Call of Duty: Black Ops – Why did we bother?
In November the latest edition of the Call of Duty series was released. Black Ops was hailed as one of the finest online multiplayer first-person shooters ever. Video game critics heralded it as better than Modern Warfare 2, it’s predecessor, in every way, shape and form. And as soon as it was released 80% of my PS3 friends were playing it at any given time. In fact, even at the time of this writing I can expect 80% or more of my friends to be playing it when I get online.
So why did I buy it? The critics said I should and if I wanted to play against my friends online I needed to conform. Bye bye MW2.
At the time of my receiving the game (Christmas) I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into it. It immediately lived up to all of my expectations.
Now that I’ve played it for a while, however, I yearn for the days of MW2 again.
Both games, while of the same series, were built by different companies, and new risks with security the PS3 network aside (I will footnote this for later reading), I wish I could find a way to get us all playing Modern Warfare 2 again.
Bugs in Black Ops
I have been victim to many of the bugs in Black Ops. Sound up if any of this sounds familiar to you.
After reaching level 40 in the game I caught myself on the “Waiting for other players” screen, waiting while I heard the game starting and progressing without me.
My game was frozen.
This was not uncommon. In fact, if I play enough rounds this happens almost every night. Randomly it freezes on the “Waiting for other players” screen.
The only solution I could find online was doing a restart of the system. A restart! Almost every night! It takes forever for the game to load back up again. How inconvenient
This particular time when I reached level 40 for the first time, the game froze and upon restart all of my stats were erased. Everything. The levels, the kills, the wins.
I found a few articles online of people having lost data in the game and the three best answers to why that I found were:
- I downloaded a bad packet
- I was flagged by a user as being offensive in the game, either swearing obscenities in the headset or selecting a vulgar Clag Tag
- I was flagged as cheating
Neither of which are likely scenarios for me. I didn’t download anything recently and I haven’t been (too) vulgar or cheating. If I did get flagged and my stats got erased as a result then Treyarch or Activision (whoever handles stat resets) shouldn’t be resetting people’s accounts willy-nillily without proper investigation.
In any case, I’m back to my argument. I wish we could go back to MW2. So far Black of Ops has been fun (and it’s great to play new maps and use new weapons for a change), but the advantages to playing Black Ops seem to be outweighed by the problems that are being experienced in the game.
There have been rampant connection issues listed on forums all over the internet and best response I am hearing is that MY router is causing the problem and Treyarch will not be releasing any fixes.
If my router is the problem how can I play every other online game without issue, including MW2?
I’m not happy. But until friends start switching back to the old version, I too, despite my bickering, will continue to play Black Ops.
Thanks for nothing Treyarch.
Note: PS3 Network vulnerability – MW2 was developed with no inter-game network security. At the time of it’s creation most games were simply using PS3′s built-in authentication and security. The PS3 network has since fallen victim to hacks and one of the games most targeted by those hacks is MW2, because of it’s large user-base. COD: Black Ops has some of it’s own built-in security features to prevent hacking.
























