Treyarch JD_2020 talks about the errors in CoD: World at War

 _{by Claire Claws}

I met him but we didn't start off on the right foot.....

Everyday players post on the Off. CoD forum that & how they have lost their World at War stats. And when sucha post has a title like "Stats reset again... end of the road for me" you know you wont find a happy story to read.

But when a JD_2020 (Treyarch's Communication slash Community Manager) decides to post a witty remark plus the suggestion that this player can have done it himself by manually opening the mpdata file..... then this is like holding a red rag to a bull.

So everyone told JD what théy thought was the cause of this problem. And this how we met. 

But he bravely stayed in and it became a 7 paged thread. So he told more then he wanted and, I think, it gave some insight on the actual status for some of the errors we all have to endure. The thread got deleted in the end.

So fresh from my history-box and with all anger siffed out. Questions are from various persons

Failure to authenticate - Stats reset to Zero

_{JD replies again and this time less personal.} 

There's no taunting, it's unfortunate for users who have had their stats reset or decreased who did nothing to deserve it. However, we've found several instances of users who try to manually edit their mpdata file, have their stats lost, and post as if it were a bug. That's why I asked.

Without detailed reports as to what you were doing prior to, during, and after the stats reset, it's next to impossible to track down. Nobody at Treyarch had this problem happen first-hand, and we have yet to reproduce the problem. If people aren't willing to give more details as to what they experienced, it makes me believe maybe they were doing things to their file system they shouldn't have.

(CC: So it is sad to read that they have no clue about what is causing this error so many players are reporting about.)

Are any of these getting fixed in the next patch?
 

• Server Authentication Failure
• There is no cg_drawfps 1
• There is no /record
• The cg_fov 80 resets after dying
• Players are changing their color names, like green to look like a teammate
• After Prestige, server will say "Primary grenade 0 is invalid. Setting to frag" in red text.
• Co-op servers do not show up correctly in server browser, many players have difficult joining others as well
• Name tags show through walls (Crosshair goes over enemy, they go behind wall, name shows for a second)
• When quitting game, blue screen pops up and restarts computer

_{JD Answers:}

Those are all on my list.

Well let me qualify that - of course obvious things like /record missing, drawfps will be fixed. Other problems like co-op are not so clear cut. There are things we can do to help mitigate or guide users to the right conclusions, but many of the problems with Co-Op are related to user configurations.

For example, just because you have port 28960 forwarded and are hosting a co-op game, doesn't mean anybody can connect to you and play. Any number of router or software firewall configurations on any of the 4 people trying to play together can cause problems with Co-Op due to the level of client synchronization that must take place.

Also, for example, you cannot join a game in-progress with Co-Op. You can only joina lobby. So if you refresh your co-op server browser, see a game lobby that has 1 player, it's possible that by the time you double-click it tot ry to join that someone else joined and the host started the game (basically an outdated browser list). In that instance, we probably could display an error that says that. But now, some users get confused and think they can't join public servers, when really the game has just started.

So when I say those are all on my list, they're on my list of feedback items. That's not on the to-do list yet; I bring all feedback to the table, however, where it is vetted and investaged by QA and our teams here at the studio.

Please post why you wont put the stats online? This should of been added to the game on day 1. People are voting for it  and so far twice the amount of people want the stats stored online than on the computer. All of the consoles get this privilege.

_{JD Answers:}

For stats to be stored on a centralized server, that technology would have to be built for the PC. Xbox users have Xbox LIVE to take care of this. There is no equivalent service for the PC. On top of that, there's nothing in the way of stopping PC users from directly sending false data to a central server, pretending they are the game saying that it's ranking up. This can't happen on a 360 because there is no direct way to interface with your 360 like there is a PC.

That's a 30,000ft level explanation as to why PC stats are not on a centralized server. It's a far larger issue than it sounds, and I can't get into it further than this on the forums, sorry.

Well a lot of us don't really care about the rank hackers but surely a server side cheat detector could be put in place. Or heck, have the server report the data and not have 25 users constantly uploading points every time they get a kill. I think the server should collect the information while a match is going on and then upload that to the SQL database.

_{JD Answers:}

And should we not let any user host their own server? Because what's to stop a user from hacking his server to send fake data?

Trust me, we've gone over this. It's a big problem, with complicated solutions, which we just didn't have time to do. There's just too many scenarios to go over on a forum. I was in on the meetings at the studio about it though.

 .