Call of Duty has been riddled with all sorts of connection issues, packet loss and the just overall high ping, even when you live close to the server with good internet. If you’ve been playing call of duty for a while then you’ll know that this isn’t new and has been an issue ever since call of duty switched from player hosting to dedicated servers. I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine the other night and we were talking about how laughable it is at this point to pay for crazy fast internet just to lag around the map like It’s 2008. I know people that have fiber optic internet and get 1gb upload and download speeds. But somehow manage to get massive freezes, stutters and packet loss when playing Call of Duty. This isn’t just an isolated incident either, a quick scroll through twitter or reddit and you’ll find countless examples of people experiencing the same issue. How is it that one of the biggest triple A franchises, who in large part is known for the multiplayer aspect of their game, can't figure out how to give players a decent experience. I mean what’s even the point of playing a first person shooter if your bullets don’t register correctly, your game freezes and when it does return to normal you’re already dead and respawning? That basically ruins the entire purpose of playing the game. It makes it hard to be excited to boot up the game and play it when you know that your performance basically doesn’t matter. I remember when I was younger playing the old call of duty games and me and my friends would sometimes sit and imagine how awesome the games would be in the future. How good the experience would be and how much innovation would come to the game. I can tell you for sure that we didn’t imagine the game getting worse. It just goes to show that humans have an assumption bias that things will either stay the same from year to year or even improve. But in many cases, especially gaming, that just hasn’t been the case. It seems like innovation and improvement kind of comes in waves. Like every 5-8 years there's some massive change that comes to gaming that brings the hot new idea to the table and completely changes the gaming scene. The last game to really disrupt the industry was fortnite. They basically pioneered how the entire gaming industry operates now. In many ways this has massively benefited the average gamer with business models being free to play as well as Epic games being so successful that other companies had no choice but to make crossplay a standard feature so that everyone could play with their friends. Now that business model may have it’s down sides but that’s a discussion for another time. It would be nice if other triple A games would also copy the completely innovative feature of the game just working…
Quick side note, I saw a lot of people complaining about the servers and connection in Xdefiant over the play test weekend and IDK about you guys but I find it laughable that people are complaining about that when the game that they likely play the most is call of duty which is suffering massive server issues right now. I know some people did have connection issues but my experience with Xdefiant during the playtest weekend was pretty solid. Sure there were times where I was getting bullet bent and dying around corners but for the most part the game was relatively playable. Maybe that’s because I skipped Friday and only played Saturday and Sunday after they had made some changes. But Compare that to call of duty where literally the next day I booted the game up. Me and my friends are lagging around the map and enemy players are teleporting in front of my face. If this is something you’re also experiencing let me know in the comments below. I’m pretty good with technology and networking systems so I've done everything in my power to make sure the connection on my end is solid.
Now we already know that call of duty has an extremely aggressive matchmaking system in place. If you have an idea at all how it works it would stand to reason that your connection suffers so that the matchmaking algorithm can pair you up with exactly the right players to achieve whatever game outcome it thinks will keep you playing the longest. And that argument makes sense right? Well I just chalked the connection up to that and hadn’t really given it much more thought, that is until I jumped into a game called Ironsight. If you didn’t notice the gameplay on screen right now isn’t call of duty. Sure in many ways Ironsight is a clone or off brand Black Ops 2. But that’s not the point. At any given time this game only has a few hundred players online. You spread those players across multiple game modes and the available players to queue with starts to get pretty thin. So you would imagine that you’re going to be paired up with players from all over the world and probably not have the best connection right? Well surprisingly enough when I jumped into the game I somehow was able to consistently get low ping games. Now while I was doing my research I couldn’t get a clear answer for if Ironsight uses dedicated servers or client hosting in its current state. The only reason I bring this up is because the game has been out for awhile and the original servers were shut down when the game was picked up by south korean studio Wipple and released on the steam platform. Maybe this is a dumb question since you can choose your servers when you’re in the game So if you know exactly how they handle player connection feel free to drop a comment and let us know.
As I was saying, to my surprise I was actually able to get a really good connection in ironsight with only a few hundred players online, at least in North america. In most of my games I was getting a ping to the server below 50 ms. This immediately made me question everything I thought about how connection works in call of duty. So now we really only have 3 possible answers as to why the connection to call of duty servers is terrible. Option number 1. The matchmaking system is so aggressive & your connection to the server is such a low priority in the matchmaking algorithm that it will regularly throw you into games hosted on servers nowhere near you, just to try and create the desired match outcome it thinks will keep you and everyone else playing the game longer. Option number 2 is that the servers are of such low quality that they can’t handle the amount of information being sent to and from them regularly.
Option number 3 is that there are just so many players online at any given time that they’re sending too much traffic to the servers and they can’t keep up with demand. Now that last one really seems like a stretch considering this franchise just continues to bleed players every month. I know steam charts aren’t everything but it’s definitely a decent sample size and if we extrapolate that out to other platforms and use it to estimate, even by a conservative estimation call of duty has lost 30 percent of its player base during the year. If I had to guess it’s honestly a combination of all 3. I don’t know which to blame the most here because I don’t handle the networking or servers for call of duty. But what I know for damn sure is that the matchmaking algorithm definitely does not prioritize your connection. And we can see evidence of that here in Ironsight. If I can jump on a pc only game with less than 200 players and find a game with a 30ms connection, there’s no reason that call of duty, with its massive player base and budget by comparison, should ever give you a match with 100ms ping and constant lag. With Microsoft taking over the franchise I really hope they take a deep dive into activision and call of duty to see what’s going on under the surface. Hopefully they didn’t just spend all of that money to acquire activision just to leave it on autopilot. It’s looking like we’ll get some more information on Treyarch’s next game Black Ops Gulf War during the Xbox Showcase coming up June 9th. If we’re lucky we might see a preview of how Microsoft plans to handle call of duty going forward.
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