Have the modern warfare servers for PC shut down for people in Britain? I am from Wales and have been trying to connect to a game for about a month now, I tried re-installing it and have tried all of the updates, but when I log in and try a team death match game it says (most of the time atleast) 1000/3745 players in playlist.
I assume there are atleast 1000 people playing it out of 3745 people who are currently logged into and playing different game types, but I cannot seem to connect to any games, the lobbys that I try to get connected to go right up to <160 ping then it just stops there and says looking for matched player and it will stay on this screen (I tried the other day for lack of anything better to do) for an hour and it still wouldn't not connect.
I assume the reason it is searching for games that are more than say <70 ping is purely down to no one in Britain or Europe playing this game any more, could someone shed some light on this? I don't want to have wasted 20 pounds on the MW2 DLC last month for nothing, and I assume steam doesn't do refunds 😉
Best Answer
From a technical standpoint, games are hosted by the players themselves, it is only the matchmaking servers that Activision/Infinity Ward control. They may have spun down a few of these now that there are less players playing, but all that would mean if there was a spike in interest, that people would hang at the Connecting to Matchmaking Server stage, not the Searching for games... stage.
Update (2015):
I have since learned that the reason for the drop in available games is actually caused by owning the DLC (The Stimulus/Resurgence Map packs). Apparently, Modern Warfare 2's Matchmaking was built in such a way as to cause the game to fracture the community into 4 'matchmaking' groups:
Each of these groups will only be able to join lobbies with people of their respective 'group'. So if you have both DLC enabled, the game will refuse to match you into lobbies with people that don't own the DLC.
It would seem that the majority of players do not own the DLC map packs, so for the best chance of finding lobbies, I suggest disabling or removing the DLC packs.
When I investigated this, I had to contact Steam Support and get them to remove the DLCs completely from my account. Since then, Valve/Infinity Ward appear to have enabled a way to disable them directly from Steam (probably because they noticed a spike in people wanting them removed from their accounts).
Keep in mind however that the other problem is that most of the community has moved on to the newer games; disabling the DLC might enable more matches to be joined, but they will be pulling players from around the world, not just your local area and will probably be laggy. It's not the 'Magic Bullet' that is going to bring Modern Warfare 2 back to it's glory days.
Another suggestion is to grab a few of your steam friends and host some private matches among yourselves.