I think the problem is that crappy players now outnumber decent ones, and because of this, gameplay has changed significantly. A tiered subscription would solve this problem. Hear me out...
A decade ago, I loved online poker. Then ESPN and Chris Moneymaker convinced every college-aged male on the planet that he could go all-in and make it to the World Series of Poker. The community went from a few thousand highly-skilled players to millions of terrible ones seeking river-card miracles every hand. It changed the game so significantly because the opponents had changed so significantly. I used to worry about underestimating an opponent, now if I'm in a low-stakes game facing a 2 on the river, I find myself wondering if my opponent might be so stupid that he'd still be in the hand with a pair of deuces. In order for me to enjoy playing poker again there was only one solution: I had to stop sitting at the kiddie tables. The stakes had to be just high enough that they wouldn't put a hole in my pocket, but that they'd keep out the jokers.
The point is this: online multi-player will never be what it was because the target audience, as a whole, has evolved pretty significantly. The only way you're getting any piece of that experience back is by creating a second-tier level with a price just high enough to give casual gamers the incentive to stay at the kiddie table.
Games are not created for a specialized niche-market, they're made so that they can be adopted by the masses... and to those masses, it's often just casual entertainment. I'm not angry, I know that greater profits are what drives advances in this industry, but it's clear that now most players aren't as skilled, and they just don't care. I have no interest in playing with those types of players, and if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you probably don't either.
You don't have to be a COD veteran to grasp this concept. Even if you've only recently adopted multi-player first person shooters, you've probably experienced it on a smaller scale with the "Christmas Miracle" bubble: a few hundred thousand kids receive the game for Christmas, jump on Xbox live, and it's such an all out miraculous slaughter that even mediocre players can convince themselves that they've got some serious skills. Servers lag, matchmaking is a nightmare, rookies camp to survive, finally unlock some weapons, and after a month or so, the gameplay finally starts to even out a bit. January can be a pretty frustrating month for multi-player gamers, but it mirrors the experience that veteran COD players deal with year-round.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I firmly believe that a tiered-subscription, tiered game price, or one-time upgrade fee would solve a number of these problems. This small fee gets you, separate dedicated servers, better matchmaking, more maps, more weapons, more games, maybe even multiple identities for the same gamer tag. It's not there to bleed customers wallets, but it's just high enough to act as a barrier to entry for casual players -and it comes with a guarantee that the revenue stream is used specifically for maintaining and upgrading that specific game's matchmaking servers, maps, etc... It's win-win for both Activision's bean counters and the veteran gamers that this franchise was built upon.
