Call of Duty: Infinity - COD is dead, and no one cares

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Call of Duty: Infinity - COD is dead, and no one cares

Stubear St. Pierre: Feb 22, 2006

I awoke from a deep sleep, as I tend to in the morning, to find that it had once again been five months since the previous release of Nintendo's hottest new series for the WiiU, Call of Duty. Satisfied with this explanation for the stunning erection I was sporting, I set to work as usual, scouring the Internet for the latest "scoop" on this year's brand new iteration of the series that sees nearly as much variation as the surface of the Moon. What I found was nothing short of astonishing:

Indeed, in Call of Duty 15: Modern Warfare 5: Black Ops 4: Ghosts 2: Infinity, we find ourselves rocketed into space like an unwitting German Shepherd paving the way for the future of all cosmonauts, as players don the role of Master Chief, who must pilot his Titan through the perils of Tatooine so he can save Princess Zelda from Bomberman, foil Voldemort once and for all, and finally bring peace to New Vegas. In a shocking twist for the series with more shocking twists than a dominatrix with a car battery, players will create their very own classes bounded by only their imaginations, and also some kind of idiot point system, and whatever lovely perks they have available, and feel immersed in whichever corner they choose to sit in as they stare at a doorway while their six year old brother, or child, screams into the Kinect that he either wants a turn or is being horribly neglected. I know I'm stoked as gently caress, and am going to buy, play, and post about this game, a lot. Below are some screen shots of the action packed action we're all in for:

If there's one thing on everyone's mind now, it's almost certainly not the "three stupid questions" approach I've used for the last however many threads, which I'm abandoning because I cannot fathom giving a gently caress about this game; it is, instead, "how exactly did it come to this?" Luckily, while the rest of you were out getting married, going outside, and generally enjoying life for the past year, I decided to nerd out like a true MLG Pro, using the only tool I knew that could explain such a deep, nuanced question: machine learning.

I strapped on my fingerless coding gloves, poignantly turned my hat around backwards, donned my yellow-tinted Oakleys and giant audiophile headphones, and daintily slid a little plastic parasol into my maraschino cherry-adorned Shirley Temple as drum'n'bass blasted forth from my studio apartment with such fury that the heavens themselves seemed a hair's breadth from shattering. I downloaded scikit-learn, the natural language toolkit, wrote some bullshit crawler using some idiot library I forget the name of to pull forums crap into a SQLite database, and, stroking the wispy hairs of my blonde mustache as they dripped pure masculinity onto my Hello Kitty emblazoned Macbook Pro, I set to work. An almost imperceptible smile danced on my lips as I git-bashed through the firewall and rode the serial bus clean through my PCI port. I was taken by surprise when my ROM flash blew right through the page table, but by this point I was running on pure CMOS. The smile was growing bigger now, as was the snack-sized erection now threatening to burst from my worn out jorts, as beads of sweat fell gracefully down onto my unlaced-Chuck-Taylor-encased foot; "this is what I live for," I thought aloud, as techno music pounded and an effeminate British guy said "gently caress" a whole lot. Effortlessly, I hyperthreaded the semaphores until the BIOS was bit-switched, and my work was complete. I was greeted with the audible snap that I had sought this entire time: I'd popped my Linux kernel.

And then, one hand still furiously typing into my Powershell, the other blindly fumbling for the plastic spigot lost in the recesses of my second box of Franzia, it struck me like the loving hand of an abusive parent: this wasn't going to work. VADER sentiment polarity--basically a number that tells you how positive, negative, or neutral the sentiment of some text is--is basically horseshit based on fatally flawed logic that, much like its autistic creators, does not account for sarcasm or context in the sample; and machine learning algorithms, like pretty much anything in statistics, is reliant on independent identical distribution of data points--which is to say none of the data points are supposed to have anything to do with any others, when in reality this is pretty much the opposite case if your data points are posts in a discussion forum. Furthermore, if my goal was to classify entire threads, I'd need a hell of a lot more data than would fit on my computer, or at least more than I cared to sit around and let download for hours.

So I was left with a bunch of COD thread data, a ton of spare time since I still sure as gently caress wasn't playing COD, and decided to do some really basic CODalytics.

First and foremost, how many posts had been made on Something Awful pertaining to each COD game--keeping in mind that some threads for earlier games were probably left out--and, perhaps more importantly, could this information be displayed in three-dimensional pyramids, with a back wall of some sort behind them?

The answer is not even remotely surprising. Nobody gave a flying gently caress about W@W, and COD has gotten steadily less popular since MW2, with a resurgence with Blops 2 before continuing its downward trend--although keep in mind this data was pulled a few months ago so maybe there were more posts for Blops 3 by now, I sure as poo poo haven't been following that thread.

The picture is pretty similar for the number of unique posters in each thread:

Interestingly, the number of unique posters actually grew from Blops to MW3 even though the overall post count shrank--probably because of the introduction of the (godawful) clan system making it a bit more inclusive, and our famous shenanigans like Wizard Night and Juggernight. This also might have been the first time there was no separate PC thread, I have no idea and didn't search or pull data from those because the Steam stats page tells the whole story (and then some).

All this is good and fun, but what could have caused this downward trend? Is it fatigue with a worn out series that still uses P2P matchmaking in 2016 and hasn't made any significant changes in 10 years, changing less between iterations than other games do over similar timespans for free? Or is it Mister Macy's?

Once again, the facts don't lie--and the truth they tell is as blunt as it is unsurprising:

The next infographic shows a mildly interesting statistic, namely the number of posts per unique user--were these threads a lot of drop-ins who left forever, or dominated by regulars who shouted out anyone who wasn't part of the in group? It's hard to say, because Macy's dominated them all:

And lastly, another graph, which I saved a few months ago but isn't really illuminating at all:

So there you have it, folks. A Call of Duty thread: an in-depth preview, irrefutable proof that Mister Macy's was solely responsible for killing COD, and several minutes of your life you will never get back, for which I am not even remotely grateful. Below, I've enclosed a safe space, for you all to discuss transgendered bathrooms, Wikipedia disputes, XKCD, Pokemon Go, other lame nerd poo poo, and--maybe--Call of Duty: Infinity Wardfare.