Will anyone ever join a game?
I am breaking out some Call of Duty MW 3 during the Christmas Holiday 2019 break.
It was fun; I hadn’t played in quite a while.
Introduced my teen son to it – he was in awe of the level of detail. (Yeah, even for 2012 this was still really good)
He had watched other play – but never played himself. As a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game, the COD series were some of the early great. Well, maybe not as MMO as World of Warcraft (WOW), but you get the point.
Coming from the Fortnite world of MMO, he clearly got the concept. Use a character and a gun to mow down any and all opposition players. And do it before they take you out.
So, he was ready for it. But the level of blood and gore could have been a bit much. Am I a bad dad for letting play such a violent game?
Maybe.
But, the only reason I did is that his mom (my ex) let him watch the full and not-for-TV version of Deadpool… only covering his eyes from the sex scenes. Deadpool? Really? There is so much gore and blood going on in that movie; COD MW3 is a clown puppet show for babies compared to that movie. So, yeah, I conceded. If he could watch Deadpool, exposing him to MW3 was no issue on my conscious.
After playing a lot of survival missions and bouncing back and forth between our PS3 profiles to get better content on my profile and him trained up (and me re-trained – WOW so outta practice!). We chose to try our skills online with Multiplayer Mode the PS3 network.
The problem was, there are not many players playing COD MW3 on the PS3 network.
Where have all the players gone? Well, it IS a 2012 era game, and this IS 2020.
Many players have gone to Prestige 20 and left it to play other games. And probably many mindless bots have been put on to more recent games to cheat and steal. (bots do cost $$ to run, after all).
We waited for an online game on many modes, Team Deathmatch, Domination, Head Quarters, and even Free For All (We only need 4 players for that).
Disappointment! Nothing but a loading screen searching for players for 10 to 15 minutes.
What is a veteran player of COD to do?
This is usually not a problem for other modes in the game where you can play the solo missions or the campaign, but the online profile is quite isolated only to let you advance that profile online… and nowhere else.
With more recent releases of the Call Of Duty series, this is no problem because the gamer community is there in masses and getting into an online game is easier.
So, we need to put some thought into future game designs when the online mode grows, old and players grow tired of the game and move on… maybe have some options to allow profiles not be exclusive to MMO or make the MMO profile playable in another mode when server traffic gets below a certain level.
After a while, we DID get into a Domination game and a Team DeathMatch game. We both got our butts handed to us. I think in my first game (I want to see how you do, Dad!), I did the best… my eyes were rested, and I took down 12 bad guys. I died over 20 times, though. At least with the lack of bots, I knew we were both getting killed by some of the best players in the world. What an honor! There you go, a new Trophy… Killed Most Often in a Match by a Top 10 Ranked Player! Sign me up!
Disclaimer, I’ve not played any of the COD series after COD MW3 because I didn’t want to start over again on a whole new battlefield of maps. (I’m not the BEST player of First Person Shooters – Far from it!). So, later games may have solved the problem, but older games will be a casualty of this limited design if no one is around to play.
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