Your problems however are amplified that you’re looking for more consistent, low-ping, closer to home opportunities for the same games we appreciate here in the US. However, being Australia, unless you happen to have a fiber connection, and sometimes even when you do, the distance involved and having to travel through multiple hubs will just drive up the ping and latency.

The bottom line is you need to be able to control the environment — or mod, or really do whatever you have to do in order to create the best gaming experience you can muster. Personally as someone outside the US, I’d be very angry about this, but I definitely wouldn’t look at this as a US industry movement. This is a worldwide factor, and the same $60 a game here is whatever the exchange rate is there.

As for servers where you might be welcome and have a good experience, You should drop by the 6thFR servers and see what kind of ping and latency you get. http://www.6thfr.net/ . They have a lot of players from a variety of countries and they do what we can to make you feel welcome.

@Johnathan, does ‘the way of the console’ mean that those outside the US are getting pushed to the side if more companies follow this method?

[=T.W.D=] The Duke

Reducing functionality is a big no-no when it comes to taking a model that was already wildly successful and replacing a major module for something drastically inferior. From a UX perspective they just make the experience worse for your most vocal proponents, and turned many of them into ranting, raving, just plain pissed off former users. They could have resolved this easily giving people the choice under Multiplayer to select using IW.NET to find players to play with, or the ability to use the older method of dredging for servers (presuming they didn’t want to update the old code beyond using it for connections.)

That’s what I would have done as a product manager. Later on we can always make the case for a third party to handle the heartbeat servers we’re running currently. Later on if we have to isolate that community we can circle back give M$ what they need to fulfill the advertising contract.

For me this is about expanding options for your users, not removing them and hoping that makes everyone happy. If you believe you need a novice plug-and-play matchmaking mode, then build it, give it it’s own button and have a nice day.

It’s likely a “plug-and-play” situation with the development anyhow if they’re using an IW.NET extruded API. I would guess they could develop this pretty easily as they know how to mod the engine better than anyone else with the possible exception of Treyarch.

You said “amazon, play and gamespot presale orders for the game on the PC platform have risen since the announcement.”
Heh, risen after the drop? Well I would guess that part of that is people not knowing what was in the announcement, and are involved in the typical last minute rush to get the product without knowing/understanding the problem exists, and an even larger part of those people not understanding the language it was in, given the worldwide popularity of the product.

So there’s a likelyhood we’re looking at more than your assumption that their R&D was factual, complete and free of intent.

I would also suggest that “a majority of PC users really do want to plug and play”, but since I haven’t seen the statistics of their findings I’ll hold reversing my beliefs in this matter. At this point I’d more suspect that’s just coverage for their decision to go in this direction.

The other thing you’re not accounting for is that IW.NET has been in development for all of IW’s titles, console and enabled for PC. It’s simply been updated. IW.NET is currently in use with the Console community, adding the PC users simply means you spent a few weeks tops sorting out how you’re exchanging information through the IW.NET API to the Client application. If you have old code, and a little bit of new code to use the same functionality that’s already written into the console… well… that makes it cheap, simple and easy to do both. Yes some updating would have had to happen on the IW.NET server side, but I do not believe it to be much of a factor here.

As for the subscription model, consider this: There’s no reason why you should pay for a subscription at this time, and if they force you into one so you can participate in the gaming community then this franchise may well go the way of M$ the hard way, given M$ Live Gaming is now provided for Free on the PC side. It was killing sales, and most people were just hacking another way to connect. That shouldn’t have to happen here.

I agree with you that a lot more companies need to get involved, and every single Game Server Host, because there’s a lot of money wrapped up in that at what’s potentially $25-$300 per month per server from most of these clans, some of which have multiple instances or would have made an investment of that magnitude.

XFire and Yahoo (AllSeeingEye) definitely will be struck by this, as will shops like Thinkgeek. Come to think of it, I’m betting Real Networks’s Real Arcade might be impacted too.