The multiplayer portion of this game added a lot of the customization that defines the
Call of Duty series nowadays, but it ruined a lot as well.
Modern Warfare 2, or
MW2 as it is sometimes referred to in official material, offered some highly memorable maps to play on, like Terminal, but it also shrunk the skill gap compared to
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Modern Warfare 2 added a few more options to its seminal "create-a-class" system from
COD4, but a closer inspection revealed an ominous trend. Some of the additions gave a damage boost to the player's weapons (the danger close perk), or gave the player a very unfair advantage (the infamous commando pro perk). Despite these negative additions, the game was still very playable, but could be very unfair. This unfairness emanated not just from the gameplay itself, but from the behind the scenes matchmaking. The matchmaking was a particularly strong complaint from the PC community.
Modern Warfare 2 marked the point where the
Call of Duty PC player base lost interest in the series for good, because of the switch to p2p (peer-to-peer) matchmaking exclusively for all online multiplayer lobbies. Not only did this eliminate the far less-laggy dedicated server option for PC players, it removed any hope of running online mod lobbies, and private servers. The announcement of matchmaking replacing dedicated servers was met with hostility by the PC community. Many quickly pointed out that
Left 4 Dead, a game that also used peer-to-peer matchmaking, was incredibly inefficient, sometimes causing players to remain in lobbies searching for other players for minutes at a time.
MW2's matchmaking fared about as well as
L4D's. PC players abandoned the franchise in droves, and the franchise was relegated to joke status on PC within two years. Many PC players would point to this issue as the beginning of the "consolization" of the video game market, though the trend had started far earlier than that.
Complaints aside, the multiplayer is instead where they really started getting things right and why it became the focus of modern cod.