During this cold weather season, and perhaps in between airsoft weekend games, many airsoft players would content themselves with FPS video games. In this case, I assume that many nowadays are hooked with the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game (COD MW2), which is the blockbuster video game release for 2009, and is much going strong for this year.

I am not a console gamer, and I have been a PC Gamer, playing online multiplayer games since the early days when online gaming can be done, whether modem to modem, and now through massive multiplayer games. I am fan of COD, and when the PC version for the COD MW2 was released, I went ahead and bought it, without waiting for the price to come down.

While the single player game was awesome, and able to finish it in one weekend, I was massively disappointed with Infinity Ward's decision to remove the dedicated servers for PC gamers. PC Gamers, who started the online multiplayer gaming, and made it popular, feel they are being at disadvantage, with Infinity Ward focusing more on console gamers. In a way, there's bad blood between Infinity Ward and the PC Gaming community.

When Infinity Ward announced its IWNET in October 2009, the PC Gaming guys were up in arms as they have been comfortable in making their own selections of what servers they can use, create a community of players, and clans can do their own battles against each other. Robert Bowling of IWNET, states the following highlights of this decision according to IGN.com UK:

Matchmaking & Smoother Gameplay: Bowling says IWNET matchmaking allows players to find and join games much easer than scrolling through lists of servers, each with their own rule and mod sets. This new IWNET infrastructure will "automatically find you a game with the best performance, ping, and preferences based on your location and individual connection as well as matching you with players of your same SKILL.'

Playlists and Private Matches: Bowling says the new playlist will allow for easier use to finding the type of game you want to play. "This now allows you to play custom games out of the box without the need to install mods, find a modded server with the rules you like, or worry about not being in control of the match," Bowling explains.

Party System and Friendslist: IWNET's friendlist system allows players to see when your friends are online, and makes it easy to invite them into your party and move from game to game. Bowling highlights the fact this is great for Clan use.

Cheat / Hack Free Games: "The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don't have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters," Bowling writes. He says this will allow them to control the quality of the game as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system.

But the PC Gaming community say otherwise that their experience with IWNET is a total disappointment and are clamoring for Infinity Ward to put pack the dedicated servers since the features they have mentioned never was appreciated by PC gamers.

In my own experience, I had a lot of poor matchmaking and smoother gameplay experience. The host, which is a PC gamer's computer will always encounter host issues such as lag and the host leaving the game. In the middle of games where I am having a good kill streak, a lag, or the host leaving will leave you hanging, and the lull of finding a new host will break that streak. I encountered host transfer issues 3 times in a single game and it just boils my blood.

Cheating? Indeed the VAC is an utter failure. Aimbots and wallhacks are put into use by players who prefer to cheat, and of course ruining the games by honest players. We do not have someone who has admin access to kick or ban cheating players. So, in this area IWNET is a big FAIL. Just look at this video.

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Balancing and finding hosts sometimes take ages. I experienced playing around 3 times in one hour, with the rest of the hour spent waiting for a game to join. Or still, you get that hair-pulling experience of "unable to connect to host" always. This video shows this:

So what now? With over 248,000 disgruntled PC Gamers and counting (which you can view via the online petition), I just hope that Infinity Ward reconsiders this. The obsession of dealing with piracy and cheating has affected a big number of PC Gamers who love this game. The complaints have been ongoing ever since, and there seems to be a lack of response from them.

We just hope the IWNET puts back the dedicated servers that the PC community wants. After all, they deserve it.