We Can Do Better!
It starts with you and your in game actions. I ask players to bring honour and sportsmanship back to Halo 4 multiplayer. It WILL make the world of difference to everyone’s game experience.
TL;DR
Overall so much of the game experience relies on what the players or teams put in more so than the game mechanics or technology or skill matching or anything in the game engine or networking code. So many of the complaints here stem from this very aspect.
Taking a page out of the recent Bungie video comment about Halo spawning teabagging elitism over community kinship I looked over my games last night and once again realised what I have always known about online multiplayer gaming.
The quality of your game experience has more to do with player actions, quitting, griefing, boosting, statistics padding, regular teams vs. randoms, objective holding and all the wonderful traits of online multiplayer games than the game itself. This is above 343i settings or playlists, the game is what we make of it.
We all know Halo 4 War Games is far more fun in a team of your mates than playing solo. However I feel we don’t recognise this enough and translate this into how we ourselves play the game. When I play with regular friends we may hold an objective for 1 minute or so but we finish a game if we’re obliterating the other team, sure we play on Aussie host for a minute or two but we don’t objective hold for statistics nor do we do that for 10+ minutes.
You want rank back in game on Halo 4, you have to earn it now. After Halo 2, 3 & Reach all having their share in creating these undesirable community traits we have to work, as a community, to earn the in game ranks back.
I’ve done a little summary of some less than desirable games and some quality games from last night for reference. Next time you are playing ask yourself am I contributing to the fun or competition of the game overall? Am I being selfish for silly statistics padding? Am I enjoying the game because I had a close challenging match? Even when you play alone or in your regular team/friends I ask you to consider how you play and participate to the online Halo 4 multiplayer quality. We Can Do Better and it starts with you and your in game actions.
Game 1 -
Somehow this game was not recorded, why? A partied up team of Aussies (I’m Australian too) backed out before the game even started as 5v5. They did this because other players on my team were from the UK and/or Italy. Silly as they’re a team of 5 Aussies and I’m 1 of 2 other Aussies on the enemy team. Likely the host would have been Australian anyhow. So this leads me to believe they didn’t like the voted for option as that’s when they left the game, during vote selection. We on the enemy team were left to start a game that finished as soon as it loaded. It’s not in my history but it happened just like that.
Game 2 -
The partied up Aussie team from Game 1 get matched up with me as a single random once again. How do they play? Just as you’d expect they get host and setup a regular spawn killing, kill farming and flag holding game for the entire duration purposefully getting up 4-0 and just annihilating Join In Progress players, mostly we were stuck with myself and 1 other, we also had AFK’ers on our team. I don’t blame them really, I like when a game has Aussie host too but I never spawn kill like this when it’s so lopsided, why statistic pad when the game is not enjoyable or skilful when winning or losing?
Game 3 -
So I switch to the NEW doubles playlist thinking less reliant on team mates. Similar thing happens, the game loads up and one player is AFK immediately, who also quits a few minutes into the game. So my team mate and I simply run around an empty map looking for the solo player to finish the game as quick as we can.
Game 4 -
I head back to CTF, which I enjoy. Once again quitters drop out as soon as we start getting a lead in the game 1-0. Some players JiP in but leave as they don’t want to start 2-0 etc.
Game 5 -
This was a well matched game, it started 5v5, no one quit and no one had to JiP in either. This is the sort of community I enjoy playing with, irrespective of the skill or team matching or classic vs. Infinity settings. No one quit despite the game half way through becoming our team starting to win more of the objective flag captures. Even though the losing team were racking up more kills than us.
Just for reference I play some nights as a single random and some nights in a party of 5-12 regular friends. We usually play as 6-8 in a party. I’ve played since Halo CE, I have multiple 50’s in Halo 3 ranked and I enjoy the new Halo 4 settings as well. I’m happy we have more variation with Halo 4 these and future days to cater for BOTH Infinity and Classic variants.