Just browsing the Call of  Duty forums and came across this post.  Check it out! This guy definately has patience! At the moment I’m in a debate with Activision at the moment that has been going on since 23/11/2010 ( there will be more on this once it’s all sorted out! ).

Hi, I’ve played Call of Duty since COD4, on PC mostly. I’ve known the games in and out since then and I’ve tried to be helpful to the community by posting on the steam forums, providing tips and performance fixes and so on. As we all now, there are multiple problems with Black Ops, some span all consoles, some span only specific ones, mostly PC. I understand that it is hard to develop a game this massive for 5 platforms in 2 years and you obviously did not have enough time or manpower to test it on a larger scale. However, we can all work together by identifying problems and finding a good way to fix these. Let’s move on to the problems and the simple solutions.

NOTE: This is a constructive way of thinking, I’m not ranting or complaining, just read and reply nicely.

ALL PLATFORMS: (excluding Wii and DS version)

• Knifing range is too long, most people complain about this. Solution: divide it by two it and see how it works.

• Snipers are underpowered. Solution. 2.0 head multipliers for all snipers and 1.5 lower body multiplier for the classified sniper.

• Quickscopers are disappointed and regular people can barely use sniper rifles. Solution: Make sniping like pre-patch/COD4/WaW but keep the randomized crosshair so it is not at the center of the screen when the scope appears. The bullet should always go straight in the cross.

• Footsteps are too quiet. Solution: increase the volume a bit, and disable sound occlusion? It’s just a performance hogger anyway.

• Hardline pro affects all Air Drops. Solution: Make it only affect Care Packages

• Infinite Airdrop/Care Package Glitch. Solution: Disable interruption of the marker throwing animation

• Erratic Spawn System that will spawn enemies in your face, and behind you. Solution: Revise the spawn code/algorithm or make the player wait a bit until a spawn point is more secure.

• Combat training cant be played offline. Solution: look into the options for this

• Teamkillers in HC. Solution: Use Ricochet rules for all hardcore game modes

• Second Chance abusers in HC soak up up to 3 bullets while in mid-air and can shoot you with pistol during this time. Solution: let them recover from the fall before they can shoot, like you did with the Dive-function. And take away the invincibility while in the air. Game breaking for HC

• Drop-shots. Solution: Prevent shooting until player has settled from going prone

• Bad Hitboxes, missing while aiming at stationary enemy. Solution: Revise the hitboxes again

• People getting banned for emblems while there are actual hackers and cheaters out there. Solution: Get your priorities straight, the players care more about cheaters than “offensive” emblems

There are people who say some other guns are overpowered (famas, ak74u, stoner63 etc.) but i will leave their balancing up to Treyarch, i find it okay for now, except the snipers. I don’t think any of the perks are “gamebreaking” either so i will not suggest any changes except for second chance.

PS3:
- Lag and frame rate issues compared to the Xbox360 version. Solution: Hire a good PS3 programmer (maybe from old IW?) for a while with the enormous load of money you’ve just earned and let that person sort things out with your development team.

PC:
- Game is ported from console and is not utilizing PC architecture well, and does not match the requirements at all. Frame Rate, stuttering and sound issues. Solution: Hire a good PC developer (maybe from IW?) and rewrite some of the game code to allow more ram usage, optimization for dual or more cores and above all… GPU utilization. We don’t buy $500 graphics cards for no reason. And we will buy your games if you support our community, and will buy DLC if the game is not broken. We are not pirates. Console players swap discs between friends, we cant do that for multiplayer on PC. We can’t “try the game” before we buy it in most cases. So we have in almost all cases bought the game before we complain, making us a 1st hand paying customer.

• People don’t know how to tweak their configs and may modify registry values and other things that can break the game and possibly ban them. Solution: Tell the PC gamers which CVARS are changeable and what they do, recommend certain settings for certain setups, or add them to the in-game settings menu. A lot of values from earlier COD games were missing such as DoF, Ragdoll and Smoothing of smoke edges which are all performance hoggers, you should not have to fiddle with configs for such basic things.

• All servers are for 18 players most of the time, which the game was not meant to handle in all maps. Solution: Make 12-slot servers or playlists (which i know you are working on). Free-For-All Games on PC are impossible to handle with more than 12 players because of the spawns.

• Crashes and lock-ups. Solution: Revise Game Code

• Progress Rollback issues. Solution: Revise Netcode and don’t rely on steam or a master server to stream stats to players, The MW2 progress saving and COD4 and WaW saving worked well, I would suggest that the client should only upload progress to steam or the mastersrver, not download. People who hack their profiles will be banned anyway.

• Playing with friends is hard and you don’t get to choose team. Solution: I have two options here. Either enable team choosing and rearranging during first 20 seconds of a match, with disabled auto-balance, where new players will join the team with less players. OR… use the black light tango down system where people with the same clan tag end up on the same team and stay there during auto-balance.

• We cant edit classes between matches, but could do this in earlier games. Solution: Try to bring it back

And lastly… the community needs more interaction with the community manager, he should be on these forums, discussing with players on a daily basis, since it is his job. You probably read a lot, but we need confirmation, in writing, in official statements and so on. Don’t let Activision hold you back from communicating because that will only hurt your developer status among the consumers, players and fans.

I think you have done a great job with the game, in too little time and i hope you will support this game way more that Treyarch and IW has done in the past, It will be great, and everyone will play and enjoy it in the long run, maybe years from now. Don’t let us down, best regards!

You can check out his original post on the Call of Duty forums here.