In a royal dispute between gamers and Infinity Ward, developers such as DICE saw an opportunity to release a statement reiterating their support for dedicated servers in Battlefield games. What set off some employees in DICE was a recent twitter post by an Infinity Ward developer:
"Seriously, people, grow up. The stunts you people are pulling only hurts your case and gets you nowhere .about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck"
The post came from IW_hyphen a.k.a. Mr. William Cho, Developer over at Infinity Ward. From one side, it is impressive how overall simplification of Internet communication is returning us to inter-human communication known as the "online caveman".
Now, taking a page out of DICE's book… "Battlefield was born on the PC, it grew up with dedicated servers and even when it left the nest and became multiplatform it remembers it's roots. We're doing the PC version of BC2 right. We won't stomach a console port tossed off to some "lesser" studio like our competitors chose to do. We've got our top PC devs working on the PC version side by side with the console team. We don't do ports. It's not the game we'd want to play, and we know it's not the game you want to play either."
So, what can we gather from all of this? Infinity Ward strongly believes they are right in forcing a system that requires all users to authenticate through their system and requires that all users use THEIR servers and matchmaking. Now that Infinity Ward is trying to fight off the entire bad PR, they are also trying to justify their move towards more equality among gamers. The company is trying to justify their move by saying that this will increase gamers' access and make it easier for them to play games. But at the same time, this will effectively kill clans and competitive play. And we will most likely see people skip this game altogether from a competitive stance, not even talking about all of the angry PC gamers. Also, bear in mind that if the company does not significantly invest in network infrastructure, the result will be very negative for the company.
Unfortunately, neither Infinity Ward nor its publisher have a good track record at building network infrastructure capable of coping with tens of thousands of concurrent players. It took World of Warcraft over two years to build a network infrastructure capable of handling the load of millions of players in this ever-popular title, and if you were a gamer from day one, you remember what was going on. And this is for fairly ping-irrelevant title. In First Person Shooters, Infinity Ward does not have the comfort of MMORPG-type delays, every millisecond means difference between server acknowledging a kill from one side or another.
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