Call of Duty Thread - Potential return to form? Or nothing but cope on the horizon? You decide!

I'm reading through Call of Duty 3's Xbox manual and found this interesting snippet:

Note; By playing online, you must leave the Activision-controlled environment in Call of Duty 3. The content of the game may change during online play due to, among other things, interactive exchanges. Activision and Treyarch take no responsibility for content external to the game itself.
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The PS2 manual for 3 and Finest Hour says something similar:

Note; By joining an online session, you must leave the Activision-controlled environment in Call of Duty 3. The game's content has been rated for Teen audiences, but the content of the game may change due to interactive exchanges. Activision and Sony Computer Entertainment America take no responsibility for content external to the game itself.
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Legally, Activision was saying: "we have no control or responsibility for whatever you encounter when playing online." That's a far cry now to Activision wanting to uphold that responsibility by monitoring game chat through AI and reports.

And these were from 2004 and 2006 respectively.
 
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I'm sure this was already linked, but I am just catching up to this story
It's not bad enough we got ridiculous micro transaction, that we got SBMM, that we got SBMM linked to micro transactions to encourage people buy them, it's not bad enough the game is a predatory casino with everything under the sun being linked to skill based matchmaking like skill based footsteps, skill based damage ect, it't not enough that the game is so dead they have to pad out the numbers with shitty crossover events and bots. It's not enough we got AI monitoring everything as well now, including able to ban you on the spot for not reason while it listens in on what you say or type.
No, that is not enough, Activision spies on you in even more predatory ways too, lies about it apparently(they might have admitted to it by this point, video doesn't point it out) and all this to create a "legal" botnet out of player's computers/consoles to train the AI bots even harder using your hardware. This is even worse than if Activision just installed a cryptominer on everyone's game(which they very well could at this point).


I don't see people discussing this very much, so I can assume that the very few remaining people who play this game just don't give a shit or dismiss it as "just another conspiracy" in the same way they half-assedly fail to wipe their ass in the morning and walk off without a care in the world. I said that this game is just one big casino and so there is no point in playing it with all the RNG you get from SBMM, I will go a step further and say that assuming all those accusations in the video are true(which they should, patents don't lie), this is not even a video game anymore. It is a petri dish to test out the most predatory consumer tactics in gaming, and genuine malware that does god knows what with your computer. I take back what I said, I will never play a COD game no matter what, even if they bring back Tranzit 2.0. These games are straight up viruses at this point, and anyone stupid enough to play them gets what they deserve. Hopefully this rabbithole doesn't go as far as MW2019 or Cold War, last games I got and even then I barely played them. Quitting COD was the best decision I made as a gamer, not just in saving money but between old games being overrun with hackers and new games being malware by default, maybe even saving my xbox/computer's life too, not to mention my accounts.
Guy who leaked this info has a youtube channel btw

Edit: Looking further into news I missed, people doing research now apparently found that bots could date back as far as MW2022/Cold War, which is fucking creepy. Why did only BT break this story and only as late as MW2023? I saw no proof, so I am not going to consider them facts, but I am not putting anything beyond Activision at this point.
Speaking of which, did anyone actually participate in the whole Squid Games event? I heard that was just one massive shitshow, perhaps one of the biggest technical blunders in COD history with non-stop crashes, glitches ect.
 
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30+GameOvers said:
Speaking of which, did anyone actually participate in the whole Squid Games event? I heard that was just one massive shitshow, perhaps one of the biggest technical blunders in COD history with non-stop crashes, glitches ect.
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I did. It was horrible. The red light, green light mode was broken; ANY registered movement (camera, player, lag) would instant kill. Everybody would run around wearing the same green, white skin that made it harder to distinguish friend from foe. The background music was torture to listen to. I think it intertwined with another event as well. Worse of all, it would default you into the aforementioned green white skin.

30+GameOvers said:
No, that is not enough, Activision spies on you in even more predatory ways too, lies about it apparently(they might have admitted to it by this point, video doesn't point it out) and all this to create a "legal" botnet out of player's computers/consoles to train the AI bots even harder using your hardware. This is even worse than if Activision just installed a cryptominer on everyone's game(which they very well could at this point).
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So older CoD games will install malware for another malicious actor, while newer CoDs will spy on you for Activision's SBMM. PC CoD is cursed.
 
30+GameOvers said:
Edit: Looking further into news I missed, people doing research now apparently found that bots could date back as far as MW2022/Cold War, which is fucking creepy. Why did only BT break this story and only as late as MW2023? I saw no proof, so I am not going to consider them facts, but I am not putting anything beyond Activision at this point.
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Having bots in a modern game like an FPS makes sense. Once there's to few players a multiplayer game otherwise becomes unplayable. I know the WWI games like verdun do this so people can still play them even with low player pop. Older cods need modding to add these in with custom servers or 3rd party launchers like Plutonium. The main issue with how it's done is it uses player's accounts for the illusion of player count and probably doubly serves to inflate their player count since it's a metric of value for games like it.
 
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The Last Stand said:
Is WWI: Verdun similar to Battlefield?
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No. It's squad based, but there's no vehicles and no environmental destruction. There's roles you play with different premade loadouts you can progressively unlock. There's an officer who has aura buffs for his squad and call in's they can use off radios like recon planes, gas, artillery etc. the rest of the squad members vary based off the squad you pick. The squads all have different roles and equipment. Tannenberg also is like this.

The latest Italian one Isonzo is less squad oriented and there's a set number specialist per team instead of based on squads. It also has building cover with engineers and static weapons like machineguns and some howitzers/mortars. In Isonzo the officer is critical and way more call-in focused than the prior.

They are all very laid back unless you get some try hards in lobbies but even then one man can only do so much with just a bolt action rifle or even a MG. They are all pretty sparse playerwise but this is a bit of a double edged sword in that it's more relaxed and you can take over a squad and play whatever role you like. The older titles have more guns and interesting equipment than Isonzo but Isonzo is more mechanically polished. There is no campaign, and based off what you've said previously campaign is a big draw for you so you may not care for that either. The older titles are fuck ugly but have cooler roles. Isonzo looks nicer but has less toys but some cool mechanics like buildable cover.
 
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About a year late, but... behold! The greatest BO3 Zombies Easter Egg of all time!


Figured we could use something a bit lighter, bit of a palate cleanser.
 
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Its all so stupid...
 
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LowlyPheasent said:
Having bots in a modern game like an FPS makes sense. Once there's to few players a multiplayer game otherwise becomes unplayable. I know the WWI games like verdun do this so people can still play them even with low player pop. Older cods need modding to add these in with custom servers or 3rd party launchers like Plutonium. The main issue with how it's done is it uses player's accounts for the illusion of player count and probably doubly serves to inflate their player count since it's a metric of value for games like it.
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It's not about bots, those were around in online public playlists since BO2 days. Problem is that:
1) They lied to us about it
2) They tried gaslighting us that it is a conspiracy theory, just like EOMM/SBMM and everything else that is patented and publicly visible
3) The reason why there is bots is not to enrich the gameplay, but because the population density is so low these days. They are propping up player numbers with bots to make the game seem less dead, "Weekend at Bernie's" style
4) These bots are powered by your own profile and hardware, ie Activision uses your own computer and it's hardware(much like a bitcoin miner) to train the AI without telling you
5) These bots literally hijack your account, there have been confirmed reports of people singing in to play just to already be in the match, with kills/deaths and people telling them in chat they played like bots. Players don't earn XP from those initial matches either as bots don't earn any XP, you can't get more blatant than this

These bots are just one more sign of how far the game fell, and how scummy Activision and it's practices are. I stand with BT on this one, this is disgusting and quite frankly, creepy with how these bots masquarade both as real human players AND actually hijack real player accounts, all to try and fool players the game isn't dead when COD has never been as dead as it is now.
 
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30+GameOvers said:
5) These bots literally hijack your account, there have been confirmed reports of people singing in to play just to already be in the match, with kills/deaths and people telling them in chat they played like bots.
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oh fuck activision must be desperate to keep their shit game alive.
 
Hermione Granger said:
oh fuck activision must be desperate to keep their shit game alive.
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Thing is that they can be as invasive and disgusting as possible up to actually breaking laws, since the only people who still play their games are mindless horde of nigger cattle that will never jump off the bandwagon unless their computer/console is bricked by a hacker, which is a very real possibility these days even when playing newer games.
 
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The Last Stand said:
The Treyarch storylines fell off after Black Ops 3 IMHO. Cold War and BO6 were okay, but now they have to recton Black Ops 2 since A), those two games are prequels to BO2 and B) BO2 takes place in 2025.
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Black Ops 2 already had too much pandering. Mason is old enough to be boots-on-the-ground in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. You don't have to look up his official bio to figure that he must have been in the late 30s, making him in his 50s during the invasion of Panama. He and Woods are just too old, but they're there as pure fanservice. Maybe it's because the rest of the 70s are too boring, who knows. I think somebody in charge (Vonderhaar?) was itching to break out of the past and do futuristic games, though.
 
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New BO6 update is so depressingly predictable with how awful and lacking in content it is that BT can't even pretend to have any passion for hating it. The new video is just him ranting for 20 minutes on how we've seen the same shit for over half a decade now. He almost done the "B O R I N G" bit he did during the Cold War season, that's how checked out he is.
COD is like that one alcoholic mess of an uncle you have that keeps getting into drama and embarrassing your family, you are always ready to sigh and facepalm whenever he's mentioned and you know he will never get better.
 
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Them retconning wood’s death was extremely retarded. There was no way he could have survived that and it takes away from bo1’s story
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Kravchenko has now been brought back twice. Of course, getting shot in the head in BO2 was so unambiguous that they set BO6 before the Afghanistan mission just so they could have him involved again. Reznov did all that work and only managed to take out Steiner and Dragovich.
 
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