bear in mind i do NOT want this thread to become another place to vent the frustrations of the PC community towards the PC version of MW2 (don't get me wrong, i was just as disappointed as the next PC gamer when IW announced "you-know-what").
 
with the game having been out for a few weeks now, i am quite curious about the experiences of the people who actually currently ARE playing MW2 online on the PC version.  is host migration smooth?   is matchmaking good enough that you're joining games with other people that have connections in the green?
 
i suppose any other feedback about the online experience is appreciated...frankly i'm on the fence about the game.  best case scenario is that i get the game and do nothing but play the campaign over and over and over to get my money's worth IF online is still bad lol

Host migration isn't smooth, it takes like 10 seconds from disconnect for the game to migrate and resume. It's very annoying when it happens more than once. Matchmaking isn't great, most often you'll get 3 green bars out of four, which means your ping is anything from 100 to 200 ms in ideal conditions, and of course one dude being the host always has an unfair 0-20 ping. It's also hard to get games going with custom rules. I'm not even sure if it's possible outside private matches actually. I don't mean mods or tweaks, I mean the game's own settings like number of respawns, time limits, point limits, etc. It's also very slow to start a match compared to just joining a server with an ongoing game since you have to start the game yourself, wait for more people to join the lobby as they also search for a game, wait for map to be decided, etc, then repeat the steps all over again when the match ends and you just want to move to the next map (you can't change game mode inbetween unless you exit and do a different search). Controversial statements over the importance of dedicated servers or whatever else aside, the experience is a definite step down from Modern Warfare on PC and the only reason you have to play this over it is simply that it's fresh content you haven't already played to death.

It was good, host migration is smooth. But lately the migration of hosts has been terrible, it can go from an "OK" connection to a "terrible" connection, and it's even more frustrating when the server completely drops and you lose your "would be" exp for that round.
I'm kind of glad they don't have dedicated servers, it gives less power hungry people..well, power. One thing that annoys me though is no "vote kick" feature, I've witnessed a lot of hackers (via Aimbot or 10th prestige level 70s) and there is no way to get rid of them! You just have to call them out and hope they leave.

I've only been playing for the weekend, but I have yet to encounter any lag myself.  I've had host migration happen to me once, it took about 25 seconds, fortunately for me I was in the clear when it happened. I wondered if any one was left staring at the other team when it happened.

While I feel it is fine, dedicated servers would be ideal. Not needing to aim ahead of people that are moving would be awesome as the fact that you should be pinging 35-50 you are now pinging atleast 2-3 times that results in something more to be desired. Sure games are matched decently but they aren't always balanced well. I'd love dedicated servers for the reason that they can be restrict items (i.e. Shields) and remove Killstreak or Perk rewards because a deathmatch game like that would be awesome.
 
I've been cutting down recently from the game but dcing from games cause the host loses connection or the host is the best but isn't stable and everyone is spiking from 3 green to 1 orange bar isn't fun either.
 
IW coulda made dedicated servers optional and still can, make them run by IW as well just so people can do what they want.

" I've only been playing for the weekend, but I have yet to encounter any lag myself.  I've had host migration happen to me once, it took about 25 seconds, fortunately for me I was in the clear when it happened. I wondered if any one was left staring at the other team when it happened. "

My  friends who went PC say it's pretty good, but they only do private games.