Maps, I Don’t Love You Like They Love You

Those players who have purchased Call of Duty:  Black Ops (2010) for Playstation 3 (this guy) and/or X-Box 360 have essentially signed up to be victims of a Ponzi Scheme.  Essentially, upon release, publisher Activision sells consumers an incomplete game for $60 and then continues to bleed the same victims for $15, three times (for an additional $45, a total of $105) for downloadable content (DLC) in the form of “map packs.”   Now, Activision does provide a decent bang for the buck:  each map pack includes four newly designed multiplayer maps and one additional zombie mode map.  It’s not so much the quality of the additional content that I find frustrating.  Rather, it’s the method in which they are sold and the quality of the original content. 

Essentially, if you have a party of six and five players have the paid DLC, the new maps will be disabled from the playlist.  This is a recent change.  Formerly, players without the DLC would be kicked out of any match featuring a paid map pack, a bigger headache that put players into a stranglehold, forcing them to buy the content or GTFO.  Yet, can’t a happy medium be found?  Why not lower the pricing back to Call of Duty:  World at War (2008) levels - $10 a pack - or offer the first round of DLC as a pre-order special, like many other publishers do, rewarding loyal consumers who shell out full price on the midnight before the release date?  Given that the map packs aren’t released until mid-summer, a mere four months before the release of the next, inevitable, Call of Duty title, their shelf life is incredibly short (a trait that some users find ways around by sharing downloads with other friends). 

Even more frustrating is that Activision has a tendency not to Beta test the Call of Duty games, leaving a barrage of glitches for software patches to clean up.  Sadly, the majority of the time, these patches release more plagues upon the multiplayer network.  Bullet hit detection seems to have declined, host migration errors have grown more frequent and given the lack of dedicated servers, lag time can be a major pain in the gamer’s backside.  Yet, it’s the little things that frustrate this dedicated gamer:  spawns which place you directly in front of enemy combatants, even the occasional spawn on top of an exploding car or an enemy Claymore mine. 

Basically, Activision takes $105 dollars from players each year and refuses to supply adequate consumer support for their products.  They’ll gladly dip into your wallet but, unfortunately for the player, they rarely exhibit similar zeal for addressing the technical problems on their end.  At the beginning of the year, these tactics came to a head and resulted in a string of lawsuits against Activision, which earned $1 billion during the first week of Black Op’s release, which claimed the finished product was “unfinished…[and] unplayable.”  “Unplayable” may be a strong word and while Activision has gone outside the box on the last couple rounds of DLC (introducing more interactive environments in “Escalation” and the grindhouse-esque zombie mode “Call of the Dead” featuring Danny Trejo, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, and George Romero), they have also failed to address the fundamental game play issues that plague Black Ops. 

For instance, this past week Activision released the final Black Ops map pack entitled “Annihilation” for the Playstation 3.  I eagerly downloaded the content, partied up with friends, and set out to explore the maps.  Yet, that exploration was short-lived.  Server problems lagged the game up and those old flaws of hit detection and those fatal spawns quickly sprang up.  I felt as if my controller was broken and nearly completed the deed myself by lobbing it against the wall.  Then, I realized, it was simply one of those cases of “It’s not you, it’s them.”  Well, Activision, unless you get your stuff together, we may be headed for a divorce.