In the latest Bash&Slash podcast, entitled "BASH 108: Are Mods Dead?", Jock Yitch speaks to Buster and Jag-Five-O from "The Company Hub". They try to get to the bottom of why players arent playing the many, many MP maps produced for COD5, and some of the conclusions they come up with potentially have an important impact on how mappers make their maps.

Essentially, they claim that one of the main reasons players dont play on modded servers is because players dont want to downoad 30-50 mb maps.

In older COD games, like UO, the average map size was only 2-3 mg, and players didnt mind hanging around to download a map of that size. But with maps in COD4 and WaW averaging between 30 - 50 mg (all 3 of the files, including the IWD file), players simply leave the server.

With the average WaW player also obsessed with stock ranks and unlocks as well, and what with these not being translated over to modded servers, players are then also faced with huge downloads, which often abort anyway due to Q-port errors and such like, modded servers are sitting empty.

If you dont know the site already, here is a link to it:

http://bashandslash.com/

Listen and weep!

Personally, I think the future of modding is in trouble unless Infinity Ward and Treyarch dont make ranks and unlocks (i.e. customkits) work across the board - in both stock and modded servers.

There is simply no reason to not make your custom kits and ranks available on all types of servers. Ever since the COD4 1.5 patch, when IW made the setStat() function work on modded servers as well as stock so that ranks and unlocks would be persistent, the distinction between so-called "online" (stock) and "offline" (modded) servers has been redundant. Why dont they go the whole hog and simply allow universal ranks and unlocks to work on all servers?

edited on May. 18, 2009 07:53 am by DemonSeed