August 5th 2010 will be the next date for another hearing between these two companies who produced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  There has been a total of 3 lawsuits filed against Activision from former employees.

Back on the 1st of March 2010 Activision fired West and Zampella, creators of the Call of Duty series, claiming they were insubordinate and broke their contract.  They fought back with a lawsuit seeking $36,000,000 in unpaid royalties.  And of course Activision counter-sued.

Since this mess West and Zampella have created Respawn Entertainment and signed on with EA. 

And Activision has signed a 10 year contract with Bungie.

The current Call of Duty: Black Ops is being developed by Treyarch.

Source: airbornegamer

If the Shacknews staff cannot tell which platform you are entering for, your comment will not be counted. No purchase is required, but do note that multiple posts won’t increase your chances. Also, be aware that they’re only giving away PC and PS3 versions of the add-on at this time and a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is required to use it.

Of the five multiplayer maps, three–Carnival, Fuel and Trailer Park–are all new, while the remaining two–Vacant and Strike–are returning from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Entries will be taken until tomorrow 12:01pm CST. At that point, winners will be randomly selected and notified via Shacknews message system.

Source: Shacknews

Provided these numbers are indeed accurate, Activision has potentially lost more than $245 million in sales on the PC version alone.

The Sims 3, Prototype, Need for Speed Shift, and Street Fighter IV help round off the top five for the year, all of which appeared on the PC platform.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii was the highest downloaded Wii title with 1,150,000 downloads.

The report notes the total download figures for this year double that of last year’s numbers, and that PC remains to be the target for torrent downloads, with more than three times that of the Wii and Xbox 360.

Source: IGN

Also G2Play is refunding (according to their response on Twitter):

http://twitter.com/G2PLAYSHOP/status/5916068001

So if you bought your key somewhere else and you’ve lost your game please do not hesitate and ask for a refund or a new key. And do not be afraid to use online key stores in the future – things like that happen but we cannot let Valve threat people with removing games and such.

Have fun playing!

Update:

Here’s a cool screenshot thanks to Rad86N:

Here’s a link to Steam Powered forums: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1031758

And here’s BurtonJ’s response:

Update:

Here’s what he did now:

Also right now it seems like he’s saying "You have to buy games in our 300% more expensive store, sorry mate."

Join the forum discussion on this post

This one literally means: “Accidental laying at most suicides”.

More here.

What about other versions of the game? You guys found anything?

Cheat / Hack Free Games: The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don’t have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters. Or relying on the server admin of the server to constantly be monitoring, banning, and policing it. Modern Warfare 2 on PC allows us to control the quality of the game much more than ever before as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system to keep games clean of hackers and cheaters.

Quoted from: http://www.infinityward.com/

NOTE: Steam Unpowered does NOT support cheats/cheaters.

Many forum members are in an uproar over pre-ordering the title without being completely aware of the different release date that was clearly advertised.
"What the… 2 DAYS??? Why the heck did I buy through Steam for? I certainly didn’t know there was gonna be a 2 day delay for us steam purchasers," one forum member wrote.

The ire also stems from the fact customers who purchased a retail boxed copy of the PC game are not forced to wait, despite the title requiring Steam authentication. This has also led many to pursue canceling their online pre-orders.

"I pre-ordered the game, assuming that it would come out on the actual release date. Now I’m waiting for my ticket to be answered for my refund," another member wrote. "The funny part is they probably wont get back to me until after it is released on Steam:

If you pre-ordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 off Steam and are still hanging in there waiting, here’s the most updated release details from Steam:
Activision’s policy is for the digital download version of MW2 to be activated 48 hours after the retail release. Therefore copies bought on Steam will be activated as follows: Worldwide (except North, Central, and South America): 3:00 pm PST Nov 11 and North, Central and South America: 9:00 pm PST Nov 11.

Source: IGN

Some nice shots of the retail box…and what makes this story newsworthy though is this picture below. A picture is worth a thousand words indeed…

And this is after everyone were promised the game will work 100% after the street date here in SA – hence the midnight release and everything.

News thanks to our user ld13 (here).

Update: http://steamunpowered.eu/forums/submit-news-in-here/south-african-cod-mw2-release-fail/#p335

For those of you who are PC gamers, you should wait on buying Modern Warfare 2 from the retailers, if at all. The PC version comes with 2 discs but it seems that only the actual game is working and not the extra content on the second DVD.

The first DVD/Disc is about 6.9 GB which seems to be the standard size for games that are coming out now. Unfortunately it seems like most, if not all, DVD drives are refusing to recognize the DVD. The DVD disk rattles around and you can hear the disc just clattering in the DVD Drive. Now when something like this happens, questions comes to mind and that is if this is a manufacturing defect and whether there are other discs out there that have this same problem.

A German game magazine reports the same problem. Every drive in their editorial office refuses the second DVD (they have seven PC’s and four copies Modern Warfare 2 for PC). They say it’s definitely a production error.

News thanks to our user ld13, and the original source.

Kotaku just posted that Direct2Drive won’t be selling Modern Warfare 2 on their PC digital delivery service. Why? Because of rival platform – Steam.

The game includes mandatory installation of Valve’s Steamworks, which the game uses for stuff like installation, DRM and save-game management. Something Direct2Drive (which is owned by website IGN) are having none of, telling:

We don’t believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse.

That “Trojan Horse” being the inclusion of Steam’s commercial marketplace.

D2D also told Kotaku that, having evaluated some Steamworks titles earlier in the year (such as Empire: Total War and Dawn of War II) and finding the forced inclusion of Steam’s storefront (offering automatic competition to D2D’s own services) not to their liking, told publishers that they’d stop selling games bundled in such a manner until Valve “decoupled its retail marketplace” from Steam’s other services.

To be clear, D2D’s beef is not with Activision, it’s with Steam, and to prove there’s no bad blood between the retailer and mega-publisher, $5 coupons will soon be offered on select Activision titles to make up for it.

But that’s not all it seems Impulse have come out today and also confirmed they won’t be stocking the game, for the same reasons. Digital store Gamersgate have told Kotaku that, like D2D and Impulse, they will also not be stocking Modern Warfare 2, and again, for the same reason.

Is this the failure of Modern Warfare 2 for PC? We’ll see. Oh and by the way vote in our poll:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Modern Warfare 2 has long earned the ire of PC gamers for its lack of dedicated servers, but Infinity Ward has now announced that it’s taking away much more than control over hosting with the game in one long face-palm of a question and answer session. No servers, no console, no mods, no problem!

Infinity Ward needs to realize that talking to people in the PC community does not end well for the buzz around its game. The lack of dedicated servers was "announced" during an interview with a gaming podcast, and the interviewers were stunned into silence when they were basically told their community, as they knew it, was dead. They would have to learn to adapt to Infinity Ward controlling all aspects of the servers, or move onto another game.

More recently, Best Buy hosted an online chat between gamers and Mackey McCandlish and Ryan Lastimosa from Infinity Ward. The floor was open for questions, and the pair systematically crushed any hope that the PC version of the game would even attempt to make gamers happy, or allow for what the community has been taking for granted for years. We’re going to take a look at some of the more telling questions from this session, and give our thoughts on why this is bad, bad news.

Josh111: PC Question… What will the max amount of players per map be for PC multiplayer on IW.net
Vince-IW: 9v9

No matter how good a connection the host has, no matter how powerful your dedicated server was, the maximum number of players online is 18. If you have a larger clan, you’re out of luck. If you’re waiting for someone to create a custom map to allow larger groups, don’t bother. There is no news on mod tools or the ability to add your own content into the locked-down server structure.

Infinity Ward says the maps are balanced for only nine players per side, but they also say there is no lean in the game because the game "isn’t balanced for lean." Remember, you can easily answer any inconvenient questions by saying it would ruin the game’s balance.

Somehow, I doubt between the past games and this one they’ve forgotten how to implement lean. Likewise, with the ability to run your own servers players can decide what size games they’d like to play on, or use new maps that are larger. As the system is set up now, however, that is simply not an option.

Q: Is there a console in the PC version of the game, so we can change our field of view from the xbox’s default 65 FOV to 80 also can we tweaks the weapon damage for each gun, removes perks, graphical debris, breathing sway, also thru console like we where able to before or is this all gone?
Vince-IW: We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

The lack of console commands is going to be something that may not make the headlines, but may be one of the most annoying omissions to the game. The ability to tweak and adjust your play experience through the console is something PC gamers have enjoyed since… well, since there has been modern gaming.

There is a long list of adjustments and tweaks gamers can make to titles like Borderlands on the PC in order to adjust settings. Now you’re locked into whatever options Infinity Ward sees fit to put into the menus.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a console game that plays on your PC. You won’t be able to make any tweaks, you can’t adjust anything, and even better? You won’t be able to make recordings of your matches. The question in the chat showed just how far the gulf between what gamers want and what Infinity Ward is giving them has become. "Is there a /record feature? Answer yes… please. We’re trying to give you a ‘chance’," the gamer asked. The answer was a simple "No."

DudezTY: Since we cannot kick people in ranked matches, how will we stop hackers who get past VAC?
Mackey-IW: Our goal is to ban hackers from the game.

It’s a shame that it’s impossible to show a jaw dropping on an online chat. There will be no way to kick players, and Infinity Ward seems sure they’ll simply be able to keep hackers and cheaters from playing.

That’s a pipe dream, of course, but with no control in the hands of the players, no ability to control who is hosting, and no ability to kick or ban players from your game, you’re just going to have to take their word for it.

kaRMa: Please give me a direct answer. On the PC version. Are all games hosted by players, and is there a five-second delay when host migration is in effect?
Vince-IW: yes.

Why is this a problem? Because Infinity Ward also revealed in the chat that the game will pick who hosts. You have no control over it. If the host leaves, there will be a five-second delay while the game picks the next best host. Players have no way of controlling who is hosting, and of course we know there will be no dedicated servers.

The host will of course have a ping advantage, which should be mitigated by the software "having a great tolerance for latency," and a five-second pause if the host rage-quits before the game restarts will ruin any flow the game enjoyed until that point.

What’s more interesting is that they said ISPs will have to deal with you hosting games, even if there is language against running servers in their usage agreement. Infinity Ward’s response is that since this isn’t a "permanent" server, they have to deal with it. When someone else asked what would happen if their ISP throttled traffic that comes from running a server, they were told that "only players capable of hosting will host."

They better hope that no ISPs get upset, because there is no way for any player to control who hosts. You can’t opt out of hosting. If the host quits, the game stops for five seconds while the next one is selected by the software. This is good for gamers… somehow.

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?
Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

This is the amount of work that went into the PC version: you are given the ability to use a mouse, to use text chat, and to adjust graphical settings. Are your fears now put to rest?

To sum it up

We thought the lack of dedicated servers was bad, but now we can add the lack of console commands, the inability to have a say in who hosts the game, a lengthy pause while the game migrates to a new host if the currently selected host quits, no leaning, no option to record matches, and no way to kick or block trouble players, hackers, or cheaters.

You have to wonder if there are any actual PC gamers working at Infinity Ward, as it will be a challenge to find any member of the PC gaming community that will stand up for any of these omissions, not to mention all of them bundled together. At launch, this will be one of the most locked-down, inflexible, and gamer-unfriendly game ever created.

It won’t stay that way, of course. The pirates will have the game up on the torrent sites soon, if they haven’t already, and the code will be ripped apart and modded to allow everything gamers want. How quickly will dedicated servers pop up for these pirates? It’s hard to say… but we have a feeling it won’t be long. Those that buy the game legally will have no choice but to play exactly how the developer and publisher want them to. On the other hand, this has given us some incredibly amusing images from the peanut gallery. The images were found on Evil Avatar’s discussion thread.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/11/pc-modern-warfare-2-its-much-worse-than-you-thought.ars

PS
It’s now official, every copy of Modern Warfare 2 will require Steam activation which means you can get it a lot cheaper in your retail store than on Steam (60€). For example in Poland this game is around 25-30€.

Robert Bowling said on his Twitter account, "you’ll also have Prestige Mode in PC as well as lots of Steam support. Hopefully min specs will be soon." That’s not a lot of detail, but at least the guy posted something.

As far as I know the game will use Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system – a lot of CoD fansites claim it’s true.

Does it mean that the game will be registareable on Steam? I mean the retail box version? I guess we will find out soon! If yes, we can expect fair prices in retail stores (hopefully) and we can get it for a lot lower price than it will possibly be on Steam.