A statement has appeared on www.fourtwozero.com from Robert Bowling at Infinity Ward.

My responses are in itallics..

Matchmaking and Smoother gameplay

..it will automatically find you a game with the best performance, ping, and preferences based on your location and individual connection as well as matching you with players of your same SKILL. So you’re always guaranteed the best game performance for where you are and what connection you’re playing on as well as an equal game with other players of your same skill level, not rank, but skill level. It doesn’t mean you’ll just be thrown into a random game! It will put you in the game that will give you the smoothest gameplay possible without you having to manually find a server with the best ping.

[i]Brillant. We already know how a lobby works. Thank you Mr Obvious.
Its for the reasons above that we do not want a lobby system[/i]

Playlists and private matches

..However, say you’re in a clan and you want to play a Clan match with another team, or you want to practice for an upcoming tournament that has specific rules in a private game. Then you can start a Private Match (which is essentially like running your own private server) where you have complete control over the rules, who can join, boot players you don’t want, and essentially control the entire game or tweak it to your liking.


...and when [NuB]ScreechyKid's parents tell him its time for bed, the server shuts down as they pull the plug. Awesome.

Cheat / Hack Free Games

The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don’t have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters. Or relying on the server admin of the server to constantly be monitoring, banning, and policing it. Modern Warfare 2 on PC allows us to control the quality of the game much more than ever before as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system to keep games clean of hackers and cheaters.

Bold statement, 'cheat free' games. No online game is cheat free, Private hacks are out their and as the are not in mass use within the wilds of server land they can remain undetected for a long time. That being said I welcome the introduction of VAC, its less intrusive than PB. Anyone with a amBX system cant use it with CoD4 at the moment as you get kicked for 'disallowed program/driver'. PB;s support sucks, but that could fill an entire separate blog post....

All in all, IWNET adds a load of new features that the PC version of our games have never had before and allows us an infrastructure to continue to update and improve on the game post-launch.

Never had before and that the community, as a majority, never wanted. Dangling a carrot stating future changes and updates is probably just a empty promise that they are expecting us to read as 'code for the dedi servers might get released one day, maybe'

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So what have we learnt here, ZERO. Apart from IW's blatant disregard for the CoD communities concerns. I (we?) need to know the following:

Yes or No - Will we ever get the dedicated servers?
Does IWnet use P2P hosting, like xbox live etc?
Custom maps, are they still do-able with IWNet?
Is there any mod support within IWnet?
WTF is IWNet really, can it evolve into something like steam when you can run a lobby system and a standard server list, like Left4Dead was coerced into doing ?

Come on IW, you doing and handling this all wrong....You cannot dig your way out of a hole.

We want FACTS not spin.