Update: the problem is now being reported in Europe, as well. MayDay on the official Black Ops forums says "I'm getting lag spikes on all servers in europe, everyone i have talked to seem to have the same problem."

Australians felt somewhat lucky to have a Steam unlock schedule that favored us, being the first in the world to get our hands on some Call of Duty: Black Ops action. Unfortunately, very few are having any success. It turns out that we've been forcibly made beta testers, whether we like it or not.


Single player is reportedly putting tremendous load on the CPU, even in menus, rendering the game unplayable for many. Those who can play are suffering poor frame rates. On the multiplayer front, pings to locally hosted servers vary from 80ms to 350ms, and looking at my Remote Console, regularly spike to 999ms - usually before dropping players. It's unclear if this issue is a problem at Gameservers.com, Internode, Steam, the dedicated server files or even the way our local multiplayer clients run.

Packet loss and choke aside, there's the bigger issue of intermittent stuttering and freezing, which looks to be another hardware performance issue. Whatever the cause of these numerous PC issues, it doesn't look like anyone, anywhere will be having any real fun with Black Ops any time soon.

No official statement has been made by Treyarch, Valve or Gameservers, but hopefully we'll have some answers sometime very soon. Steam's USA and UK unlocks for Black Ops are just hours away, so one would assume they'll want to have these problems resolved before that happens.