FORUMS_

The main reason i bought Black Ops 2 was becuase of it coming with dedicated servers, i was very dissapointed to find out they are not what i expected.

If you are giving a game dedicated servers then give us the ability to pay to have our own servers hosted and give us server browsers, theres no point in dedicated servers without private hosting and a server browser to find your favorite server.

I read the post about the dedicated servers here: http://community.callofduty.com/community/call_of_duty/english/black_ops_2/blog/ 2012/09/28/pc-online-security-matchmaking-and-server-intel

The main reason you outline for not allowing private hosting of dedicated servers is to prevent hacking, well that didnt work out too well did it? There are already hackers, there were hackers on day of release. Games will alway have hackers in them and they are usually quite good at not being caught by any form of anti-cheat.

Why you should give us dedicated servers

Hacking - While anti-cheat is somewhat effective at dealing with hackers, it often takes a while for it to catch them, privately owned dedicated servers usually will have human admins on them, this means when somone is obviously hacking it takes no more than 1 match (if that) to have them banned from the server. Yes i am aware that admins sometimes do abuse their power, but the beauty of having true dedicated servers means that you can simply not play that server again and just play on a different one instead.

Community - True dedicated servers allow for a community to be built arround them, it is very often the case that while browsing for servers, players will find a server they like the most and frequent it, making friendships with those who also frequent that server. Servers tend to be owned by clans, this means that they will tend to have more than one server and will often have a website and forums, futher expanding on the community feel of the game.

Stability - With no form of server browser in place, it often leads to having to hop from one macth to another to find a server that you don't get lagg on, it is time consuming and frustrating for players to do this. When there is a server browser you simply bookmark any servers that you have a decent connection on and frequent those.

Mods - Releaseing the server files and allowing for privately hosted servers often comes with modding of the game, while this usually scares the developers quite alot, just look at the mods on COD4, i've spent hundreds of hours playing the zombie and paintball mods and it is truely what kept the game alive for so long for me. Modding allows for the game to be enjoyed from different angles and will help keep it alive for longer.

Conclusion - Giving us privately hosted dedicated servers with a server browser and the ability to mod will increase the lifetime of the game and make it far more popular. In my opinion this game with the changes stated above could be a COD 4 beater, without the changes it will just flop and die like all the others. The pros of making these changes far outweigh the cons.

Thanks for reading, please reply with any reasons as to why you think that these changes should or shouldnt happen, and note any changes you would also like to see.