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 (DIR) Post #Atm2ZRsA38gtnqCIgC by pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com
       2025-05-05T05:22:40Z
       
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       The biggest problem with Nu-CoD: The death of the lobbyOne of the most controversial aspects of Microsoft’s strategy with the Xbox platform is Game Pass. Game Pass is a subscription service for the PC or Xbox that allows you to play or stream games. It’s been Microsoft’s big gamble and something that Sony has kind of bungled trying to mimic Microsoft. Microsoft buying Activision, Bethesda, and other studios was part of a “long game” plan to make modern gaming a lot like Netflix. Nevermind the fact that streaming in itself is questionable when it comes to being sustainable, in the sense that as rights run out shows vanish or get used for tax write offs. The goal is for a flat fee of $20 a month, you can play any game you want in the program.Think of it like PS Plus or Games with Gold taken to the logical extreme. Games with Gold allowed you to get two games a month that stay in your library forever (360) or as long as you pay the monthly fee (One/Series). Then Game Pass came out, and the format of this is completely different: for a flat fee you can pick from the 400+ games in the library. These aren’t slop titles nobody wants though, there’s pretty much tons of big-name games from both publishers/devs who signed on, along with Ubisoft/EA having their own passes included in the fee. It’s so popular that Sony did the same thing with PS Plus, yet unlike Game Pass you can’t get access to new Ubisoft/EA games. Developers are compensated in different ways, from paying up front to have the game included to revenue sharing per downloads. Of course, there’s also free marketing from people picking up the game and trying it, and games being rotated out so you have to buy the game at a discount if you like it.One of the biggest things to happen to Game Pass is Call of Duty making a visit on it. See; Microsoft buying Activision might as well have been for this one reason alone. Call of Duty is the gaming version of a crappy drug everyone is hooked on, but absolutely hates. Instead of having to buy the new CoD yearly; you too can play Black Ops 6 or whatever they’re at now on Game Pass. So, I decided to try playing MWIII and MWII on the Game Pass service on the PC after buying a month of it (since it includes XBL gold as well), and well, there’s a lot that can be said about modern CoD.MWII/III isn’t a bad game…Essentially if I were to describe MWII/III (the same game really, I’m not even bothering with BO6), it’s a pretty interesting game as it is. It’s a bit distant from how the “golden-age” of CoD played (4 to BO2), yet it’s a very well-polished, well optimized game. With the default settings, it runs at a high framerate on my Intel ARC A750, and on the aging Xbox One X hardware it runs pretty well too. Graphically it looks great, moreso if you pay money for an expensive GPU or something. It’s a very polished game IMO, and it plays quite fun when you get into a decent lobby. It might not have the “advanced movement” (jetpacks) that AW or IW/BO3 implemented yet it’s clear they took some notes from that with tactical sprint and sliding. There’s plenty of people on both titles, both with Game Pass and the general malaise of Black Ops 6. Literally, YouTube is recommending me videos of how “bad” it is from someone hate playing it and another guy who is playing XDefiant until the bitter end and talking about how BO6 is just Activision taking a dump on everyone.That’s not to say there’s bad parts about it. There are some maps that are downright tiny and feel painful to play, especially on objective modes like CTF. There was literally a map where both flags were across from each other with a giant open lobby between them, and that was painful to play. The best maps unsurprisingly seem to be the throwback maps ported from CoD4/MW2. Yet, it’s still better than playing WWII or some of the other CoDs with bad map designs and quick kill times.If anything; it feels like the one thing killing MWII/III and modern CoD in general has more to do with Activision and their choices around the franchise. I’m talking bad anti-cheats, voice-chat AI moderation, and of course the whole cosmetics that feel ripped right out of Fortnite. No, I don’t want to play as Nicki Minaj in CoD. There’s also the giant elephant in the room of SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking. This is one of the worst modern CoD features; where behind the scenes players will be “matched” with players based on skill level. This has come under much criticism for matching players in lobbies with frustrating opponents, or matching you against bad players to make you get hooked more so you play even more of the game. This is combined with a second matchmaking feature to match you with players with cosmetics to try to get you to buy them.Much of this has been talked about by angry forum posters and YouTubers, so I’m going to focus on what I personally noticed and probably the fatal flaw with the game: the death of the classic lobby.Lobbies and their deathPrevious Call of Duty games worked in either one of two ways. The PC versions of 1-World at War and Black Ops 1 featured a server list as the only way to play online. This worked like you expected, you would join a server and play until you quit. Communities formed around this, leading to much disdain when this was killed with the original Modern Warfare 2. This would lead to years of CoD client mods combined to a series of C&Ds from Activision leading to Plutonium (the alternate server for WaW/BO1/MW3/BO2) requiring a Steam account check to allow you to play on their servers online.The second format used for Call of Duty online modes was the matchmaking lobby. For the longest time, CoD used a matchmaking system where you’d be dumped into a lobby. One of the players would host the game but not be told this (with the exception of say AW on the PS3 with serious framerate drops for the hoster), and all the other players would be clients. After each round, the lobby would stay together until the next game. This was a critical part of what made CoD organically successful, as older console multiplayer games were about socialization. You could stay and shoot the shit with other players in between lobbies, become friends with them, and add them/join their party to stick around after the match. This wasn’t solely a CoD thing, as Halo 3/Reach used other techniques to have the same process occur with its “no joining in progress” matchmaking: you could “party up” after each round in Halo 3. In fact; Halo 3 was arguably even better at socialization because the party leader could back out and run custom games, change the playlist, or even do Halo co-op campaign runs.Sure, people like to talk about moments that could never happen in a post-Tumblr world without half the lobby being muted, like the Riot Shield argument video and numerous other “Xbox Live Kid” moments:https://youtu.be/vn-shXySml0But what people don’t talk about are all the organic moments that could only happen back in this day of matchmaking, from getting invites from other players in your recent player list, to meeting friends online.In new Call of Duty titles (and the Halo MCC as another example); this is absent. Instead, after each lobby you are thrown out into the main menu to search for another game with entirely different people. Back in the day you could do the same doing this thing called “backing out”. This was done to introduce and push a new feature: playlists in CoD went out the window in favor of playlist filtering. Others have speculated this is due to the previously mentioned SBMM being unable to work as well if players don’t leave a lobby after each round so it can throw you into a lobby that’s predetermined by the magic black box algorithm. There’s also the recent players list not actually working right, so you can’t find that funny player you wanted to vibe with some more or the person who was playing very well with map callouts and all. Instead, you get random lobbies which are a crapshoot if you get cool people. You’ll get silent lobbies (because the lobby got AI voice chat banned), or someone with their mic picking up game audio, yelling at the other team, and smoke alarm chirps.This new method of matchmaking gives the game a very “dead” feel; almost as if something is missing. Eventually it clicked on what that something was: lobbies are dead. These are the new CoDs and people are clearly using their mics, but yet you can’t see this anymore due to how matchmaking works. It’s made playing these games much less fun and social, and I no longer can find new friends on these games.Friendslop and a sign of the timesQuite frankly, I should be playing different games, ranging from that “hot multiplayer” people are shilling to flavor of the month games. Yet; the sterile multiplayer experience of new CoD games is a reminder of just how things have changed in the post-Tumblr world of online gaming. You can’t even play the same game online and get the same experience you used to. It’s not like you can playing the old CoDs; their popularity and dated/exploitable engine (the BO2 Theater Mode exploit being the absolute most notorious of them all, along with PC CoD’s RCEs) made them a prime target for hackers.But I mean; do you think AI voice chat censorship was a thing in old-school CoD, let alone the pride emblems or the infamous BLM message in CoD during the “summer of love?”The problem is, you can only slide dodge the rot in new video games so long before it catches up with you. The game you used to play as an escape from the real world has been rotted to the core. Sure, few people use the pride flag emblems in CoD, but you will see lots of voice banned people in every lobby. It’s going to be hard going back to the late 2000s/early 2010s, when culture and the quality of the games has taken a nosedive. I can see why people avoid this series now; there’s something to piss off everyone in new CoD.I guess I did this to get a taste of just how bad things are in new video games, and this experiment has served its purpose. Yet; what keeps this series alive isn’t that it’s good, but because of your normie friends and coworkers. You begrudgingly play this or “friendslop” flavor of the month games like REPO because your friends play it too and they’re bugging you nonstop to please play this, while refusing to play anything you want.Arguably, Call of Duty when it began to decline (I’d say the original MW3 was this point for many before the total mess of Ghosts) was an early example of this. They weren’t playing it because it was good, but because their friends did. People saw the original MW3 the same way they do the new one: as a MW2 expansion pack. It wasn’t that good, and yet people played it because their friends were too. Then BO2 came out in 2012 and MW3 was just an anomaly. Boy, if we all knew what was to come afterwards!This is what Call of Duty is now: It’s chasing the dragon of the past eternally down to having remakes of old maps and milking the crap out of Nuketown. It’s fighting game design choices that Activision staff probably mandated. If “friendslop” games are what your Discord or online group plays for the sake of it and only this week while blowing you off for the 20th time today (just like how you’re their 30th side hoe), CoD is what your normie coworkers play after another long day at a dead-end job dealing with whatever drama comes up. They’ll never release sales numbers or player count numbers anymore (especially with Game Pass), but they’ll tell you they’re selling well, we promise, we swear.It might feel dead and sterile, kept afloat by the sheer power of missed Nissan Altima payments by paypigs willing to spend $100 for the special edition or Game Pass consoomers. That’s not going into the fact that player retention thanks to SBMM and updates is all fake; it dies when the publisher says so. Why have mods or custom maps when you can buy a new game yearly with an unsustainable business model?I guess my point here is; if an online game wants to be good it’s gotta be better than CoD, but who am I kidding? Everything with a centralized server list/system might as well be Nu-CoD now (especially in a world of gamedevs who only use Bluesky and goon to the idea of “owning the chuds” for a few reposts and blog articles), except for a game where you control your own server list. Be it UT99 servers with boobs for the load screens, or games with servers like this:Essentially, the only way forward is to kill matchmaking and return to servers.