besides the matchmaking system, its pretty much exactly like MW1 which everyone loved.
BLASPHEME!!!
The only similarities between COD4 and MW2 are 1) the words "Modern" and "Warfare", 2) the concept of perks and killstreaks, and 3) surprisingly, Infinity Ward.
The gameplay is not "pretty much exactly like MW1". COD4 was about guns and bullets and even a degree of strategy. The killstreaks were cool but were not integral to the game. You could dominate without ever tapping into a killstreak.
MW2, on the other hand, is about everything except guns and bullets. It's about stabbing people from 15 feet away and camping from one killstreak to the next. COD4 was organized chaos, MW2 is just chaos.
IW had an awful challenge in front of them. Seriously, how do you improve on perfection without leaving the boundaries of the what made it perfect?
Apparently you can't.
It sucks that you can't get BC2 working. I agree that there's absolutely no excuse for the borked PC rollout. As I mentioned earlier, people did server browsers for years without issue, but DICE has never figured it out. Then all of a sudden it was like everyone forgot how to develop a functional browser with even the most basic features, so they went to automatchmaking. Enter GoW2 and MW2... they forgot how to do that, too.
I would like to see a standardized server query protocol and a standardized server browser. Gamespy is the obvious candidate, since most games already use one of their protocols. So when a game decides to go multiplayer, they license the browser along with the protocol and quit fucking up the reinvention of the wheel. At the very least, develop the browser outside of the game. An in-game multithreaded browser is cumbersome to write and requires a ton of boilerplate UI code. On the other hand, written in .NET, Flash, etc., is very speedy. I wrote replacement browsers for UT3 and BF2 in 3 days. Lightweight and VERY fast. The lists populate as each server comes in, so no more waiting for the whole damn list to complete before you can join a server. You can create endless filters, name them, save them, and load them.
I would love to do this for BC2, but the lack of command line options means you can't pass a server IP to the game at launch, so there's no point of integration. If they fixed that, I could have this sucker ported to BC2 in a day.