Infinity Ward decided to take a step back to familiar territory with the PC release of Modern Warfare 3 — forgoing its in-house IWnet system in favor of dedicated servers, a move Call of Duty community chief Robert Bowling says was prompted by fan feedback. In a recent interview, Bowling discussed the shortcomings of IWnet, and why it failed to succeed.

In particular, Bowling pointed out the problems with “hacking and cheating” that MW2 suffered from. Valve’s VAC system is still being used as the anti-cheat backbone for MW3, Infinity Ward has made several adjustments to make it more secure, while also adding flexibility.

“We wanted to unify the experience across every platform but it was always intended to be the first step in a series in what IWNet would become,”  Bowling told GameSpy.

“So we looked at how that performed and regretfully there were a lot of things that it didn’t achieve that we wanted it to achieve. Things like making it as secure as it can be – Modern Warfare 2 had a lot of problems with cheating and hacking, especially on the PC, that VAC didn’t fully take care of. ”

“As a result we’ve done a lot of work on Modern Warfare 3 on the back end. We are still using VAC in Steam but in addition to that we’ve done much more work on the backend, locking down our stuff to make it more secure, to make sure we have more flexibility on addressing things like that ourselves rather than just relying on some third party anti-cheat program.”

It’s a step in the right direction, to be sure. Despite harsh resistance from PC gamers with MW2, it’s good to see that IW is recognizing its faults, rather than throwing in the towel and churning out another lousy port.

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