Hey bashandslash,

Your ideas, tweaks and dedication to the cod series is and has always been one of the best resources around. Thank you all for the great contributions. I am a regular visitor of your site for a balanced, informative, up to date goings on.

Jock yitch - I without a doubt knew you would find a reasonably well articulated unbiased review as you did from Timur Aksu. In all fairness to the initial story - I believe his follow up to this story having played for 2 days is material to the original write up and would like you to take a look at his current review if worthy of posting as news.

http://timuraksu.net/2009/11/11/iw-net- ... your-ping/

""After playing heavily for 2 days straight, some of IW-Nets annoying habits are becoming more and more obvious.""

Keep up the great work and web site......

ps. my take on some of this - iw/act didnt want to release a game that would cause cod4 (which is still priced high considering its age on shelf) prices to be reduced going into xmas selling season. Cod4 is still strong because of dedi's and mods. Every Cod4 server would have gone to MW2 rapidly and the cod4 series would linger minus some 10,000 dedi's you can currently find. So by holding back MW2 dedi support they can garner xbox-ps3 sales plus a really nice buck for cod4 still. It's all about the $$$.

some relevant quotes if some dont want to click on link:

= "IW-net’s match making seems to check 3 conditions, and if any one of those conditions are true, it’ll give you the go ahead to join the server it’s found. Ping seems to be the last one of these conditions"

= "Firstly, IW checks skill levels. When i first played, i was obviously considered unskilled by IW-net and i was allowed to join alot of games easily. Because my options where so open, i got allot of servers with low ping. excellent."

= "From this morning on, servers took longer to find, and the connections where not as great. Infact, i did not play a single 4 bar game today, One 3 bar, and the rest where 2 or under." "I constantly get matched with players in USA/Europe. I am litteraly the only one with a single bar on ping with everyone else on 3 or 4. But my rank is similar to everyone elses,"

= Secondly, "You’ll get directed to full servers as much as possible, sometimes with little regard to lag." "over less populated, local ones."

= Thirdly, "Third ofcourse, comes ping. I’d rather just not play to be honest. Silly IW-net, 100+ ms ping is not really great."

Conclusion "Telling them that we’ll play if they fix X and Y of IW-net is the same as telling them that its good except for a few tiny issues. which it obviously isnt."

I'm Aussie too, ive noticed too, that the higher ranked you get, the longer it takes to find a game, and the laggier it is, we will probably have to wait until alot of people are higher ranked to get a lag free game in, least when half of AusCoD are level 50+ it will find games easier if its based on "skill" level, what i find funny is, anyone can get to a high level, just because somebody is a high level, doesn't make them skilled, it means they been playing the game alot, you can rank up just from camping and shooting people that run past, while getting random headshots while doing it.. tbh, this skill level search thing is a load of crap.

Hmmm I'm lvl 68 and I get still matched against lvl 19-30 I don't think that is a problem .Today %50 of games were lagy to the point we had leave the "server" I haven't played CTF game yet and only 2 sabotage and HQ .only options are TDM ,Ground war or Domination if you get on at the right time of the day. IW net is failure but I wouldn't hold my breathor IW to fix it.They just release patch here and there mainly to stop any workarounds like console or dedi from community.Game is fun but no dedicated server s just ruins the enjoyment of the game

Aussie here too.