to communicate with the players. No one expects problems to be solved at the drop of a hat, but they have every right to expect at the very least a daily substantive update from the community manager. Unfortuantely he'd rather piss about on twitter.

There might be some confusion here, I'm talking about CoD4, not BO, which might have different rules.

The strategy I described is what EVERY good player tries EVERY match, EVERY time. As GW noted, that's why you quite often have a few players with ridiculously high k/d ratios.

It's the one who pulls off nade/spawncamp bomb/die/chopper/camp pattern first is who wins.

On the off chance someone else's chopper is up, you might have to kill that first, but otherwise, that's the pattern.

Doom, oh yeah, I've never understood why they let kill streaks stack at all, let alone when you call them on the next life.

I bet you haven't played it in a while, but shortly before World at War came out, they changed it to where the kill streak only stacked if you used it during the life you got it.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;423302Lag.

Host advantage is massive in CoD. This is evident from the scoreboards and the results in a given match. So many times a few players will get scores far and away in excess of anyone else and/or their team will go 250/0. Such huge divides just prove the point.

For me, BO is functionally unplayable. I traded mine in and I certainly won't be paying for another installment of this crap unless activision allow for a much improved online setup (ie servers) and the game's design enjoys a serious overall much as the original MW provided.

But the worst part about it is how the problems are handled: Treyarch have made no effort to communicate with the players. No one expects problems to be solved at the drop of a hat, but they have every right to expect at the very least a daily substantive update from the community manager. Unfortuantely he'd rather piss about on twitter.

I'm not saying you are completely wrong. This was certainly true when the game came out. Now though, I have many more games where lag isn't an issue than ones where it is.

Quote from: Cranewings;423366Doom, oh yeah, I've never understood why they let kill streaks stack at all, let alone when you call them on the next life.

I bet you haven't played it in a while, but shortly before World at War came out, they changed it to where the kill streak only stacked if you used it during the life you got it.

Well, good to hear they fixed at least a tiny part. But there's also the whole 'lack of spawn protection' thing that's just goofy. Also, the random spawn zones drive me nuts.

I'd spawn, grab a grenade, throw the grenade, die before even knowing I'm being shot at.

Respawn somewhere else...on top of my own grenade as it goes off, die again.

Seriously, how did the stupidity of that not occur to any playtester?

Also, too many grenades in the game, especially the small maps, bringing up the next issue.

The CoD4 maps were all goldfish bowls, too small, especially considering weapons that easily shot through cover. It was so simple to just get the shoot through walls perk and just hang back, spamming the spawn for trivial kills, slaughtering people with NO chance of doing anything about it.

Even when doing well, I'd shake my head often as I played, cursing how bad the design was.

Graphics are great, but those maps were so detailed that modders couldn't make any maps---and these games get old fast when there aren't new maps. Consider the longevity of 'old' games, the constant new maps are the key, in my opinion, and even the game could overcome the design flaws, the difficulty of making new maps just kills it.

Nothing I've read about Black Ops says they've really tried to improve anything.

Lsat time i played was thursday and it wasn't fixed then. I traded it in, couldn't be arsed with it any more.

And they also need to fix the wolverine 'berserker barrage' that is knifing.

I have no idea why theonline is so bad for the game, perhaps it demands a greater connection strength than I can provide. But i have the same as most people in the UK (which is shitty anyway),so there's nothing i can do about that. I doubt that's the issue though, i'm very very rarely host (especially as it migrates constantly).

If Treyarch ever get their shit together then fair enough, but for now stick to Bad Company 2 at least it has dedicated servers which is more than Activision are willing to provide (despite their prices being 10% higher than anyone else's).