Naturally one would expect that Infinity Ward would approach it's loyal fan base with humility and appreciation. You'd be wrong. Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward's Community Manager, has made a mockery of community relations. He instructs fans to follow his personal Twitter page where you'll find a rambling of incomplete sentences answering a single suffering souls dilemma. Want to know what the question was? Just click the inquisitive users account and scroll through dozens of posts in an attempt to match the question to the answer. This is assuming of course the user hasn't deleted the question or set their account to private. If you do manage to find out the original question, Bowling's answer is short and sweet, containing just enough information to vaguely answer your question without providing any real detail. Too bad "Lost" is in it's final season or Mr. Bowling would have a future in television. If you are one of the chosen few that receives a golden ticket and gets an answer, then surely you are greeted with respect as a valued customer. Strike two. Bowling is often snide and defensive refusing to show the patience he asks of the gaming community. Lashing out with profanity and insults is rarely the correct course of action, however given the high expectations of Modern Warfare 2 and the accompanying record breaking sales, you think Bowling would choose not to fuel the fire. Here are a few examples of Rob's drawn out responses:
"@_Trems_ No problem."
"@Boyle111 I am."
"@Jayroo21 Correct. At least, that's the goal."
Thank you for the clarification Mr. Bowling. Perhaps now I can sleep soundly at night knowing that it's no problem, you are, and that Jayroo21 is correct about one of an infinite amount of conclusions floating in outer space. I knew I pre-ordered for a reason.
The worst is yet to come. Thus far, we've seen Infinity Ward's treatment of the gaming community on a large and more public scale. What about the die-hards in the Infinity Ward forums posting endlessly about the various problems needing resolution in "Modern Warfare 2?" Despite their best efforts, the community is usually ignored with little input from Infinity Ward staff. One can only wonder why Infinity Ward doesn't watch these forums more closely since these are the fans that are most aware of the bugs, glitches and hacks plaguing the game. I presume it's because Infinity Ward is already moving on to it's next project. They would have to push forward with any hopes of having a new game out to meet Activision's ludicrous release schedule (Guitar Hero 18 is no doubt in development somewhere). The staff realizes that fans like those in the forums are in the minority. Millions of gamers are clueless to the controversy with "Modern Warfare 2" and I'm willing to wager that a fair share of them aren't even aware that "World at War" and "Modern Warfare 2" are made by completely separate and unrelated developers. Infinity Ward now has at least two downloadable content packs to consider as well as plan the inevitable Modern Warfare 3. A small part of me hopes they do decide to abandon this game in hopes that the next will receive the polish necessary to warrant it's sales figures. Below are excerpts from the official forums by a staff member in the art department known as Hyphen_MW2.
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 4:46 pm
"when most of the threads consist of someone berating us, what we do for a living, or how we do it, do you expect volunteers to come back and take it over and over? many may not know, but after i received several death threats and ridiculous comments being sent to me through all avenues, i decided to cut myself free. it's not in my job description to be here answering questions and getting reamed every which way."
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 2:11 am
"since im not one to really bite my tongue quite as often as i should, i'm gonna go ahead and say it. flugtag, you have absolutely zero clue what you're talking about. i'm pretty sure you just started typing away and while flailing your fingers at the keyboard, some random ideas came about and you decided that it'd be cool to post it. you really have no idea and need to put the pity card away. you too spetznas. i'm sick of all these lame ass assumptions. jesus christ. now, with that out of the way, dungbeetle, i'm trying to ease it in there. i can't just walk up to the engineers and say, "ohay guyz! we needz to put in local search." local searching is considered a feature, one that i dont think you can simply put in by typing a few lines of code. and even if it was as simple as that, it has to get approved first. so, i'm easing into it. i've brought up your plight to a few people, it just needs to gain some more momentum. if you wanna know my opinion, i think taking some video of your games would be helpful. possibly a montage of connectivity issues from different people. hell, if everyone in the other thread could make one video and string it together in a vid i could fwd that to some people and itd make things a LOT easier on me. and an fyi for people, there are many fixes in the works. just because we aren't overly vocal about things doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't being made."
According to Infinity Ward, we should make videos of the in game bugs and send it to them. This is pretty amusing considering Hyphen has a fondness for stating that responding to fans is not his job. Why he should presume that making videos of bugs is our job, I couldn't tell you. I don't own a video recorder, but I think I might buy one now just to make Hyphen's life a little bit easier. It's good to know that besides having paper thin skin incapable of receiving criticism, Infinity Ward's staff also require bug reports to be eased in with KY jelly in order to gain the "momentum" necessary to fix a broken game. At least they aren't being "overly vocal", because God knows fans hate hearing from the developers about upcoming patches for the game they blew their Christmas money on. Perhaps there is enough left over for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 due out March 2nd for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
