Well, I caved in and bought it after seeing nearly every one of my clan mates playing. Call me whatever you'd like for buying it, you're just anonymous people on a forum so I don't care.
I really really really hate to say it but it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.
Yesterday was my first day of playing and the system works great if you're a solo player.
However, my evening was spent trying to party up with 8 other guys and it didn't go so smoothly.
When it works, the system isn't too bad. Unfortunately, from my experience last night, that's not much more than half the time. Sometimes the game drops half your party, other times one or more people will get "unable to resolve to host" and then we all have to leave the game to regroup as the 'server' will be full and they don't have a queue system.
Also, once people see a bunch of clan mates in the lobby, many are quick to leave even though there is a whole playlist which doesn't allow grouping for them to play on. My advice to clans grouping up is to remove your tags if you're having trouble getting games going. If you wait though, you'll end up with enough people but it'll just take longer.
My clan seems torn between all the emblems, titles and whatnot. Half of us love getting them and the other half find them annoying.
I was worried about all the perks but the system is good. You can unlock whatever perks you want but you can only have three of them at a time so it is rather balanced. You can also shoot down all aircraft with guided launchers. It seems that most don't know about being able to shoot down UAVs though.
Most of the maps are smaller but they are actually well balanced. The matchmaking manages to ensure that the maps always have the right amount of players on them.
There is also a little tweak out there for your ping. You set it to 10 bars with 20ms increments. The one person who shows up with 10 bars is the host. Having a maxed BE connection, I find that it is often me. Good news though is that when it isn't me, I don't notice any difference so they must have something going on behind the scenes to equalise it. I've found that I sometimes get connected to foreign games where half the people are in the red and the game is laggy (only 5 games out of 50 yesterday - or something similar). Only takes 15 seconds to be in a new lag free game.
It pains me to think of how good this game would have been with a combination of iwnet and dedicated servers. Both have their pluses.
I don't think it will have have any long lasting appeal but as a stopgap until BC2 is out, it'll do fine.
It's currently beating Counterstrike 1.6 and Source with amount of people playing. I have never seen this done on a FPS before. :/
Insane.
Other FPS games don't require Steam to be running. I would bet that COD4 beat them easy, but most people don't have steam running all the time.
