(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I enjoy COD. What I don't enjoy and have railed them about is the use of players Boxes to host the game instead of a central server. I don't think it provides a reliable enough connection and gives an over all bad experience when playing COD in multiplayer. Instead of a player having to tweak his connection and system for 1 central point of connect to a server now you throw in the variable of having to do it for an infinite number of combinations.

Problems include:
Given the time for a game to come together; a thorough test of the reliability of either the host or the clients connection can not take place. A connection may seem good at the beginning but if an IP uses throttling for peak connections and also the fact that a broadband's upload speed is usually much slower than its download speed this can lead to problems once in a game. To take and reliably probe a boxes connection would have to take into account different loads on that connection over a few minutes. Now a box 1: connects to a server to find games 2: starts checking its connection to available games and seeing if they are good all within 30 secounds or so. (Since each game is a different connection lets say it goes through 20-30 different games to find a strong connection in an open game. A reliable analysis of the connect should take at least with a bare bones check 1 to 2 minutes. So you should see a wait time of 20 to 30 minutes at least to get in a game. Try doing an analysis of your own connect through You must login or register to view this content. and see for yourself how long it takes. Then do it multiple times at different times of day and through not the closest server to you and see the variable of the numbers that it returns.

Second you are always at the whim of the host.
If a host votes to skip a game and it don't go through and the host leaves, then the game migrates to a new host. I would say at least 50% of the time a new host can't be established. Therefore all the people that wanted to stay in that game gets kicked out. Not only is this inconvenient and you have to start over finding a new game but it also means that the voting system is just for show. on a full game of 12 it takes 7 people to pass a vote. But if I am the host and leave and a new host can't be found then I just effectively overridden the majority rule by having everyone kicked from the game and given the number of different arenas the chance that the next game you find would be the one that you were forced out of and wanted to play the odds would not be good. (My opinion is that if you want to leave an active game it takes you back to the very first screen of call of duty and you have to go through choosing through several screens to get back to multiplayer and a game. Stopping a lot of people from leaving games and being so picky.)

The biggest and best argument against is outlined as an emerging threat in the following article:
You must login or register to view this content.

Denial of service attacks.
Two possible scenarios:
It is only time that is stopping someone from creating a zombie virus that infects PCs, listens for gaming activity on the persons network, get the host IP address of the game they are playing or a list of host games they are trying to connect to and then launch a DoS attack against a host or hosts. (yes the virus could do the same by packet bombing the client instead of the host on the network that is connecting to a host but this would affect only one player and not 12.)

A variant would be a Virus zombie bot that infects a pc emulates a game box uses a premade account that could be updated and while it is trying to find a game to connect to it is collecting host IP addresses and then launch a DoS attack to all the hosts or one host it collected(Very technical but as is nothing is impossible).

Second scenario is a program you could have residing on your PC that either could be sniffing the network connection your game box makes to a host or by utilizing the pc as the portal to the internet it could directly sniff the connect to the host. Then when a player gets mad or feels destructive he clicks his mouse button and flood of packets is sent to that host and the game gets effectively shut down.

Both scenarios can happen to a central server too but the resources and ability to block DoS attacks that are going to one host is 100 folds better than stopping a DoS that could happen to any user/connection which is 1 of possibly 100,000 different connections that could be D0Sed and the resources and ability to stop an attack directed at their IP is not available to a single user.

Multiple Host/client is a way that companies can save money by not hosting a large server and big pipe. In these times saving money is not a bad thing but if it gets to the point where you cant play the game or with ISPs starting to cap amount of data transferred to where if you go over you are the one paying for hosting then this sours the experience of having a multiplayer game anyways.

Do I have an answer no.
What I think will happen is that games like COD will continue to use the distributed host model until it becomes absolutely necessary to change because of DoS attacks to the host or ISP caps making the game to expensive to play beyond the cap.

What this means is that we will probably experience a long time frame where game play is marginal at best while Companies begrudgingly are forced back to central server play!

My 2 cents here.

Argh, can't be bothered to read it really, it is so unappealing, add some colour, do some titles, make some fonts bigger

If you didn't read it why post?

Sorry violent-mak i wasn't going for entertainment. I think this is a serious problem and tried to be argumentative here. It's the short attention span and indifference that you have that game makers are counting on to keep multiperson game playing just above the level of crud.

The reason i posted was so he can change it so it's more readable because a lot of the people who have viewed this have probably been warded off because it is so unfriendly...

And now after reading it, i see there is a problem that i hadn't noticed before, thanked!

So what? If they need colors to read something they shouldn't be reading it anyway.

A change of colour so the paragraphs are easier to see, bigger lext so it looks like there's less text then there actually is!

What would you rather read, one big paragraph of size 8 writing (on microsoft word) with no colour, titles

or a lot of smaller paragraphs, bigger writing, a different colour on each paragraph, a sub title for each sub section