An open letter to Infinity Ward, the game development studio behind Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2.

We gamers would like to thank you for the great products you have produced over the years. As great as your games have been, we still feel the need to bring to your attention a few glaring defects in your games regarding the online multiplayer matchmaking and party system. The Modern Warfare 2 pre-game lobby is such a glaring eyesore on what otherwise is one of the best shooter games of all time.  What makes it so much worse is the fact that other shooter games have had the whole pre-game lobby and party system mechanics down for years.  When we first put the most anticipated game ever into our systems, we expected a perfected and well polished product.  Instead, we found a broken and inept matchmaking system that makes us feel as if we’re playing an online game from the late 1990′s.

First and foremost on the list of issues we would like to see corrected is the role of party leader.  In online matchmaking where gamers go in as a party, one person is designated the party leader.  This role should provide some level of power over how the party plays the game.  When in a pre-game lobby, sometimes gamers have reasons to back out of the matchmaking system.  The way your current system works is completely wrong.  The party leader has absolutely no control over pulling the party out of matchmaking.  Instead, the only way to keep the party together is to require the party leader to back out of the matchmaking system by themselves and then have the rest of the party notice that the party leader is gone and they then need to back themselves out.  This has caused many gamers grief with having half a party back out while the other half is still in the game,  completely oblivious to the fact that their party is gone.  The party leader should also have the ability to designate a new party leader.  This prevents the entire party from being broken up just because one person needs to leave.

Another issue is that of party stability.  When we enter matchmaking as a party, we generally want to play the game as a party.  This means we want to all be in the same game and on the same team.  The current system glitches often, which causes parties to get split up and thrown into completely separate game lobbies.  The way the gamers are listed in the pre-game lobby also makes it difficult to recognize if your entire party managed to make it into the same lobby.  We would like you to fix this so that parties are kept together, no matter what the connection quality is.  We would also like you to change it so that if we do somehow manage to get into the same pre-game lobby together, that we have our party listed always together and possibly have an on screen indicator of who is in our party.  You do this during the game (with the blue/green indicators) so why can’t you do this in the pre-game lobby?

One great feature of the Call of Duty franchise is the ability to join matchmaking games in progress.  Not many other game developers put this into their games.  While it is great to be able to get into games quicker, we have a few suggestions on how to refine this.  The first thing you need to add (this goes along with the party leader powers) is the ability for a party leader to set the party status as open or closed.  A closed party should not be available to be joined in progress.  Another feature we would like to see added is that join in progress be disabled near the end of an online match.  There’s nothing worse that joining a game in progress only to be placed on the losing team with just a few seconds left in a match.  There should be some qualification measure to determine whether or not join in progress is enabled or not, such as having a certain scoring margin within the last minute or two.  If it’s a close game, join in progress can be helpful, but no one wants to join a game that they have no chance of winning.

We hope you take this into consideration and we look forward to seeing many, if not all, of these suggestions implemented in a future title update.

To all you other gamers, if you agree with this, feel free to leave your gamertag in the comments below for Infinity Ward to see.