CoDBoards Portal

Before leading into my first post on our new portal, just a brief note to our regulars that the forum is still here and unchanged.  This is the new face of codboards and to view the forum, all you need to do, is click the word forums at the top of this page.

Now on to the first post;-

And so, 2009 came to a most ignoble end.  2009 saw the end of the hard core PC gaming community for the Inifinty Ward inspired Call of Duty – Modern Warfare series (IMHO).  Using some sort of warped reasoning, IW forced all PC players to register their game via Steam, in order to prevent widescale piracy.  This did not work.  Coupled with the removal of dedicated server, many, but not all, PC players refused to buy the game and as a result, MW2 is the most pirated game of 2009 - FAILURE! The same twisted reasoning, brought them to remove dedicated servers and replace Punk Buster with the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) – In order to defeat the hackers.  However, VAC does not have sites like punkbusted where screenshots and video evidence could be presented and cheating players placed on a global banlist.  As a consequence, there are far more undetectable hacks that server admins would and did catch.  These are cheats that PunkBuster failed to catch and now VAC fails to catch them too! but there is no “fall-back.” – FAILURE! By removing dedicated servers and not releasing modding tools, they killed the MW2 modding and mapping community – in this, they succeded for themselves, for the CoD community – FAILURE! You have only got to visit our CoD 4 and 5 servers to see what is no longer available to the gaming community and in that, I include the console users, as had they provided dedicated servers for them too, then they may have been able to have access to the same mods and maps.

Does this spell the end of the CoD centric community – NO! It does not.

We now look to the future and await with bated breath, the offering that TREYARCH will bring to the table this coming Autumn/fall.  All indications are that they will not forsake this community and will revive dedicated servers along with modding tools.

In the meantime, we have pseudo new games to play.  The Starwars mod for Call of Duty 4 has been released and Zeroy’s Vietnam mod for Call of Duty World at War is doing well.  In addition, with the coming demise of Infinity Ward as the king of First Person Shooter (FPS) games, we have a variety of other developement houses vieing to take the crown.  Notably, EA DICE have made it known that Battlefield 2 – Bad Company will support dedicated servers and mod tools will be made available (although not on release).  This will breed SUCCESS! This is due in March 2010 and codboards will be supporting this release.  Following up, as previously mentioned, will be Treyarchs Call of Duty release, a highly anticipated move into the Vietnam era (not confirmed).  Assuming that the indications of dedicated servers and mod tools are correct, this will herald – SUCCESS! and codboards will be here to support it!

Moving on from the above, let us not forget the console players.  Those that play the PS3, the xBox and the Wii.  Various versions of Call of Duty are available on all three consoles and codboards will continue to cater for these players. These games work in the same manner as expected and reports on the console game are mainly favourable. We have forums for these players and look forward to watching this part of the community grow and get stronger.  But, in some ways, they were shafted just as badly by IW as the PC players were.  The PC game was altered to offer the same features as the console versions.  In reality, they should have introduced dedicated servers to the console players too!  This would have enabled them to also play the FREE mods and maps made by the community.  Maybe we can start a movement to get this implemented!!

The battle now begins to see just who will emarge as the new King of FPS games as the year ahead unfolds.