First of all, I play on PC so some of my comments may seem more geared towards PC play and some about the game in general. I am really unhappy with MW2 and can barely stand to play it. In fact, I comment on it more than I play it. Steam just updated me to the .184 patch today. I googled the patch to see what they had changed and all that came up was hack sites saying they have already cracked it and have released their own patches so the hacking programs will still work. I tried to play it tonight and it was business as usual wallhack and aimbots everywhere. Its time to retire MW2 online. The IWNet/Steam combo is a dismal failure and they will never be able to level the playing field online by removing hacks. They just can't do it. The gameplay is extremely degraded and unfair.
In contrast, MW1 still has dedicated servers and they are busier than ever. I wonder why. I have been playing it instead of MW2 and enjoying it immensely. You have a wide range of game types to go into. If you don't like noobtubes, their are servers that don't allow them. I played for hours and never seen one hack...not one. Many of the servers will not allow profane remarks and racial slurs. A lot of the MW2 immaturity, profanity, insults, and racism is simply not there in MW1. You can filter the types of servers you want to view. The gameplay was much more realistic. You have bombers and helicopters but you don't get bombarded by multiple aircraft at the same time and the helicopters don't spawncamp. I don't know if aircraft spawncamping is a PC thing, hack, or even if it exists on consoles, but it does exist on the PC. I have seen harriers hover over spawn in points picking people off as they are spawning in. I have literal seen piles of bodies lined up by harriers. There was strategy and people seemed to be playing as a team instead of a giant free for all with some people you don't have to shoot.
While I like a lot of the weapons in MW2 and there are more of them, I can live with the weapons in MW1 and I have really good graphics so I didn't feel like I was losing that much in graphics advancement. I also wasn't losing connections and was able to join every server I tried to join without getting kicked or timed out unlike IWNet. The best thing is that there is private match XP in MW1 which has been one of my biggest complaints about MW2 with no private match XP. My friends and I can gain rank and unlock weapons playing each other, which is how it should be. Ironically, IW is the company that came up with this great game in MW1 that I like and destroyed the next installment.
