While Black Ops was an excellent game in almost every respect, it did have one drawback which was more than a little annoying, and that was of course the lag.  There’s nothing more irritating than missing a shot when your screen jumps, or getting killed because your bad connection caused you to get shot.  Well, nothing worse except perhaps getting disconnected completely and dumped out of the game you were participating in, only to find it full when you try to get back in!  Black Ops players are fed up with low frame rates, screen freezes, jumpy action and other slow connection hassles.  While Treyarch did release some patches to fix associated bugs, the lag issue still never went away completely, leaving us to conclude that the main reason for the lag is the lack of dedicated servers running Black Ops games.

Black Ops supports peer-to-peer hosting of games only.  The P2P solution does seem to work fine for console gaming, but for PC gamers it can create all sorts of lag.  Activision and Treyarch, taking note of the complaints, did promise to provide dedicated servers for the PC gamers on Black Ops, but they never actually delivered in a meaningful way—instead, they put up a single dedicated server host in Australia which was far too slow to actually meet the demands of gamers around the world.

Recently rumors have been emerging that with the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Activision and Treyarch will finally make good on their promise.  We feel pretty wary about this given the result of the previous “promise,” but hopefully given the angry fan reaction, Activision and Treyarch will think of a better solution this time around than a single slow server in Australia.  If dedicated servers are really provided this time around, we feel that Black Ops 2 could be a huge hit (bigger than it’s going to be already), one which would blow away the original game.  Running the extra dedicated servers may cost money, but we think that the sales would probably more than make up for it.