MW2: exploiting the exploitable

It really is hard to argue with a billion dollars in sales, but if there's another recurring theme with Modern Warfare 2, it's this: to love the game is to hate its players.

Following on the early trend of glitch exploiters - the javelin suicide bombers, the infinite care package mongoloids, and the hiders in what should be solid objects - a second wave of griefers have begun relieving themselves in MW2's swimming pool. The aforementioned slash-and-stab super soldier is one species, of course, and now we've discovered another: the nuke booster. Geek.com provides the profile:

[B]asically players on opposite sides can team up, use tactical insertions to spawn in out-of-the-way places (near one another) and then one repeatedly kills the other until they have their nuke.

The thing about the nuke: it ends the round for everybody. When it's hard enough to find a game setup that interests you (in terms of ping, map, gametype, etc.), a round aborted by an exploit might cause some frustration.

The use of such exploits is garden-variety unsportsmanlike conduct, which has infected every online multiplayer game ever made. In MW2's case, however, you have to view that type of behavior alongside the douchebaggery-by-design: the noob tube, the akimbo shotguns, the martyrdom "deathstreak" award, et al., all of which work exactly as the developer intended.

Most of the common complaints about the game (and its predecessor) relate directly to all the silly, unbalancing novelties introduced with the perk mechanics. It's a system that's ripe for exploitation, and there's no way to stop it from overwhelming the fundamental "move, aim, and fire" aspects of a shooter.

Well, there is a way. Custom rule sets on player-administered dedicated servers would have gone a long way toward making the online experience tolerable for a range of different tastes. (Note to IW's Jason West: this is why gamers form the "insular communities" you hate so much.) There would be no cause to describe any intentional feature as a "gamebreaker" - a word increasingly associated with MW2 - because individual server admins could just prohibit its use.

Instead, players got IWnet: a social sandbox that allows you to play the game with everyone and everything in it ... or not at all.

And people went out and bought it in droves.