News - Live Service Games Are Out Of Control (warzone 2)
Many of you experienced a massive live service failure for Call of Duty, leaving the game down and less than functional for about 12 hours, and coincidentally, you can actually see the delay in my production times by counting the difference in days between the 23rd and when this comes out, but I got to work on it immediately because it was a massive event in the Call of Duty Community.
Charlie Intel was reporting on this, and people had their ranks reset, unlocks reset, and levels reset. This is more of a community thing and not something that really Activision was talking about. The service failure was so bad that the skill matching algorithm was either not functioning properly or disabled on the demonware end, so there was no skill-based matchmaking for a couple of hours, and players got this real.
Weird mix of emotions of happy that the playing field was leveled and they were getting that experience that they want and mad that all of the stuff that they spent hours working on and grinding for unlocking and buying essentially got turned off and reset and a quick, little explainer here I'm just following up on a question from a different article a lot of people wondered, what's with the bed cam especially this lower bottom right corner so I'm going to do this real quick I'm in bed due to illness yes I can sit up and get around just can't do it for a super long period of time I built this for my comfort I also like referencing news articles here on Charlie Intel and doing the split screen thing when I talk about very specific topics.
And when I do that, the formatting on the webcams is a little weird. If I didn't have this bottom webcam, there'd just be this weird kind of gap down here, so I kind of use that to fill in the gap, and it also explains the unusual camera angle of killing two birds with one stone. We better frame the article, and it gives the audience a visual understanding of exactly what's going on here, so I thought that you guys might be interested in that little explanation.
H only to have it all disappear almost instantly due to a tiny little error on the Publishers server and that happens because almost nothing about your game that you really care about is stored locally, all your unlocks your gear your classes almost all of that stuff is stored server side right now so that there's a persistent profile and so it's easy for people to log back on from other devices and Jump Right In as relating to the recent outage that's why when you logged back in everybody's accounts were messed up and all their stuff was you know either not unlocked or disabled for some reason, because it's all stored on the server that was screwed up and I assume that those things are going to be fixed over the next couple of days but I'm worried because purchased items are even more complicated there's much it really boils down to complex accounting and how you're buying the points and how you're spending it in the ecosystem.
And royalties to creators like Nicki Minaj are getting cut off of her skin, so when live services go down, all of those items are suddenly. Worthless inaccessible, because what you've really paid for is to have a tiny little data entry in a giant database on a server somewhere, that says you have the homelander skin, and if they don't maintain that server then that money you spent and that physical thing really kind of doesn't exist and this can get even worse when Publishers pull support for a game especially a game that was designed to be live service, all the servers go down and the game becomes unplayable there's so many games even ones that are just sort of regular multiplayer that you would think that you would be able to play on land become unplayable when either the Publishers pull out the servers get shut down or entire platforms disappear, for example think about how many Call of Duty games you've bought in the last 10 years that you can't play anymore because either the servers don't work, or maybe because it's so hacked into Oblivion there's no point and it's scary to think that the Call of Duty game that you're playing right now can and probably will at some point in the future do the exact same thing probably the distant future.
And this sort of massive service outage and disruption in people's purchases and unlocks is definitely something that should not have happened. I don't think it's something that Activision or Microsoft wanted to happen, and I don't know if this is related to Microsoft buying Activision and their layoffs or not.
It's definitely easy to say, Hey, a couple weeks after you know Microsoft laid off, I think it was $1,00. Activision employees were a pretty big number, pulling purely from memory right there. After they laid off all those people, not too much later, the servers went down. Well, it's definitely a bad look.
I don't know if they're related. I don't know if they fired the live service team or if this was an error that was building for the last five years and nobody noticed, so it''s a little bit intellectually lazy for me to say that, but it certainly looks bad and suspicious. But sadly all this frustration about losing your unlocks and things that you are buying are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to live service game problems so I wanted to talk about some other lingering problems as well but only after we talk about today's sponsor very briefly Logitech G because they helped me build the setup that I'm recording this article on So today we're specifically shouting out the microphone that this is recorded on which is the Logitech GX, it is a simple USB mic which I haven't used in a while I've been using XLR mics but a new setup has new requirements, the most important of those for this small bed rig is form factors so I needed a very small mic that performed very well and just happened to have the new Logitech Tech GX come out at just the perfect time it's a very tiny microphone smaller than my hand weighs nothing was super easy to mount super cardioid.
As you can see I'm recording this from the bed as a little Ultram mini health update things have been going a lot better for me over the last three months but for reasons unknown to me the last 3 weeks have been a little bit rougher, so I'm not gaming as much as I want to and I feel like I'm falling behind on everything, and I'm falling behind not necessarily in terms of Base gameplay, or skill level I'm able to keep up in that regard, but rather with, what content I'm experiencing and how it is unlocked because in order to maximize the value of a live service game you probably need to play it every single day you unlock all the stuff you do all the events you do the community challenges etc you swap over to the other modes for the zombies or for the war zone or whatever in come back to multiplayer.
