I bought a brand spanking new Xbox One, a new monitor, upgraded my internet to fibre optic, and I even dumped my then girlfriend and sent her packing back to England, all for … wait for it… …
The launch of The Master Chief Collection.Why do all this you may ask? For Halo 3. My favourite game of all time, and before you Halo 2 guys start hating automatically I had a PlayStation 2 back in the day so I couldn’t really play Halo 2 only at friends’ houses. (Edit: and the girl and I had other problems as well before you all jump to conclusions) Halo 3 brought me so much joy for many years, there were a tonne of different communities involved in just this game for example; Montage Editors, Forgers, Machinima Creators, Screenshot … uh, I guess you’d call them artists? MLG community, Social community, even a full group of people dedicated to just hiding in matchmaking; HLG plus many more that I can’t be bothered to list … my point is that the player base was so diverse and creative that it dramatically added to the lifespan of the game. Populations stayed high for years after launch.
We’ll come back to the MCC in just a minute but first I’d like to briefly say that I did not enjoy Halo Reach or Halo 4, the reasons why I didn’t enjoy these games is quite frankly they were far too different from the Halo I’d experienced… I wish Bungie had just added to Halo 3’s NEAR perfect gameplay instead of trying to change everything possible for the sake of a new shiny appearance, anyway without going into a massive rant about Halo 4. I could see that the fanbase of Halo was dwindling, MLG dropped Halo and a lot of pro players moved to COD. I went back to Halo 3 and spent my days making alt accounts and playing with other like minded people that couldn’t stand the newer games.
I remember hearing the news that Halo 2 and Halo 3 were included in the MCC with DEDICATED SERVERS and 60FPS! I was so excited maybe Halo 3 will be a huge game on Xbox again? So rewind to the beginning of this thread, it’s November 11th 2014, I’m sitting at my desk with my new gaming monitor, my new Xbox and the MCC has finally installed, ready to ‘no life it’ for the foreseeable future and the game has major problems; connection issues, glitchy menus, achievements not working, a non-existent ranking system, framerate issues and many more problems that have been complained about for many months now.
Day 1, I let it slide even though I was pretty angry but I said to myself that an update would come and all would be well… Yes the updates did come eventually but by that time the game was long dead and the vast majority of people had moved on and most people in matchmaking had clan tags that said certain things about certain game developers and I completely agreed with what was said on those tags if you’ve ever played the MCC you’d know what I’m saying.
Fast forward to Halo 5, why did I buy another Halo game? I vowed after the MCC that I would not be fooled again however after seeing that Halo 5 was more competitive focused my interest was peaked and I was chasing the dragon so to speak… forever searching for the same buzz that I got from Halo 3.
Halo 5: Guardians… what remains of the once massive halo community is now divided on every issue mainly because the game has changed so much over the years and the population is now a drop in the bucket compared to previous titles however the gameplay is solid, the weapons for the most part are balanced, the graphics admittedly could be better and there is few flaws here and there but compared to the titles that I hated, this game definitely gives me a similar feeling to 3. Which I love.
The problem with Halo 5 for me is that the EU community is just not there and the server quality is just awful it’s so infuriating to me because like I said the gameplay is solid and when I played the game on LAN (or private server whatever) at HCS in London the game felt truly incredible and in 2016 it is certainly not unknown for a game to have great online connection as well such as Titanfall, Battlefield etc. In my humble opinion a game cannot be truly competitive without a stable connection between players. The amount of times I’ve seen the server speed up then slow down or people lagging out is just unacceptable in this day and age, I thought these server hiccups would’ve been ironed out months ago but it seems the server problems are just getting worse and worse as the population decreases.
When Region lock was implemented in EU after campaigning for MONTHS on the dedicated servers EU thread for SELECTABLE servers I was truly having a great gaming experience I never felt robbed of kills or seen many lag spikes on the servers it felt very close to LAN and I’m not exaggerating in the slightest (I even wrote a thank you thread to 343i for this update) ,however this has now created another problem for EU many want to play with US players as because the population is so low people are struggling to find matches especially at higher ranks. Over the past 4 days the connection has been unbearable when I finally get in a game the connection is unstable it’s not high pings any more it’s just the overall quality of the server is somewhat jumpy and Spartans are now moving extremely frantically? After spending so much of my time trying to get through to 343i to fix the server issues. I have now came to the conclusion that it’s too late for EU as by the time anything decent has been implemented 343i will then be forced to revert region lock and the competitive nature of the game will infact be ruined.
I should have done this at Reach, but I think it’s time for me to move on to greener pastures, I may still play from time to time but nowhere as invested as I once was, I will not spend any further money on REQs, and I might as well sell my Halo 5 Astros as it’s pretty sad just looking at them. I hope 343i takes something from this thread however unlikely that is … and to all that has read this far I salute you!
Thank you and goodbye.
Point proven.