Today at Gamescom, Activision has announced it will be using dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 3 on the PC version at no cost to the player. Unfortunately, community hell broke loose… Though there are both sides to the story, plenty of COD fans were outraged. Competitive PC fans were worried about potential cheating and well others, were wondering why it wasn’t announced for the consoles.

At the moment, Activision is rather concerned about the open nature of dedicated servers on the PC, which might make cheating a lot harder to manage than it already is on the console. This is one of the reasons why it was dropped from Modern Warfare 2 PC, despite its success in Call of Duty 4 which gamers are still complaining about to this day. Then again, have you played a game of COD4 lately? It’s pretty outrageous, at least for my taste. And with the addition of Call of Duty: Elite, which is supposed to hand out real prizes and track legitimate stats, Activision is wondering how it’s going to manage cheating and other potential dangers that will ruin user-experience. All of those answers will come in time as they do not intend to release the game without a solution (oh joy…).

As for us console gamers, we’ll just have to wait and see as well. A great majority of players are tired of host advantage and constant host migrations. But according to Activision, dedicated servers will drop the life-span of their game because they might have to be shut-down within a certain amount of time, which they do not want to do because the online portion of COD is a very important piece.

Anyways, going back to a traditional dedicated server system on PC will excite normal PC enthusiasts as they will be able to set-up or rent their own servers, allowing them to do what they will. With the game getting closer and closer to launch, Activision better find a solution to PC cheating. Is Modern Warfare 3 PC in danger of that? Will the servers move console side as well? We’ll just have to see for ourselves…