About a month ago I purchased Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) for around $60. I'm a fan of FPS games and this one seemed like a good one. The single player game itself was pretty good, but it was very short. I think it maybe took 3 hours total to complete, which was much shorter than the gold standard (in my opinion) of Half Life 2.
But that was fine, because it had an online component which was really the more important part of the game for me. This is the part that would make buying a $60 game worth it. A good online game could be enjoyable for years (like Counter-Strike Source still is).
But as I was soon to find out, MW3’s online component was different and fatally flawed. The first thing I noticed when launching the online game though Steam was that there were no servers to choose from. Instead, the game seemed to find other players and create a new game. That was interesting, since my experience was that you played on a particular physical server that was owned by someone who managed that server.
As best I can tell, MW3 works like this: You select to play a game (there are several variations of MW3 online games, to choose from but are similar to most FPS games). Then Steam goes out and finds other people who are interested in playing that same game right now. The next step seems to be that Steam determines who has the best PC and internet connection, and then hosts the game on that person’s PC.
And that is the weird part. Without your knowledge, you may be the host for the game. Not a big deal, but it leads to some serious problems which Activision and Steam apparently never thought about. First, there is an upside to this: The game is no longer dependent on servers being around for people to play. That means that (theoretically) 20 years from now, if enough people are interested in playing the game, they can create an ad-hoc online game. No one needs to pay to maintain a MW3 server for 20 years.
But here’s the huge downside. About a month after MW3 was released, software cheats for the online game became available. These cheats (such as aimbot) allowed people to dominate the game so that no one could play. Literally, it was possible for a match to start and for one cheating player to kill everyone in the game in about 10 seconds, before anyone else had a chance to even move from their start positions. With the old server based gameplay, the server admin could identify cheaters and ban them from the server by blocking their unique game ID and/or IP address. This meant that servers with active admins became great places to play, where cheating wasn’t tolerated. But with the new MW3 system, there was no longer an admin. There was effectively no one able to police the game. Except for Steam. Steam claims to follow up on cheating complaints (you can report a cheater by going to their Steam profile page and reporting them). But I seriously doubt Steam will do anything to cheaters, and I’ll explain why.
As cheating has always been a problem in online gaming, various solutions have been tried out. Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) was a system run by Valve (the company behind Steam) that would supposedly blacklist cheaters. If you ran a server, you could get access to this blacklist and then block VAC identified cheaters from your server. The effect of a VAC ban was basically a death penalty: Since most servers ran VAC, you would basically be banned from ever playing again without purchasing a new copy for the game and starting over. The problem was that Valve never seemed to blacklist anyone, and I have a theory as to why that never happened. Imagine if you were Valve. You start banning people from gameplay, which essentially removes the functionality of software they purchased. How long would it be before there was a class action lawsuit? How many people could you ban before someone decided to take you to court for unjustly and unilaterally removing a service for which they had already paid you for? And there were no refunds proposed for VAC cheaters. That would defeat the purpose since it would allow them to purchase a new copy of the game and begin cheating again until they got caught again.
So to my knowledge, VAC never banned anyone. It appeared to be an empty threat. So what happened was that dealing with cheaters fell back to individual server admins.
That brings us back to MW3, which has no admins. A couple of nights ago I went to play MW3, and the first game had a blatant cheater. I quit and formed/joined a second game. Another (different) cheater. Joined to a third game. Another (and yes, different) cheater.
I quit and joined a Counter-Strike server. No cheaters.
The cheating problem has suddenly reached a critical level for MW3 and Steam/Activision are apparently unable or unwilling to do anything about it. The online component is almost completely unplayable.
So my advice: Don’t bother.
