If you play a lot of Call of Duty's multiplayer, chances are you've nerd-raged at some point for various reasons. Sure, it's never fun to lose, but that's not the only thing that gets my blood pressure rising when I play online.
In writing this I am in no way disparaging the Call of Duty franchise. These are just the things I’ve noticed that really, really annoyed me – which, I’m sure some of you have experienced at one point or another. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to discuss it intelligently in the comments, for the fanboys who blindly follow the franchise and think it can do no wrong; this article might not be for you.
(Disclaimer: All views expressed here are from me only and does not represent Gameranx as a whole. I will be basing the list on both Modern Warfare games and Black Ops only, as they're the most relevant today. The article pertains to the console versions of the games.)
10) The Host Shouldn’t Have an Advantage
Let’s start with the obvious but ever popular host advantage. If Call of Duty had dedicated servers, this wouldn't be an issue at all. But alas, there's none. So we have to live through someone being able to kill you in one to two bursts, while you need to unload a full magazine to off someone. One perfect example of this is when you meet an enemy head-on, and both of you start shooting at each other. You're sure you fired first, but on the kill cam it shows that he fired first and you barely got a shot off.
If that's not rage-inducing, I don't know what is!
9) Squads and Playing as a Team DOES NOT Matter
This is something I've been feeling for quite some time now. Squads do NOT matter in a Call of Duty game. Before you start flaming me, hear me out. Squads are a big help, but they're far from being needed. When I play with people I know, it's usually easier because I know they can hold their mettle against the competition; sure, we sometimes use flanking maneuvers but it's not needed as the maps are kind of small and linear.
The dynamics of needing squad-mates are a moot point, since all that's needed are kills to win the game (let’s face it, people play CoD for Deathmatch, right?). Will someone give you more ammo? There's the Scavenger Perk for that, need someone to kill a camping dude? There are all sorts of killstreak rewards for that as well. Do you get my point now?
8) Kills are All that Matters
The title says it all, if you finished a round with 12 kills, 8 assists and 14 deaths? Well, tough for you as people will chide you for the 14 deaths instead of looking at your assists (yes, I know the franchise is slowly deviating from this). While the game has an accumulated scorecard that will show you helped your team the most People will still think you “failed” because your kill/death ratio wasn’t high enough.
7) The Mystery of the Vanishing Bullets
Has this scenario ever occurred to you when playing a round of Call of Duty multiplayer? You and an enemy face-off, you both shoot and he somehow gets the better of you, but for some reason your last few bullets fired automatically vanishes into thin air when you do. What the heck is that? If you don't believe me, try it out for yourself. It's not this way for noob-tubes, rpgs or other explosives – just on guns; which make this all the more mystifying on why they designed the game like this.
6) The Community Might Need a Little Bit of Work
In my quest to know what annoys people in Call of Duty's multiplayer, one topic that was always thrown my way was the game's community.
Complaints ranged from how people playing it are homophobic, racist bastards — to how their community consists of 12 – 15 year olds pretending to be older than they really are. You can't escape how their voice breaks out in pre-adolescent squeaks that come out from time to time.
Granted that there are a lot of "kids" playing FPS games these days, but there's something about the Call of Duty franchise that has become the demographics’ new "haven" for online gaming. I mostly attribute it to the franchise becoming so big now that almost every kid in the world wants to be a part of it to be deemed "cool."
There’s a reason why you sometimes hear the term “X game is good since it doesn’t have CoD kiddos,” or something to that effect.
