So the long awaited and much needed patch for Treyarch’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops went live less than a day ago now, and while it was one of those few situations where players actually were WAITING for a fix, they were absolutely gutted to discovered first hand that 1.04 made things worse. At the moment the reports of complaints are only coming back about the PS3 version, but it seems that this ‘major’ update has caused even more problems than we originally had to deal with, and now it’s hard to see what they were even patching in the first place.
I have a huge amount of respect for Treyarch and what they’ve managed to achieve with the game, despite a huge amount of critical stigma, but let’s get this straight; a patch is supposed to address the issues that are lurking about in the game, iron out those little creases and put a tight and clean seal around it all. The main problems with Black Ops at first were the frame rates issues, the faulty party system, and the muted headsets. Admittedly the frame rate thing was dealt with rather quickly, but the other two were desperately in need of 1.04 (aside from multiple but small niggles).
Now that it has arrived, complaints have been describing that the party function still doesn’t work reliably, and that a group will get piled into a room with someone missing, some apparently in the lobby but not showing their names and so on. Other reports say that the PS3 is actually freezing mid game even more frequently now, with the connection error message coming up, closely followed by your console crashing. Headsets are getting muted out randomly in matches (although seems to pop up more from what we have been told, in team tactical lobbies the most?) and for some reasons you can’t mute players in the pre-lobby anymore. Oh and who among you has seen the “chessboard screen” as unhappy users are calling it. It is an orange and white chequered pattern that glitches onto the matchmaking background image, if you leave a game under certain conditions.
That’s quite worrying considering that now Treyarch have to go back and undo the patch, or patch the patch? Then start again to fix it properly. From what they tell us it requires a lot of work and time to make an update, which I completely respect. However I would rather the patch came out a week later if it was going to get the job done once and for all.
Activision and Treyarch have said they are looking into what went wrong. We’ll keep you updated.
Come on Treyarch, don’t ruin it now. I know! Can my Christmas present be that Black Ops will work perfectly for a week? Thanks.
We all know that the irritation comes from the fact that the game would be so good if their weren’t all these little issues to contend with. Sigh..
