Xbox Gaming in South Africa

Developers tend to forget that there's gamers outside of the United States, especially when putting together a matchmaking system. The result is high latency games where the host is on the other side of the world, and it leaves many players having to arrange local games beforehand to ensure a decent connection. This, however, looks set to change, at least for Call of Duty players, as Treyarch's Josh Olin has confirmed with NowGamer that Call of Duty: Black Ops "will enable matchmaking with people in the local area."

While games such as Modern Warfare 2 have started to take ping responses into account, the problem of high latency persists for local players as the server determining your latency is once again located in the US or UK. Hopefully we'll see a region/country select option in Black Ops, which should help improve local matching.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is set to take over the gaming world on 9 November.