The downside of multiplayer gaming
The first game I purchased for my Xbox 360 was Call of Duty 2, and since then I’ve been in love with the franchise. Infinity Ward knows first person shooters and they are master craftsmen of the genre. Call of Duty 4 has been no exception, and I tore through the single player campaign as quickly as I could. Usually I end it right there, but having heard about the unique leveling system of multiplayer, talking to friends who were engrossed in the COD4 multiplayer game, and having still an unquenched thirst for more Call of Duty goodness, I decided to give multiplayer a try.I have no false expectations on my skills at first person shooters. I don’t have the twitch and dexterity to be really good at them, nor do I have the time to practice to push my own skills higher. Still, I’ve really enjoyed a good multiplayer coop from time to time, so the idea of playing with other people sounded reasonable, so I took the plunge. I’d heard it before on podcasts and forums, but the Xbox Live experience is just plain broken for multiplayer gaming. I’d assumed there would be trashtalking online, but I wasn’t prepared for the racist slurs and complete idiocy of a select few players in each match. I thought I might run into it once or twice, but it’s pretty pervasive to the point that I clearly needed to quit or change something because it just wasn’t fun for me to here someone’s drunken diatribe online. Having 2 kids still too young for real gaming, there is no way I’d let them play online. The one saving grace for me was a little known setting in xbox live to turn off voice communications for everyone but friends (To access it: go to your gamertag, edit gamer profile, privacy settings, voice and text) which silences everyone but your friends. Now I’m in blissful ignorance, enjoying the game albeit I wonder how much more fun it would be if there were friendly people there working together as a team to play the game as the developers intended. Microsoft really needs to revamp the system to make it a better community if they hope to grow their userbase for this kind of gameplay. There are ways to report people who are obnoxious but it takes too long to do, and isn’t very effective. A better system would be something akin to linkedin.com where you can let friends of friends in your voice chat or even friends of friends of friends to at least comb out the bad apples as a first pass and then ban the rest manually.