Recently there’s been a boom of modern pc games adopting what they call ‘matching systems’ for online play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been around on consoles for years, but as a pc gamer I like to think I rise above the level of intelligence needed to choose a good server, say that of a small woodland animal. The system has arrived mainly due to an influx of gays not knowing how to navigate a 2-button server browser, but that’s beside the point. Both Dawn of War 2 and Modern Warfare 2 amongst many others have adopted this system, and I’ve got nothing against it, apart from, hey, IT DOESN’T FUCKING WORK.

I was so looking forward to Modern Warfare 2, and once they announced that they were implementing “no dedicated server support” a few weeks before release, my heart sank. So much so that I decided to sellotape my cat to a rocket and launch it through Activision’s head office window.

Eventually I had to succumb to the temptations of such a gorgeous high budget game, and I was right to do so. Playing through the single player missions made me feel warm and bubbly inside – in awe of the somewhat implausible script and characters. Before I knew it I’d killed half a million troops – many being civilians or my own team, but the plot is fucked like that – and completed the single player campaign.

So at this point I thought I’d give multiplayer a go, and to be honest it’s not that bad. So long as you don’t mind having a Ukrainian pig farmer as your host you’ll be fine. Not to mention getting randomly dropped from games because the only host decided he’d rather be playing Peggle. But no, seriously, it’s not that bad. Sometimes you even make it through a whole game without the server having to stop and find a new host. This is particularly enjoyable when you have an enemy in your crosshair, but then realise you have to wait 5 minutes to take the shot due to ‘host migration’.

You’d expect Dawn of War 2 to be the same, but to my surprise it wasn’t. It was even worse. Instead of connectivity being the issue here, it’s more the fact that they’ve gone out of their way to match you with the worst people imaginable.  For my first game, the ‘Trueskill’ system managed to match me – an extremely unskilled RTS player – with the 31^st best player in the world… Now to me, that doesn’t seem like Trueskill matching, that seems like a complete fuck up. I thought that as I played more, my Trueskill rating would balance out, and I’d get matched with more equally skilled opponents. Me losing horrendously every game only seemed to spur the system on. Now not only was the system matching me with incredibly skilled players, but it was also giving me a teammate called “TheRealHitler” who has failed to win a game for the past 72 years (a little bit of anti-fascist satire for you there).

In fact the only thing I can think of that’s worse about these games other than the matchmaking system is how I can’t stop playing them. I couldn’t care less it takes me nearly half an hour to get connected to a decent game in Modern Warfare, or that I’m playing against the Luftwaffe’s finest on Dawn of War. The graphics, the gameplay; literally everything about these games are superb and I recommend that if you haven’t, you purchase both immediately.

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