The COD:Black Ops Patch History page is updated for all the updates but the original the original post from JD_2020 regarding the 1.07 patch is below with the included list of changes.

• Improved stability for Zombies, Multiplayer, and Dedicated Servers
• Fixed server hitching when client is kicked for inactivity
• Added server browser Filter for DLC
• Quickmatch will prioritize servers running only the maps you own
• Addressed various MP and Zombies exploits
• Addition of the “Dolly Cam” editing mode in Theater
• Improved reliability of Recent Game films saving properly
• Connectivity improvements for Zombies
• Added ability to remove Counter Spy-Plane effects with the Jammer
• Players that put an enemy into Second Chance are now credited with a kill when the downed player is killed or takes the ‘coward’s way out’
• Players will no longer receive any “hitmarkers” for shooting friendly equipment
• Addressed an issue with switching classes while using a Chopper Gunner / Gunship
• Disable player movement sounds when Ninja perk is equipped
• Players can no longer “spawn tube” with the China Lake at the beginning of a match
• Additional fine-tuning of audio levels for bomb plants/defuses
• Headshot “ping” is now only audible if enemy dies
• Limit the ability to re-roll supply drops using Hardline Pro to Care Packages only, no other Killstreak drops
• Addressed an issue where the incorrect perks would appear when spectating another player under certain circumstances
• RC-XD adjustments
• Addressed an issue with calling in Chopper Gunner / Gunship immediately after being shot down from a previous one
• Various improvements to Multiplayer and Zombies leaderboards

So it seems that there is quite a bit covered in this patch but what is missing? Well the biggest would have to be the weapon changes. In past XBOX updates dating the whole way back to December 13th until now there have been multiple adjustments to the sniper rifles and also adjustments to the AK74u and the horrible knife lunge. Why has the PC community not been given these adjustments? Are they not needed because of the platform differences? I think they are – especially the sniper rifles and the ridiculous sliding across the map 10 feet knife lunge. Another thing that is still missing – again dating back to the December 13th XBOX update; is the addition of a delay on the red diamond enemy indicators that are used to show enemy players locations when someone is controlling Valkyrie Rockets, a Chopper Gunner or a Gunship. This is a huge cause of spawn killing right now with the Chopper Gunner because as soon as a players spawns the player basically has a target on them – whereas with the patch there is a slight delay before this red enemy player indicator appears on you and it gives you a chance to equip your anti-aircraft gun. Since this change wasn’t in this patch I am starting to think that it isn’t coming at all – like the previously mentioned weapon adjustments. As far as map changes; there was an exploit on Array where you could jump from a window into a group of filing cabinets and shoot without being able to be killed and it has finally gotten fixed but the biggest map issues involving railings that can’t be shot through on both Crisis and Hanoi are still not corrected. There is only one location on Hanoi but there are multiple locations around the one building that this issue affects on Crisis but I just don’t understand why this is such a big deal to fix. So to sum it all up; this patch did do some good but it still was quite focused on bug fixes and stability when that should be over and done with by now for the most part. Five months after release the patches should be focused on adjusting and improving the game and gameplay itself. The above mentioned issues should not still exist; especially when other platforms have had them for almost four months – it’s almost as bad as waiting for the DLC.

Speaking of DLC. The PC community will finally get it’s hands on the First Strike DLC today as well. Personally other than the release videos that have been coming from Treyarch on the First Strike DLC I haven’t seen much on it but I am anxious to see how the maps play and will find out here shortly. I debated on supporting the COD series further and buying the DLC would definitely do that – however the way I am looking at it now is I am buying the DLC because this will most likely be the last COD title that I purchase and I might as well play the game to it’s fullest extent while it is still up and running pretty strong. That and the fact that not too many other games that are releasing right now look very appealing to me at all. At least this time around the DLC maps are all “new” maps and not just random maps regurgitated from previous titles like COD:Modern Warfare 2 has done in the past.

To go along with the DLC maps being released on the PC; the PC community will get an exclusive weekend of Double XP to celebrate the release so I am off to get some games in and check out the new maps. Feel free to join me in the testing on the CODV DEMO & DOM SERVER.

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Unfortunately as I suspected it would; the First Strike DLC will come at a price of $14.99 through Steam – unless you take advantage of the pathetic attempt at lessening the pain from the kick in the face this release has been on the PC and pre-order the First Strike DLC at 10% off. I knew Activision wouldn’t let it slip out the door with some sort of price tag and typically I wouldn’t expect them to be free (those days are over) but with the shotty way the game released on the PC the DLC should have at least been sold at an outright discount (somewhere around $5) instead of a temporary pre-order discount. As usual with the way information is given to us; no one is really sure how the DLC will work on the dedicated server side yet and I am sure we won’t know until the release on Friday. GameServers – the only Game Server Provider for the game is stating these details on how the dedicated servers will work is something that Treyarch wants to release and GS won’t even say a word on the matter. UPDATE: Understanding DLC on the PC posted by JD_2020.

Shortly after the Tweet from CM JD_2020 announcing the First Strike release, PCDev also announced that the 1.07 patch will be released on Friday March 25th as well. Well it is about freaking time! Even though there aren’t any release notes posted yet this update should have a number of gameplay changes and additions that the XBOX 360 has been playing with since December 3rd… that’s right December freaking 3rd… Waiting for pathetic console exclusive DLC is one thing but waiting months for simple changes that have already been applied to other platforms of the game is just plain ridiculous.

Who knows what is actually in the patch until we get some release notes but there should be items such as map updates to get rid of numerous issues/exploits within them, spawn system improvements, minor weapon balancing with the AK74u recoil and ADS speed as well as sniper rifle damage and the ridiculous knife lunge, enemy target indicator delay on the Huey and Hind Killstreaks, RC-XD explosion radius reduction, Second Chance Perk point award changes, limitation to the Hardline Pro Perk of re-rolling Care Packages only, additional editing functionality in Theater Mode with “Dolly Cam”, and probably a lot more. This will probably be a pretty good patch – unfortunately it is way too late in the game to bring back the many people that were interested in the game months ago. Sure there still seems to be people playing it and admittedly I am still playing it here and there because nothing else seems interesting to me right now but so many people in the PC community have dropped this game already and aren’t looking back.

The Steam Statistics page has shown COD:Black Ops beaten by COD:Modern Warfare 2 in terms of daily “peak player count” for almost two weeks consecutively now – and for COD:Black Ops to be only entering it’s fifth month of release and the failure of a game (by PC standards) that COD:Modern Warfare 2 was; the situation is quite pathetic right now. Many dedicated COD fans have moved on to other games; practically all of the competitive players interested in competitive COD:Black Ops has moved on or went back to other titles; server count is down to just over 13,000 servers which means there is approximately 3 players for every server, the game still runs terrible for some out there and there are drastic performance discrepancies between different hardware and operating systems that no one from Treyarch cares to explain or even acknowledge. The last ditch effort of mod tools are probably still a month or more away from release – who knows – but who will be around to play anything custom when they do come out? To me there aren’t a whole lot of people playing the game that really care about custom maps or mods at this point and the last thing these mappers and modders want to do is spend a lot of time creating content that wont be played. With so many dedicated server limitations still in place I just don’t see custom content going anywhere in this game. On top of all of those negative factors the fact that some other pretty interesting games are starting to release now and will be in the near future; the player numbers along with interest are going to keep dropping and dropping for COD:Black Ops.

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With previous versions of Windows like Windows Vista or Windows XP we kind of got used to a Service Pack coming out with new features or vast performance improvements – however with Windows 7 it is actually a very feature rich and solid performing operating system and therefore for the Windows 7 side of things for Service Pack 1 it is really only a few minor feature fixes and otherwise just what a Service Pack should be – one big all inclusive update of all previous security fixes and updates since the operating system released. There could possibly be some performance improvements but for those test results we will have to wait for the final build to come out and for the PC enthusiast websites to do their benchmarks comparing the new Windows 7 SP1.

For more information on what exactly is all included in the Windows 7 SP1 / Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 update (both the client operating system and server operating system come from the same mold so to speak so they get the same update) I will direct you to a guy that knows a lot about Windows and a lot about Microsoft in general; Mr. Paul Thurrot at the Supersite for Windows where he did a writeup of the Service Pack back in January.

Service Pack 1 will become available publicly on February 22, via Windows Update, through manual downloads, and pre-installed on new PCs and servers.

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View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

• Backward compatibility for films created before Patch 1.05
• Issues with weapon purchases after prestiging in some cases.
• Leaving a server and joining a different server, could briefly show the Map of the previous server.
• Duplicate player name on a server now becomes playername+slotnumber instead of ‘Unknown Soldier’.
• During a ‘Demolition’ match, the ‘Auto-balancing teams’ options may cause a ‘Defender’ player to respawn with a ‘Bomb’ icon in his inventory.
• Minor Shader Warming speed increase.
• One In The Chamber no longer counts democlient as a live player.
• 16x AA menu option for compatible graphics cards.
• Additional Stability improvements.

Stay tuned for more information on what should be coming for the next 1.07 patch that should include a decent amount of game changes. Hopefully…

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The list for the latest patch; although much smaller that what was mentioned on the prior list from JD_2020, doesn’t include much of anything in regards to tuning or balancing but does continue to push on with the still much needed stability improvements and some bug fixes – with a few little additions on the side. With that said; there are still numerous additions and changes that the XBOX 360 & PS3 has had for over a month now already – and since those features weren’t in this patch us PC users will now be waiting over two months (or more) to get those features and changes that the consoles have had.

View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

• MP Audio stuttering on certain systems.
• Playercards sometimes not showing properly.
• Added three Private Match Server Settings: Team Change, Team-Up Period, and Keep Balanced Teams.
• Added Alternate Color Scheme for accessibility: Settings / Multiplayer / Player Name Indicator.
• Changed Team-Up Period countdown interval to 10 seconds.
• Combat Training sessions are no longer counted in Server Browser Unranked tab.
• Friends on your team will now show as blue on your minimap.
• Prevention of various exploits.
• Objective markers localized for all languages.
• Various stability improvements.

Supposedly all servers were updated as well with this update however once again there is really no communication on what changes were done to the servers and GameServers staff has already commented that “not all issues have been addressed” with this patch. However a GS forum staff member did comment that we should be looking at two points on the same patch notes that were released for the client as they also are said to apply to the servers. It sure would still be nice to see ACTUAL patch release notes for the servers so we know what the heck is being changed or being fixed to make the servers that WE PAY FOR better.

• Prevention of various exploits.
• Various stability improvements.

Lets hope that these stability fixes finally address the client side freezing issues that so many are still experiencing once and for all and lets hope that something is corrected with the horrible server crashing issues that have been going on. As of this morning reading the GS Forums there are mixed results with some reporting servers are still crashing yet others are reporting that they notice major improvements in server performance and their server isn’t crashing – so I guess it will take a little more time to see which way this patch swings the pendulum for the server side.

The last part of the update was a version increase to the Treyarch RCON tool with the addition of it now being able to notify you if you are trying to connect with a wrong password. Yay.

• Recognize new “invalid password” server response

Now for the future; it seems that the next patch (1.06) will be a pretty big patch with some actual weapon and game play balancing/tuning; and hopefully some of those features and changes that consoles have been playing with already for quite some time. However, at this time instead of speculating what we will get in the next patch I will just direct you to David Vonderhaar’s post on CODHQ if you haven’t seen it yet to get an idea of what might be coming up. Keep in mind that right now in that topic he is talking about console updates for the most part but I would see most if not all of those also coming over to the PC as well. Again; only time will tell.

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In Progress

• MP Audio stuttering on certain systems.
• Playercards sometimes not showing properly.
• Added three Private Match Server Settings: Team Change, Team-Up Period, and Keep Balanced Teams.
• Added Alternate Color Scheme for accessibility: Settings / Multiplayer / Player Name Indicator.
• Changed Team-Up Period countdown interval to 10 seconds.
• Combat Training sessions are no longer counted in Server Browser Unranked tab.
• Friends on your team will now show as blue on your minimap.
• Prevention of various exploits.
• Objective markers localized for all languages.
• SP Audio stuttering on certain systems.
• Addition of new contracts.
• Addition of the “Dolly Cam” editing mode in Theater.
• If a player cancels an invite to a Wager Match, then attempts to join another server, they will join the server from the declined invite.
• Issue where the incorrect perks would appear when spectating another player under certain conditions.
• Addition of round start explosive delay to China Lake grenade launcher to give it the same “spawn toob” protection as other explosives.
• Ensure reticle purchases are reset on prestige in all circumstances.
• Contracts should reset on prestige.
• Prevention of Valkyrie rocket exploding upon release under rare conditions.
• Prevention of Gunship and Chopper Gunner failing to give player full control under rare conditions.
• Prevention of an issue where a player will get teleported outside the map boundaries under very specific conditions.
• Limit the ability to re-roll supply drops using Hardline Pro to Care Packages only, no other killstreak drops.
• Increased headshot multipliers for sniper rifles. Sniper rifles with suppressors equipped will now always be ensured one-shot kill headshots.
• Added a render delay to the red diamond player indicators that appear when controlling the Gunship, Valkyrie Rocket and Chopper Gunner. When a player first spawns, this will not appear for a period of time.
• Additional minor reductions in knife lunge.

Now this is a decent list and it is definitely nice to see adjustments to two of my largest complaint points on there – the red diamond player indicators that appear while using the Huey and Hind that point you out immediately on spawn and of course the ridiculous cheesy knife lunge – but seeing this list and referencing back on some things that have been Tweeted and posted in CODHQ in the last few days brings up some confusion and it seems that the Game Design Director and the dev team aren’t quite on the same page.

The topics in point are adjustments to the AK74U (another big complaint point for me), adjustments to the Second Chance Perk, adjustments to the RC-XD damage radius and the fact that it was stated that Treyarch was happy with the sniper rifle tuning and knife tuning and no changes were planned – all seen in the this post on CODHQ by David Vonderhaar (quoted below for easy reading) and also different bits Tweeted by David Vonderhaar over the course of last week (also quoted below). Strangely in this patch we have both sniper rifle tuning as well as knife tuning and yet even stranger is the tuning on the AK74U that David Vonderhaar states was completed as of January 5th is no where to be seen on that list above. Maybe this isn’t a complete list? I really doubt it due to the patch most likely about to be released in the next few days but who knows.

I had hoped by this time in the game life-cycle we would be engaged in a series of constructive debates about the game tuning. Tweaking a few things one way or the other. These are some of the key things on our minds. The ones in bold are done already as of Jan 5th.

We think the AK74U grip variant re-center speed is too quick. Although the tuning in line with other grip variant weapons, the gun itself has a very perfectible kick and other attributes or attachments that make it a popular weapon to use. We have slightly de-tuned the AK74u grip for version 1.06.

We are considering giving full kill credit to the guy who drops someone in Second Chance and Assist credit for someone who finishes them off. We are also considering allowing you to only be revived one time. We are even considering increasing the revive time.
- Forum users like to complain about the “invulnerability period” when someone is dropping. I found where this happens. It’s in code and not script which is why I didn’t see it originally. We need to think about this one clearly. I went through the revision history. Any attempts to remove the “0.5″ seconds of invulnerability mean the guy with Second Chance will likely never be given his Second Chance. Removal of this entirely will all but remove the perk from the game (which I know many of you would prefer in the first place, but it’s something we are not yet ready to do). This “0.5″ seconds is consistent with the previous games and is not any longer or shorter.

We are evaluating the RC-XD minimum and maximum damage and damage radius and it’s movement speed. Changing the kill requirement isn’t feasible at this time.

We are largely okay with the sniper rifle and knife tuning at this time. No changes are currently planned for either of these for version 1.06.

Twitter poll. Assume you get +100 for dropping the guy into Second Chance and the assist for finishing him. Better or worse. If worse, why?

LINK

What if I drop the AK74U clip size from 30 to 20 and the extended clip from 40 to 30. Alternatively, lower the max damage.

LINK

One other final point that I will call attention to is the fact that there is nothing mentioned about the server side of things. There has been absolutely no communication about the servers from Treyarch since launch. There are still MANY server owners (including myself) suffering from uncontrollable server crashing issues as seen in this currently now 33 page forum post at GameServers.com and then to top things off were given abilities with the last patch to adjust team changing options that were broken from the very start – along with Autobalance; which now forces admins to disable team changing because servers can become very out of balance since Autobalance doesn’t work and in full circle that disables Spectating which makes admining servers a little more difficult with questionable players. Straight to the point – we need to see some information from Treyarch to let us know what is being done with the server code!

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I have been suffering from some solid freezes requiring Control+Alt+Delete ever since the last patch and at least for tonight’s testing of the patch for about 3 hours I didn’t have any freezes. On top of that overall game play seemed to be a little smoother graphics wise with a little bump in frame rate it in some aspects. It’s still not solid but I know I haven’t seen the 150′s or 170′s before tonight and I was hitting them in some places without any settings adjustments and running the game at 1680×1050 on medium-high settings on an EVGA GTX260 SSC Edition.

View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

Multiplayer Update

• Improved threading performance on computers with only 2 cores.
• Additional performance optimizations
• Added an option to pre-cache all shaders during load time. This fixes hitching related to shader compiling on some video cards when viewing an area of the map for the first time
• Fixed random freezes in certain computer configurations
• Allow Team Change on Ranked servers when it does not unbalance teams (this is a server admin option)
• Allow Team Change grace period at start of match (server admin option)
• Added 4 more reserved slots (server admin option)
• Added /connect
• Improved quickmatch results (server side change)
• Fix for watching films through Combat Record
• Fixed compassSpectatorsSeeEnemies exploit
• Fixed 3rd person fov exploit
• Fix for infinite supply drop exploit
• Fixed crosshair flickering when stereo is active
• Various spawn improvements
• Various sound improvements
• Fix for Zombies – Teammate shadows not displayed properly
• Fix for radar not staying on in One in the Chamber when it should
• In a Domination match, the Position Secured medal is no longer delayed
• ‘Hardened: Equipment Shot’ Challenge can now be completed by destroying a ‘Camera Spike’
• Fix for choppy final killcam in dedicated servers
• Various map glitches fixed
• Weekly and Monthly leaderboards will now track all kills, deaths and assists properly (All Time leaderboards were not affected by this)
• Added mixed hardcore playlist
• Added mixed barebones playlist
• Added 12 player versions of all playlists

RCON Tool Update

• Reduced timeout values. Connect (or failure to connect is faster)
• Added all white-listed dvars for Ranked and Unranked. Admins have rcon access to ALL available dvars
• Added Settings and Console tabs for Ranked servers
• Fixes a bug where the “Server” tab doesn’t update values when connecting to a new server
• Added version number to the title bar
• Fixed a bug where UI state didn’t persist after switching to another server
• Added “disconnect” button
• Fixed map “set” to not use admindvar
• Changed all dvars which could be possibly float, to float. Mostly these are time-type dvars
• Fixed bug where entering a value of zero for Message Duration would cause a unhandled exception error
• Truncated all message fields to 140 chars

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For myself running a Core i7 860 and a GTX260 I really haven’t had any performance issues other than the first few days with the mis-configured MAXRATE setting. However, now with this patch I have had numerous solid freezes that require the three finger salute (Control+Alt+Delete) to get me out of the game and sadly this is also happening to others who had no issues before this patch. So now the performance issues that some have been facing since day one that weren’t solved with this patch still need to be addressed but now performance issues that have been caused by this patch need to be addressed. Two steps forward and one step backwards it seems.

View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

Multiplayer Update

• CPU performance improvements
• Server browser bug fixes and tweaks to populate faster and do full refresh less often
• Fixed crash when viewing leaderboards if player has more than 99 friends
• Fix for locked ADS after pressing shift-TAB to bring up Steam overlay
• Fix for ADS while holding shift as a sniper

Single Player Update

• CPU performance improvements
• Zombie matchmaking improvements
• Fix for locked ADS after pressing shift-TAB to bring up Steam overlay
• Fix for ADS while holding shift as a sniper

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November 16th, 2010 – 12:05AM EST
An emergency security patch is being applied to all Black Ops servers to fix an exploit that has been discovered. Your server will automatically restart once to apply the patch.

My call was spot on and based on a reply from [GS] devicenull on the GameServers.com forums this security patch addresses the power leveling servers.

[GS] devicenull – Tue Nov 16, 2010 11:19 am
The security issues were related to the power leveling, or fastrank, servers. This is all that was fixed in last nights patch.

View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

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Nov 11, 2010 – 10:45am EST
Treyarch will be releasing a fix for the server browser in the next 24 hours that should correct the problem with being able to find your server on the server browser. We appreciate your patience in this matter.

With that little information it is hard to say what this means. This “problem” as GameServers.com puts it; was intentionally put into place by Treyarch to limit over burdening the Treyarch backend servers that the client Server Browsers are pounding. So it is still unknown if we will be getting full access to all of the servers (over 10,000 last night) in the Server Browser now or if this will just give us some of the servers; as in a regional manner or something. Whatever the case hopefully I will be able to finally SEE or maybe even PLAY on my own server after tonight. Wishful thinking eh?

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To kind of put an end to some lingering speculation about Map Pack 4 I think this answers the question as this patch is appears to be just wrapping up some bugs hanging around comes in at only 15.8MB. I could be wrong but I would imagine that this will be the last update for WAW now that the groundbreaking Modern Warfare 2 is released and flourishing and hopefully Treyarch is working on their next COD installment. As long as it is still actually a PC game I will be quite interested!

You can get the patch here on CODV or you can head on over the callofduty.com PC Updates page in the link below and find a boatload of more places to get it.

• http://www.callofduty.com/supplies/pc-updates

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It is quite odd that it is coming at the time it is. Is this Treyarch’s way of sticking it to Infinity Ward saying that they are standing by the PC community by releasing a patch right at the prime release time of COD:MW2? Maybe I am just over speculating but it sure seems like something more with  the patch being as minor as it is this late in the game for WAW.

With no details stating the actual final release date of the patch, no mention of any work being done on another map pack and the wording on JD’s post about “wrapping up a few of the lingering issues surrounding the PC version of the game” it sounds to me like this will be the final update to the game – but I could be wrong.

The basics on what the patch will include:

• Fixed a voice chat crash on systems with no default recording device selected.
• Fixed an issue causing erroneous duplicate qport errors.
• Server admins can disable team switching by setting g_allow_teamchange to 0. Players will be restricted to Auto-Assign in team-based gametypes.

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Well although there is no “official” post on the callofduty.com Intel page; the Call of Duty website PC Updates page is updated with links aplenty for your downloading pleasure. The patch is a little larger than 1.5 patch coming in at 1.20GB however it isn’t incremental so you will still need the previous patches to install 1.6.

Head on over to the PC Updates page to start your downloading!

http://www.callofduty.com/supplies/pc-updates

The patch is also available for download in the CODV Downloads section.

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After a handful of posts and tid-bits from both JD_2020 and PCDev over the last few weeks on the official COD:WAW forums regarding the progress of the patch and issues encountered; it was finally announced that the PC community would get the patch at some point this week and hopefully that day is finally here.

A “sticky” thread on the official COD:WAW forums was also updated by JD_2020 shortly after stating the following:

Patch 1.6 (w/ Map Pack 3) hits this Friday, the 18th! With it will be the Linux Dedicated 1.6 bins, Mod Tools 1.4 package, and Steam should be ready to go Friday as well =). I can’t wait!

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