The other day Game Rant reported that Treyarch and Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops sold over 5.6 million copies Tuesday. With a majority of those 5.6 million users choosing to go straight into the mulitplayer portion of the game, it doesn't take long for players to discover some problems. The PS3 version of the game seems to be suffering more than the Xbox 360 version, with some frame rate issues and freezing. Thankfully, Treyarch is addressing these issues and has fixed or will be fixing them in the near future.

One nice thing about multiplayer Call of Duty games on consoles is that Infinity Ward and Treyach built in the ability to apply updates to the games without requiring a patch to be downloaded. Treyarch's Community Manager Josh Olin announced on the CoD forums that the following issues have already been resolved using this ability to "live fix":

  • Villa: User can clip into rock at west edge of grid zone B2 and see through to the other side.
  • Crisis: User can clip into LVT between grid zone A3 and B3 and see through to the other side.
  • User can get an infinite number of 'Sam Turret', 'Care Package' and 'Sentry Gun' killstreaks (commonly referred to as the "care package glitch").
  • Radar sweep when there are only 2 players left in One in the Chamber will stop functioning if the 2 players have multiple lives when the sweep starts.
  • Crash when viewing content (films, clips, etc) in the Community & Recent Games menu.
  • Users' rank and stats can get wiped under very specific conditions.
  • Online number counts were not updating properly; these are now reporting exact online numbers.
  • Parties getting disbanded when host did not find a match quickly.

If you are experiencing an issue that you didn't see above don't worry as Treyarch has a few fixes that are in progress. A few of the fixes they are currently working on are:

  • Improved matchmaking to find matches faster.
  • Improved match and host selection; will result in much better networking conditions for all games (a.k.a., decreased lag).
  • Weekly and Monthly leaderboards stats reporting incorrectly for kills, deaths and assists (All Time leaderboard not affected by this).
  • Additional improvements to party system.

While it is good to see a quick response from Treyarch regarding these issues, it brings up the same question that many asked about Modern Warfare 2: Why was there no beta for this game? It doesn't matter how rigorously you test the game in a closed off environment, as soon as 6 million players hit start it is not surprising they come across a large number of bugs. A smaller game might be able to get away without a beta, but a game that has this many people trying to gain some competitive advantage needs one.

It is unacceptable in my view that a game of this caliber is basically launched in a beta state. Just put out a beta a few months before the game comes out, find how people are gaming the system, fix the issues, and have the game launch which doesn't immediately need to be patched.

So readers what has your Call of Duty: Black Ops online multiplayer experience been like? Has it been good so far or are you frustrated by the issues that this series seems to always have at launch?

Source: CoD Forums