This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Where did you people get raptor being the president from? Because the COD wiki doesn't say anything like that.
Koveras: It's not stated in the game itself but you can find a bit about why everyone thinks that on the Just Bugs Me page.
Alhazred: Also, the COD wiki is not a source of official information and is purely made by fan contribution. It shouldn't be used to judge the accuracy or lack therin of speculation. Being modeled after That Other Wiki rather than a more casual archive like this, they seem to prefer the "if no one outright says it, we do not speculate" mentality, whereas here, it flies because it's an extremely reasonable assumption.
Koveras: How about moving the Shout-Out examples from the main page to Modern Warfare?
Why does everyone say that Captain MacMillan was paralyzed from the waist down? He actually states in-game right after the copter falls on him (sometimes; what he says is random) that "[his] leg's messed up". So actually having a helicopter fall on him "only" broke his leg. This also makes him more awesome: he survived a helicopter falling on him with nothing worse than a broken leg.
A couple entries mention the "invasion forces heading to Alaska and California." As I understand it, those didn't actually exist and were just decoys projected into the American satellite surveillance systems - evidenced by the cutscene with NORAD alerting the local radar stations, who were confused because there wasn't anything there. The satellites didn't show anything approaching DC - the other "attacks" were diversions, and as such aren't loose ends as some have claimed.
Alhazred: You're right, those entries should be changed to get rid of "actually, it's like this" because it's established canon and it makes the "actually" replies redundant. I already did this and then for some reason a bunch of my edits, including these, magically reverted, I'm not sure why. I'm too lazy to go through the whole thing again for it right now.
Alhazred: I re-orginized Your Mileage May Vary to focus more on how much it applies to the plot itself; I figure since most of the people making regular edits here are in the "I like the plot" group, it'll let tropers who didn't like it add additional points without the Complaining About Shows You Dont Like mentality that's been resulting in natter and edit-wars worthy of Makarov's plans since this page started.
Jonn: I'd just like to thank whoever removed the "Sequelitis" point. Saved me having to write a rant in that tiny little "edit reason" box.
Alhazred: In case this point turns into something that needs debate, let's pre-empt it; I vote we keep the reference to Private Military Contractors. Whether or not the developers intended for any part of Shadow Company to be PMCs, the fact that not all of them are wearing identification basically cinches it; members of a state military must wear an identifying mark of some kind per international law (even spec-ops wearing black uniforms will still have a patch of their county's flag somewhere, possibly taped over, the tape to be removed when they hit the area of operation,) and "Shepherd doesn't care, he's already breaking laws" doesn't work, since some of them do have identifying patches; if he just doesn't care, why do some of them have patches and others don't? I don't know if private contractors have the same requirement, but if they do, the unmarked men must at least be independent mercenaries.
The Real CJ: Apparently MW 2 is the BEST GAME EVAR. As my Sequelitis point was removed, and everybody is cheering it. Fanboys in full swing here.
Alhazred: Because paraphrasing one of Yahtzee's criticisms is so much better?
What's in full swing here is reality. Is the sequel Over Nine Thousand, Up To Eleven and every other euphemism you can think of for "everything in the first one multiplied by a really big number to the point where comparisons to Micheal Bay are valid?" Yes, absolutely. Does that, in itself, make it bad? No. Connecting the game's excessiveness with the quality of it is not objective fact. It's a correleation based on personal taste, saying "My tastes don't like this much HSQ, therefore, it's bad." Correleation about anyone's personal taste is not objective fact.
It's entirely fair to dislike it because your personal tastes don't allow for Willing Suspension of Disbelief / Artistic License / Acceptable Breaks from Reality to give the plot the passes it needs to function. It's not, however, an incompetently made product just because some people aren't pleased with the final result; the writing is consistent, has set-up, many of the twists are foreshadowed, and the themes are well explored. If you don't like it, it's because you just plain don't like it, and that's okay, but Sequelitis has nothing to do with it. Unless you're suggesting that it's possible to please everyone, that it's possible to have a sequel anywhere, to anything, that won't inevitably have viewers who don't like the directions it took regardless of how popular it is overall.
Seriously, just look how huge the blurb under Your Mileage May Vary is, which in itself is almost never on a list of examples on account of it being subjective, but it's here because the page is acknowledging the above; it's a hugely anticipated sequel that some are inevitably dissapointed with. It's not like the article is actively trying to shill for Insanity Infinity Ward.
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The Real CJ: Who said anything about paraphrasing? I wrote a review the day the game was released. A full day before the US release, and a good Two Weeks before Yahtzee posted his.
There you Go, 10th November (US).
And for the record, I liked the game, but it wasn't the second coming of Christ that everybody was sprouting it to be before the release. Does that sound like Hype Backlash to you? I actually thought the game wasn't bad, but it was more So Okay, It's Average than Call of Duty 4. Oh, you mean the sequel wasn't as good as the first game, for various reasons? That sounds awfully like Sequelitis.
Read the comments in my Review, and you'll see I'm not the only one who doesn't thing the game is the greatest game ever. I believe popular opinion counts for something. Look at Twilight
Finally, what the Hell? Just because more people liked it than disliked it isn't fair grounds for removal of all negative tropes. Every single article here is subjective, wether you like it or not. Okay, so the comment about IW on my Up To Eleven edit was more subjective than required, but why delete the entire thing? The number of character deaths in MW 2 was much higher than the first.
Again, look at a page like Twilight or Halo, it's full of (mostly negative) opinions, but that's okay for some reason, because the majority hate those things. It's only objective if people agree with you?
Edit: Oh, ha, I found the reason given in the edit log. Would you like to see it?
- CJ, dearest, please don't whine here, It's embarassing, you are a young adult already. Mummy's not going to be around forever.
Yes, that sounds awfully like an impartial, objective editor. I can totally see him trying to see my point of view, and editing while keeping those points of view in mind.
Okay, I'll concede this: I did edit the trope from my heart, without thinking of impartiality. Sorry.
Alhazred: There you go, then. At no point did I say I have issue with people not liking the game, at no point did I say the percentage of players who don't like / think it's mediocre is so small as to be irrelevant, at no point did I say I have anything against expressing that dislike.
Like it or not, the majority of people in this article don't have negative opinions. Does that mean the article has to be drooling fanboyism? No, and it's not. Using the dramatic typical troper flare for expressing like for a work is not fanboyism, it's a common form of expression across the entire wiki. The fact of the matter is, you can't prove how many players share the negative interpretation, you can only guess, and thus far, regardless of how many comments may agree with your review (which is hardly a litmus test, of course your readers are going to express admiration to the point where review comments for any review, positive or negative, are horribly skewed, just look at how many people scream about dedicated servers on every article remotely approaching the subject versus how many PC gamers bought it,) so you can't say if the negative side of things is the majority or not. What you can say is that it's not the majority here.
I would argue, and this itself is a very subjective statement and you may feel free to argue, that unlike Twilight and Halo, it's much easier to actually find literary merit in Modern Warfare 2. Twilight is bait for teenage girls, Halo is bait for frat boys, neither has much substance under the surface, Halo demonstrably avoided substance after the second game had more involved writing than the first and then received a negative reaction, leading to quite a few instances of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot in the third. Modern Warfare 2 has substance, that's why the Broken Base has gone to such an extreme; as I've said both in this debate and others, anyone can dislike the writing, that's only natural, but it is legitimate writing planned out by someone who knows how to structure a plot with themes, literary devices (foreshadowing, etc) characterization, continuity and pacing. The debate isn't like arguing whether the Master Chief is genuinely badass or just non-nude fanservice to the demographic, the debate is whether the substance is worthwhile or not. You want to post negative comments? That's fine, but broad "HEY LOOK AT THIS MASSIVE PROBLEM I HAD!" statements are inappropriate. Is it a double-standard? Yes, in some ways, and in more ways than it's not, but even getting beyond how much the majority's opinion matters, when the article is edited by a vast majority with a positive outlook, sudden negativity looks more like bad formatting than anything else, which is why it comes across as whining, regardless of how valid the points may be. And you actually have to make points, not just vague assertions that "if you read all the praise and then actually play the game afterwards you'll be shocked!" Praise for the game comes in the form of "here is an awesome plot twist" or "this thing that character did was awesome!" These are subjective statements, and the negative reaction happens because the equally subjective opinion that any / all of these things aren't good writing exist. If there wasn't actual substance, there wouldn't be massive counterpoints in the article itself to some problems some have with specific plot points. I say "some" problems because some of them are clearly worse than others.
Specific points: Sequalitis is not objective no matter how you look at it. You even said up there "I actually thought the game wasn't bad, more like So OK, It's Average," and then further go on to say that obviously makes it Sequalitis. It doesn't make it Sequalitis, it means you, and anyone who agrees with you, see it at Sequalitis. That's what the entry should say, not "It is Sequalitis because because I say so despite the obvious disagreement of nearly everyone who's contributed to this article." I would defend the right for an entry like that to be here as vehemently as I'm telling you why the manner in which it was there was inappropriate (which is why I didn't remove it myself, nor do I agree that the person who did should've tried to be snarky about it.) It's not invalid to dislike the points you covered, it's invalid to treat them as though dislike is the "right" way of seeing it. Hell, I re-wrote most of that stuff from various other parts of the article to fit it all under Your Mileage May Vary myself. Does that entry seem like it's being overly snarky/critical of the negative reaction to what it covers? 'Cause it's not supposed to be, and should be changed if it is.
Character death: Two player-characters die in the second game; Private Allen and Roach. Yes, that's "double" the amount of player characters that die in the original, but that's a long stretch to calling it excessive. That you haven't been with Private Allen for very long makes it far more of a plot point than a character-driven moment like Jackson's death was, as Jackson's was intended to be. Jackson's death also wasn't the centerpoint of a Reveal like Roach's death. Like everything above, there are points for and against this with legitimate reasoning; yes, they're using a trick again based solely on the fact that it worked the first time, but the trick is being used in completely different ways than the first time. This would belong more under a trope for repeating a previous method of doing a plot twist, which I'm sure exists and I just can't think of the name. I don't think the one that covers World At War repeating COD1's end (the name of which also escapes me) fits it. Gaz and Ghost are the only important supporting characters in the ranks of the good guys who die. The fact that Makarov doesn't die means that less non-player characters die in Modern Warfare 2, compared to Zakhaev, who didn't survive. Redshirts are about equal, if we assume Shepherd offed the entirety of the 141, it's technically still less than the amount that died in the nuke, but enough named redshirts for it to be about even, I'd say.
To conclude this Wall of Text; my apologies for jumping to conclusions and assuming you were just ripping off Yahtzee, the specific wording just sounded similar enough to convince me without thinking about it.
Dark Sovereign: This is ridiculous. Why does Halo have no substance and Co D does? Because Co D dances its message naked in full view and Halo's message has to be searched for? I can easily find "literary merit" in Halo. For instance, the Covenant represents the dangers of zealotry and unquestioning religious faith. The Halo rings show that a weapon can be both salvation and damnation. Had the Chief attempted to use the rings to end the war, he would have destroyed the Covenant but destroyed humanity in the process. The Prophet's show us that leadership shouldn't be trusted unconditionally. The Flood/Human/Covenant war shows that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. In fact, the entire story can be used as an allegory for war: just because a war is happening far away doesn't mean it can't be at your back door tomorrow.
The worst part of all of this is the double standard. Despite the supposed zealotry of Halo fanboys, Halo's deficiencies weren't given this much leeway. Halo's story made logical sense. It wasn't told very well, but upon reflection the actions taken were logical. By contrast, whenever one of the glaring plot holes/idiot plot examples for Co D are brought up, an explanation from outside the story is conjured up to cover it.
Why did the Ultranationalists attack the United States, a global superpower, instead of the terrorist organization obviously responsible for the attack on the airport? Why did Europe/Africa allow Russian transports across their airspace despite the obvious World War that was about to break out? How did the Ultranationalists rebuilt and unify a country half a decade after a bloody and costly civil war? Even worse, how did the Russian Ultranationlists build the armed forces and air force up to levels the current Russian government couldn't match in less than a decade? Why didn't US fighters take down the transports? Why didn't US missile defenses shoot down the nuke, despite having demonstrated the capacity to hit space level objects more than a year ago? What happened to the US nuclear missiles? How did Price launch a missile without any of the proper authorization? Why was a VIP, of any kind, placed in a bunker in Washington D.C. when DC was under invasion? Why was Price in the Gulag but Soap running free despite both having been in Russian custody? Why was there no evidence of US militia activity during the invasion? Why was the Navy bombing the gulag when a known task force and valuable hostage was inside, but not willing to blow up an oil rig because of civvie hostages?
This leaves aside the ridiculous explanations for the Russian use of select US guns. That, I would excuse as creative license. The rest of this is just a plot not making sense. No writing deserves this much hand waving and this much excuse making. Bad writing is bad writing, not matter what game, book, or movie it's attached to.
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The Real CJ: I know, and I apologise for the bad edits.
But that doesn't excuse the people who agressively edited my posts. The only reason given (so far) pretty much amounts to "You're just wrong, so suck it up and stop complaining". That's hardly fair, now is it? Look at Jonn's post above. He was fully prepared to go on a full rant about how I'm an idiot, but somebody beat him to it.
In fact, you're the only person who has provided a valid argument as to why my posts needed editing. They were subjective, and over-opinionated. If somebody had said that, I probably would have conceded the point a lot sooner (in fact, going over what I wrote on the page, I realised you had the high ground, and I conceded accordingly). But, except for you, all I've gotten is complete removals, and unfortunate levels of Fan Dumb.
Wild Knight: ...Oh, you've got to be kidding me. I spent half a bloody hour cleaning up the page and it was reverted back by someone editing it at the same time? Fuck it. Someone else wants to do it, go ahead and copy my edits or instate your own, but I'm done. Who am I kidding? I'm a bored college dropout with nothing better to do. I couldn't let Testosterone Poisoning slip away, either. >.>
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
