Just a few minutes ago a News note was posted on the GameServers.com Members Area of the website stating that a global change to the “MAXRATE” parameter on all of the COD:Black Ops servers was changed to correct some of the lag issues happening in the game right now. You will need to restart your game server from your Members Area for the change to take affect but other than that server owners don’t have to do anything.

Nov 10, 2010 – 8:39pm EST
A global change has been issued to our Black Ops servers modifying the maxrate parameter. This will help smooth out performance issues some have referenced. Please restart your server from within your account page to take advantage of the changes.

This was brought to the attention of Jock Yitch of BashAndSlash.com by an individual named Alex G earlier yesterday according to this message on BashAndSlash.com. It appears that this might be a setting left over from the console configuration since the console “servers” (if you want to call them that) are hosted on higher latency, less bandwidth home internet connections – they have a lower MAXRATE set at [highlight2]sv_maxrate 5000[/highlight2]. Until now this is what the PC dedicated servers were reporting before this update whereas in previous COD titles it has always been [highlight2]sv_maxrate 20000[/highlight2] or [highlight2]sv_maxrate 25000[/highlight2] since the majority of PC dedicated servers were hosted from very good internet connections that could handle the players and bandwidth.

Looking at my server config file now that my server is rebooted I see that sv_maxrate is set to 25000 now so lets see how things shape up over the next few days once everyone gets their servers restarted. Hopefully this will resolve some of the lag issues – at least on the bandwidth side of things.

[fancy_link link=http://www.callofdutyview.net/articles/codblack-ops-patch-history/]View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here[/fancy_link]