Advanced Warfare Gets Dedicated Server Petition Amidst Growing Complaints

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare released on Monday and, while the general consensus from both press and customers has been pretty good so far, there is an outstanding issue that has yet to be addressed by Sledgehammer Games and Activision: the latency spikes that occur randomly during multiplayer matches.

If you have played the game at all, you probably noticed this already. Just by looking at the ping bar available on the scoreboard menu, anyone can tell that ping can change from full bar to empty bar (respectively representing low and high ping values) in a matter of seconds, resulting in a highly variable gaming experience while playing competitively; commonly, players affected will find themselves unloading entire bullet magazines into someone’s virtual body without the game registering that at all, such as in this video posted on Reddit.

 

I’ve experienced this myself despite a fiber connection, and while it is rare, it is clear that Advanced Warfare does not use dedicated servers as promised by Michael Condrey himself, co-founder of the development studio; everything appears to be working on a peer-to-peer basis, which however isn’t really ideal for a highly competitive game such as this one.

In a way, this has been like adding the insult of being lied to the injury of Advanced Warfare not actually having dedicated servers, and now there are many topics/threads on popular boards such as Neogaf, the dedicated game subreddit etc. with players voicing their complaints. Some have already decided to create a petition in order to further stimulate a response from the developers, and in a few hours almost 500 gamers have signed it.

The petition says that it would be a pity to throw away the great FPS that Advanced Warfare is because of the lack of dedicated servers, and I can definitely agree with that. So far  I’ve enjoyed my time with the game, but this is one issue that cannot be left alone.