If PC gamers didn't have enough reasons to hate Infinity Ward for what it's doing to Modern Warfare 2, the company just gave them a whole-new box of ammunition. Feeling like the PC still had an edge on the console versions of MW2, the company decided to even things out. So, the maximum number of gamers that can be online on a server is now 18. The decision must come from its "why make something better when we can make it worse" policy. The original Modern Warfare supported servers for up to 32 players on the PC, so how exactly is a downgrade to 18 seen as a sequel-worthy feature is a bit confusing.

Infinity Ward's Vince Zampella and Mackey McCandlish are the ones that confirmed the 9-versus-9 multiplayer for Modern Warfare 2. McCandlish said that 18 was "the number of players we focused on when we were balancing map size, perks, classes, challenges, etc." So, in theory, it's not really that the maps will become scarcely populated and the action will be toned down to a crawl pace, it's more that the game will focus on more personalized battles, with fewer opponents on smaller maps, or at least the ones that don't accommodate a large number of players.

We're sure that Infinity's statement regarding the new player cap is truly a sincere one, the result of prolonged discussions and intensive testing. After all, there's no way this could have anything to do with the matchmaking system it imposed and the limitations of the Peer2Peer system. The chances that its explanation is just trying to have the company divert some aggression from IWNet is obscure, if anything. Its decision to remove dedicated servers was felt by almost every PC gamer out there as a shiv in the back, and now Infinity is coming in for the kill.

Its decision to strip control from the gamers turns out to have dire repercussions on the gameplay, and the true disaster floating just over the horizon is that a popular game as Modern Warfare 2 might turn these decisions into a standard for future games. The only thing it hasn't removed from the advantages of the PC platform is the controls, but it would be no surprise if it decided that the gamepad was, indeed, superior in precision to the keyboard-and-mouse rig and stopped supporting it.