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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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 sv_maxrate 5000. Until now this is what the PC dedicated servers were reporting before this update whereas in previous COD titles it has always been sv_maxrate 20000 or sv_maxrate 25000 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.

View the full COD:Black Ops Patch History page here

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You can catch the action between the hours of 5:00PM to 6:00PM Pacific Standard Time and if it is the same server they played on last time (they didn’t announce that yet) you can check the status of it below.

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Hi all,
Developers from the PC team will be playing tonight in our server (IP below) from 5:00pm to 6:00pm PST – end time may vary depending on how badly we’re destroying everyone.

Server IP: 64.156.14.55:28960

Note that the server will be password protected until 5:00pm. At that time though, please feel free to join up! All developers will be wearing the [TREY] clan tag.

Hope to see you online tonight!
-JD

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