Killing the campers, exterminating the exploits: Has Homefront solved CoD's biggest problems?Kaos studios has told CVG how it is attempting to make Homefront's multiplayer an even battle ground - leaving little room for habitual campers or exploits.
The combination of players who sit in hidden areas and those who take advantage of server lag and other cheats have dogged Activision's CoD games online, most notably in Modern Warfare 2.
It's a problem that Kaos believes it might have cracked, assisted by its decision to run dedicated servers for every version of the game.
Homefront's key multiplayer features include Battle Points - a system of reward currency which players can use to buy vehicles and perks. There's also Battle Commander, which gives team-mates sub-objectives that often include targeting a particularly lethal enemy.
"Interestingly in Homefront, camping is actually pretty difficult to do, because we have so many different tools to kill you," multiplayer level designer Erin Daly told CVG.
"What we've found is that if there's a sniper who's doing pretty well, players will get annoyed by him and want to take him out. So they'll be able to spend their own Battle Points on, say, a recon drone and mark him or an assault drone to fly over there and try and kill him with. They can even buy an airstrike and specifically target him, because you can guide a missile down right into his position.
"So internally we've found it's actually pretty challenging to just camp and stay camping for a long time. In addition, with the Battle Commander system, you're marked within a region on a map. So even if players don't know your exact location, they're going to be heading towards that region. If you have enough players coming in, eventually they're going to find you. Camping isn't really going to be a successful strategy."
Daly acknowledged that cheating via exploits could "totally ruin" an online FPS experience.
He added: "It's something we're obviously really concerned about. One thing you get from dedicated servers is that it makes cheating much more difficult - specifically the type of lag cheats that exist. When you've got a player-hosted server, players can find out if it's them and can exploit it or use a lag pedal. There are all sorts of different cheats. But we've got dedicated servers, it's really not possible to do a lot of those cheats. That's one advantage.
"But then the gameplay side makes it difficult too. We've hammered on our mechanics to make sure there really aren't any exploits like that. What that comes down to is large-scale testing. We've played the game everyday. Internally we've got a 32-player game going constantly, plus we've got QA doing a tonne of work. They're sending us reports saying: "When we combo this ability with this Battle Commander buff, in this situation, this guy's drone is just unstoppable. You gotta do something about it!
"We go in there and just those values to fix that. We've definitely handled a lot of those exploits so far, and hopefully there won't be any left by the time we ship."
Early reviews of Homefront - including OPM Italy's 9/10 and PSM3's 83% - have heaped praise upon the game's multiplayer. Check out our latest hands-on to learn all about it.
Homefront is due for release for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on Tuesday (March 15) in the US, and three days later in Europe.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/29 ... -problems/I have to say campers and snipers don't bother me - I just flank 'em and kill 'em
all online, not a single minute has been tested singleplayer 
