The Callings of Dutification - Ebony Operations

[bovine]

So I grabbed Black Ops.

It is my first Treyarch COD experience. My first actual COD games was 4:MW. I got in the beta and thought it had some really great ideas in the multiplayer, so I picked it up on launch and here I am. This game, however, feels like it really lacks the polish that came with the MW games. The multiplayer feels right, but the single player is where I am left feeling like they had lots of money, but just did a sort of middling job. The game usually looks great and there are a bunch of very recognizable voices in there, but I just found that some parts relied too heavily on scripting, it was extremely easy to see where one of your teammates would go from "scripted part" to "unscripted movement" and it did not look like the sort of seamlessness that I was used to in the MW/Infinite Ward side. I think this game is certainly worth a FPS fan's dollars if they want a whole breadth of single and multiplayer content, but don't expect this thing to be game of the year or anything.

[Anarky]

Game is beyond broken.

[Zeus]

One way you know it's not being developed by Infinity Ward: The Battle of Khe Sanh. I thought I was missing something when I got there as it took me nearly 2 hours to get past it on Veteran (and I only discovered the one thing I had to do that was vital to passing the level by sheer chance), but apparently it's an epidemic that everyone is facing and is actually a serious design flaw

http://wii.ign.com/articles/113/1134054p1.html

I will say this: after playing Medal of Honor, I'm ankerin' for teammates who aren't as useless as tits on a boar. I know it's been around in the CoD franchise from the beginning (at least in the next-gen ones I've beaten) but when you couple their ineptitude with inhuman accuracy of the enemies, a disgusting volume of enemies who act as if you're the only one who exists (often standing right beside your teammate, who's ignoring them, and shooting you), and some parts with infinite respawning and the manner in which the difficulty is delivered is becoming a bit tiresome.

I'm all for a stiff challenge but don't be lazy about it. My teammates should be able to take some guys out if there's seven waves of more than 50 guys coming at you. They should be able to watch my back, too, if they're standing RIGHT THERE. The enemies should not be able to kill me in 2 shots (firing only 3) with an inaccurate SMG from 200 ft away through a window while I'm crouching against a wall in a building so they can only see half of me (it happened a bunch of times last night). You get the feeling you're just fighting through lazy, cheap difficulty as opposed to a great challenge. Sure, it's taking a 6-hour campaign and turning it into a 12-15 hour one, but there's better ways to increase difficulty. Medal of Honor on Hard was way too easy and I like the high difficulty from the CoD franchise, but this is not how you do it.

[Eric]

Yes, that mission is fucking retarded, I think I replayed it 20 fucking times.

One of those rare cases where you want to freakin rage.

[Zeus]

Anyone up for some zombie co-op action? I'm available 8pm - 9pm, roughly, during the week

[SineSwiper]

Everything's got to be about fucking zombies...

[Tessian]

I am a weak, weak consumer whore and I picked it up last night. It's better/more fun than MW2 but god damn I hate my teammates something fierce sometimes. WHY play Domination when you have NO INTEREST in actually capturing points?? This game reminded me how much I don't miss swearing at my tv every 5 seconds.

The exploding RC cars are fun... when you're driving them. Contracts give it a new twist, too bad I suck at accomplishing them. Haven't tried zombies yet, but single player campaign is, so far, as entertaining as previous games (which is to say I enjoy it a lot).

[Zeus]

Tess, that's why I despise the Call of Duty / Halo multiplayer. The people who play it are only interested in their stats, they couldn't care less about the actual game type. What they should do is severely limit the number of points you get for not winning, then people might care about the actual objective.

And that's why I stick to Gears online.

[Shrinweck]

If they did that people would leave at the first sign of their team beginning to lose.

[Zeus]

If they did that people would leave at the first sign of their team beginning to lose.

Not if you have severe XP deductions like, say, 5000 XP if you manually quit. It's 'bout time they stopped rewarding the idiots who ruin the game for others

[Shrinweck]

What the? So if I have to leave because I'm out of time, there's a griefer asshole on my team, or my power goes out for 2 seconds I get penalized? Yeah, that'll go over real well.

[Eric]

Thing is that there's so many millions of people playing they could get away with stricter penalties for dropping.

WoW recently for the most part stopped rewarding honor for killing players in battlegrounds, so actually winning has become the primary method of attaining honor, as opposed to ignoring objectives and killing people.

If you leave a battleground and don't stick it out, you can't requeue for 15 minutes.

[Shrinweck]

There's a difference between having to wait 15 minutes to get back into it and losing potentially hours worth of work.

[Zeus]

What the? So if I have to leave because I'm out of time, there's a griefer asshole on my team, or my power goes out for 2 seconds I get penalized? Yeah, that'll go over real well.

What part of "if you manually quit" did I misspell? I mean if you actually go through the effort of manually quitting the match. Sure, you can get away with it by forcefully exiting the game (like hitting the guide button then Y on the 360) or turning off your system, but how many of these ADHD kids would actually want to spend the next 2 minutes restarting? At least make it enough of a pain in the ass that they would think very seriously about it.

And what do you mean "out of time"? These matches last 5 minutes. If you're trying to squeeze in that last match before you go to your wife's cousin's wedding and she comes down and "forces" you to leave, you deserve the XP penalty on social irresponsibility alone.

I like Eric's idea even better, it'll stop the whining bitches who realize they can't take advantage of the game anymore from screaming even louder for "losing time" (like these guys who hit Prestige 2 before the game was even out for 72 hours have anything valuable to do with their time in the first place.....). Except I'd up it to 30 minutes. That would really stop the spoiled bitches who ruin the game for everyone else from leaving just because their team is losing or they're not doing as well as they'd hoped. And that would eliminate the penalty in case you have a power outage (like that happens enough to actually even concern yourself with) or "have to run" (like these guys ever have anything else to do, check out that video I posted for proof; I mean seriously, if a 20 year-old gives up sex for a game, he REALLY has nothing "better to do").

Unfortunately, it will never happen. Activision would be alienating at least 70% of their hardcores if they did anything like that

[Tessian]

bitter much?

I'd be for penalizing quitters by making them wait 2 minutes to enter another game, not 30 that's ridiculous. I myself quit games early sometimes when I find them horribly stacked. I refuse to go through 5-10 minutes of humiliation when it's a pick-up team vs 6 friends who play together.

[Shrinweck]

Sorry, I was just assuming the match times were similar to MW2, which last 20-30 minutes by what I played. When I lived with my parents, there would be nights when the power would go out several times in a night during some nights. Granted most areas have better grids and systems then our part of Atlanta, but there are definitely nights in nearly all places where power get spotty, and manually quitting can be only so accurate. What stops me from reaching to my router and unplugging the ethernet connector? That used to be how I would drop from shitty EverQuest groups when I wasn't even thirteen. That's what I would still do during multiplayer games if losing was still a big deal for me.

Also - locked out for 30 minutes? There's no multplayer game ever that's worth being screwed over for that kind of penalty - people need to pee and most of us arenj't assholes enough to stay on the server AFK for that kind of period, right? Okay, that might be weird enough that I'm alone on that, but still, people need to do shit and quit out of courtesy more than being a free spawn target for 3-5 minutes, right? And most game's matches last longer than 5 minutes.

[Lox]

There's no good way to detect manual quitting vs accidental quitting. Once players figured out that manual quitting hurt them, they'd just start unplugging their ethernet cable or wireless adapter or turning the system off mid-game or whatever else would count as an accidental quit.

I'm all for punishing early quitters in games. The reason I stopped playing the first Rock Band's battle mode was because people would quit as soon as they had no hope of winning and screw you.

[Zeus]

bitter much?

I'd be for penalizing quitters by making them wait 2 minutes to enter another game, not 30 that's ridiculous. I myself quit games early sometimes when I find them horribly stacked. I refuse to go through 5-10 minutes of humiliation when it's a pick-up team vs 6 friends who play together.

yeah, I don't like it when people just exploit something. See, when it says "capture the flag", I believe your goal should be to actually get the flag, not just run around like an idiot ignoring your teammates to rack up kills and completely ignoring the objective (the Thursday night after it came out, my cuz played online here for 5 hours, I saw the objective being ignored in every game of every match type he played). It was like that with Gears 1 online and the bum-rush-to-shotgun which turned it into Halo and is why I stopped playing it. And in the case of Call of Duty, they're actually rewarding people for not playing the match type, it's stupid.

It's 5-10 minutes, deal with it. Your teammates suck and the others are super-co-ordinated Gods? Well, use that as a challenge to try and see what you can do on your own. Use the morons on your team as decoys to see if you can ambush the other team. Think of it as a different kind of challenge while you're waiting to join another game. If you just leave because it's not going your way, you're ruining it for everyone. Abandoning your team even if they're useless should be punished otherwise you get the bullshit that you have now where you quite often end up 8 vs 3 because there's no consequences to being selfish.

Personally, I think there should also be a penalty for not actually winning the match too, like, say, 30% of the XP you earned that round is deducted and the winning team gets a 30% bonus. But one step at a time.

[Zeus]

There's no good way to detect manual quitting vs accidental quitting. Once players figured out that manual quitting hurt them, they'd just start unplugging their ethernet cable or wireless adapter or turning the system off mid-game or whatever else would count as an accidental quit.

I'm all for punishing early quitters in games. The reason I stopped playing the first Rock Band's battle mode was because people would quit as soon as they had no hope of winning and screw you.

Yes there is and it's quite simple: if you choose the menu system option to quit, it's manual, otherwise it's accidental. If people purposefully try to accidentally quit, the punishment is it takes them about 2-3 minutes to log back on and rejoin a match. For the ADHD kids that rule online play, that's like an eternity and a huge punishment in an of itself.

This is why I think Eric's idea works even better. You won't need an XP punishment so the whiners can't use that excuse. Regardless of the type of quitting, it takes 15 minutes to be able to get back into a match (I'd up it to 30 for manual quitting but for argument's sake, let's assume we don't care what kind of quitting there is). For the most part nowadays, the real "accidents" are very few and far between from the customer's side (I'm also going to assume for a sec that the PSN and XBLA server failures are either very uncommon or do not count towards the punishment). Can you have an ISP hiccup? Power surge? Unwanted system shutdown? Sure, but how often does that actually happen? It's so uncommon it's not even worth worrying about, those kids can deal with those once-in-a-blue-moon issues. There, issue solved.

Unfortunately, it's never going to happen because the vast majority of people playing the games either a) want to have the option of quitting early, b) are so used to it that it's not even an issue anymore or c) are against anything that doesn't allow total freedom, even for the losers ruining the game (assuming the majority are not losers). And does Activision really want to give Medal of Honor ANY possibility of nabbing the spoiled-brat hardcores? No chance, otherwise they would have introduced pay-to-play already.

[Zeus]

but still, people need to do shit and quit out of courtesy more than being a free spawn target for 3-5 minutes, right? And most game's matches last longer than 5 minutes.

How often do you need to shit right in the middle of a match so badly that you can't wait the 5-10 minutes max they last (I watched my cuz play for 5 hours, the matches were no longer than that)? Even if you're assuming Mother Nature bellows at the top of her lungs JUST as the match is starting, it's still a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence to be forced to either stop or quit the match because you have that uncontrollable need to pinch that log the size of a small canoe? Just be cannon fodder for those 3 or 4 minutes, who cares? I've done that many times in the middle of a game of Gears or Left 4 Dead as my bowels occasionally exhibit ADHD and need instant gratification as well. Maybe more games could use Left 4 Dead's idea of computer controlling the character who's either idle for more than 30 seconds or who requests it at the average level of their teammates. Any kills racked up while in this mode do not reward XP. There, issue solved.

Regardless, these less-likely-than-getting-hit-by-lightning arguments are not enough grounds to ruin the game.

[Tessian]

Wouldn't the easiest thing to be to have a 10 minute wait regardless of how you disconnected? Purposeful, accidental, who cares-- 10 minutes. If it was environmental (internet died) then it'll probably take that long to get back on at least anyway. If it was on purpose and you had to do something I assume it'll take at least 10 minutes.

Oh and I enjoy Contracts, I just wish there were more than 3 sets worth of them that rotate... I mean seriously, if you're going to have them change every 24 hours you need more variety.

[Shrinweck]

I think Penny Arcade got it right. People who quit early should be marched into the streets and shot in the mouth by government agents.

[Zeus]

Wouldn't the easiest thing to be to have a 10 minute wait regardless of how you disconnected? Purposeful, accidental, who cares-- 10 minutes. If it was environmental (internet died) then it'll probably take that long to get back on at least anyway. If it was on purpose and you had to do something I assume it'll take at least 10 minutes.

That's what Eric was sayin', make it 15 minutes. But he and I were nice enough to stick that only to those who purposefully leave the game, not to those who get screwed for some other reason. But if you wanna make it for any kind of disconnection whatsoever, that's coo. But there should be something