With a much hype of the CoD6 these days as the launching date is coming closer, the developer of it is every time in news. This time it is also in news for their existing Call of Duty series. The official website of CoD says that just after the release of Call of Duty: World at War DLC, Map Pack 2 – the first Map Pack 1 has reached to 2 million milestone. Isn’t that great?

The official website also announces that Call of Duty: World at War has surpassed the 11 million units sold from the launch of its first in November last year.

An official statement has been issued giving a thank note to all who purchased CoD: WaW. It reads as below:

These outstanding feats would have never been possible without the continued dedication and support from all of the loyal Call of Duty fans. For that, we at Treyarch and Activision would like to extend our sincerest Thank You. We’re honored and humbled to have one of the greatest online communities in video game history behind our products!

For Treyarch we can say that it is a sure achievement. For Activision we can say that Call of Duty Franchise is one of their biggest franchises ever in.

Recently there was also a statement by the analyst firm Janco Partner. Mike Hickey of Janco Partner said, “We believe Modern Warfare 2 will likely be the largest video game release for [calendar year] 2009. For the Company’s fiscal Q409 period (Dec. ending), we anticipate the sell through to consumers of 11.1 million units for an estimated retail value of $803 million and sell-in approximating 12.4 million units, for an approximated sales value of $666 million (we assume demand is 90% of supply).”

>> discuss it more in the forum <<

So as many of you know I uninstalled World at War last month and never really thought twice about it until my friend called me a few days ago to tell me they released the new map pack. So against my gut feeling I went ahead and re-installed the game.

The first thing I noticed was that I had to start again, from rank 1. Why is that, exactly? Aren’t our stats stored server side? Or are they stored locally? I could have sworn they were stored server side which would beg the question why do we have to re-rank up when it’s re-installed? Shouldn’t it automatically give us our rank back when we connect to their server? Furthermore, I *SHOULD* be on my 3rd prestige but Treyarch purged a ton of accounts without explanation about a month after release, you guys remember that? Yea, I signed on one day and all of my rank/stats were POOF gone. There were like 10 gazillionbillion threads about it on the official Call of Duty forums. Treyarch, to my knowledge, never gave any explanation or apology. It would have been nice to at leats get an apology like “Hey, we had some server errors and the  75 hours of playtime you had has disappeared, you’re going to have to start again, sorry.”. No apology, no explanation. F you too, Treyarch.

So I digress, last night I played COD5 for the first time in a really long time and I must say it wasn’t bad, the new maps are pretty cool too. It seems they fixed the terrible  browser issues. I didn’t notice if they fixed the bug where nades stick in the trees when you throw them, did they finally fix that bug?

Oh, they also fixed the custom maps issue, before any custom map you wanted to play on it could only download at like 12KB per second so it would take 20min+ to download a custom map. Also, unlike IW, they don’t have the browser set to automatically filter custom servers which is really cool. IW kind of shit on the custom servers and community by doing that. Granted it’s easy to tell the browser to show all servers but there are a lot of noobs out there who have no clue.

Anyhow, back to my profile trouble, last night I played up to rank 8 and went to bed, today I got on and I was rank 1 again. I assumed it was just the server I was on tonight, must have been one of those custom servers with custom ranks, right? Wrong.  After playing S&D today for about 20min, up to rank 4, I wanted to change my graphic settings so I exited the game and when I re-started it I was back to rank 1 again with the settings back to how they were before I had just changed them. So now it was pretty clear that not only was it not saving my rank and stats, it’s failing to save the control and graphic settings as well.

I just really don’t know WTF is wrong with this game, how can you F up so bad? It’s just terrible coding, I really don’t know what else to say. There seem to be bugs and crashes everytime I turn around and it literally makes the game un-playable. I finally uninstalled the game again tonight for the last time, there is just no winning with World at War. I wash my hands, I am done! The IW coded Call of Duty 6 will be out in no time, until it’s out I’ll play my trusty COD4.

P.S. Hey, IW, hows about some screens already? You’re F’ing killing us here with the lack of details and info

I can’t put into words how happy I am that IW is doing Call of Duty 6. I hope Activision has learned a lesson form all of this. Call of uty 4 was an epically successful game, why they snatched the dev rights away from IW and gave them to Treyarch after such a huge hit is beyond me. Treyarch even got to use IW’s game engine and they STILL managed to F’d it up, I mean wow.

>> discuss it more in the forum <<

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the minority when it comes to hating Treyarch. I haven’t been to a COD forum for sometime now, last time I was on one everyone had just found out Treyarch was making COD5 and they were expressing their disgust not only for Treyarch but for WW2 as well. It was pretty clear the community wanted another modern warfare, I wonder whos idea it was to basically say FU to the community and make another WW2 theme against the majority of our wishes?

You may be asking “what’s your beef with cod5?” Allow me to name a few of the things off…

1. After updating the servers list, you have to actually close down the game and reload it otherwise you can’t enter a server because of the famous “server authentication error”. I can see having some bugs when the game first comes out, but the game has been out now for months and the browser is STILL broken. What kind of preschool company would allow such a huge bug to remain without patching it?
2. The sound. I think no explanation is needed.
3. Search & Destroy can’t determine the actual winner. Say you’re playing S&D to 7 and one team has 7 and the other has 0, if the losing team wins the final match they win the whole thing. Perhaps this is something that should have been fixed in the first patch? I mean no rush, just one of your game modes is completely broken, take your time Treyarch.
4. Auto-climb was annoying in COD4 but it was just something everyone had to accept. In COD5 you CONSTANTLY find yourself getting hung up on stupid crap. For example sometimes you will be running through a field and all the sudden your forward movement stops and you’re trying to figure out what’s happening only to look down and see you’re “caught” on a little rock or stick. In COD4 this isn’t a problem because the game would simply let you walk over or around this small object.

I could go on but what’s the point? Treyarch doesn’t care because they’re too busy counting the money they made off of us. What about Activision? You think they will reward Treyarch with another COD title after this one? I would hope not. They should have never taken the rights away from IW to begin with. Why would you look at the huge sucess of COD4 and then turn around and give the next title dev rights to Treyarch after IW did such a good job?

I should say that it’s not ALL bad from Treyarch. They added the friends option which is cool. The prestige option like COD4 consoles had was cool until the power rank servers came out which totally ruined the whole idea. Other than those two thinks I can’t honestly say I like anything else about it. I’ve already become sick of COD5 and gone back to COD4. Bad part is I installed Windows 7 yesterday and found out that COD4 and Windows 7 don’t get along so I’m forced to play COD5. It’s actually Punkbuster that doesn’t work with Windows 7 but don’t even get me started on how worthless Punkbuster is, they’re worse than Treyarch.

EDIT:

I gotta give credit when it’s due, the second patch for WaW certainly seems to have fixed a ton of problems. Funny enough they fixed the power up exploit which I never took advantage of, now I have to start at rank 1 when I decide to reinstall(just reformatted windows).