It’s come to a head tonight. Myself and my UK party are having horrible fluctuating lag in every single match we enter. Sorry, but what the HELL is going on?!
Seriously 343i, how long does it take you, um, learn your netcode skills…?
Hate to be the negative nancy, but are you sure that YOU’RE not the one lagging (or someone in your party)?
Every time I see a post about lag, I have to sit back and wonder; I get lag maybe 1 out of, oh, 200 games.
Typically, as soon as the offending person drops out, the problem goes away.
Do you get lag in custom games where it’s everyone in the UK? What is your Ping/Jitter typically at? (pingtest.net)
I’d recommend doing pingtest.net on three or four American servers from where you are, and seeing what your ping/jitter is at. I typically get 120ms ping to the uk, with 5ms jitter.
Many times, when people have bothered testing, they’ve found out that their Download is great, but their ping is in the 300+ range, and the jitter is 50-100, which will kill your matchmaking.
With you being in the UK, doesn’t help, since the majority of Halo players are going to be us based.
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OP tell your mom to call your internet provider.
The way it works is if someone in the party has the slightest bit of lag then everyone will. That’s how they make spartan ops work so that everyone is seeing the same exact thing. Sort of crappy considering almost every time I play someone is lagging but I honestly do not expect much better from $4$i.
Sigh, we play all the time. We also play BF3 and Forza, where we have no problems. Between the three of us we have a combined 148mb broadband connection.
It’s not our connections at fault. Comprende?
Every single match sees fluctuating yellow and red bars tonight. Something is wrong.
Dude, If Microsoft and 343i just dropped some money on ded servers it would end all these issues.
Quint,
your response actually makes it seem that you know even less about internet than what you probably do.
Your “combined 148 mb connection” is a useless measure; download speed doesn’t affect anyone as much as upload/ping, and I can’t even fathom why you’re bothering to bring in the “combined” nonsense.
Download speed is not going to be an issue; if you have broadband internet, your download is more than what Halo, or any MM game, uses.
Upload is more important; I’ve heard of people with 25Mbit download and .5 upload… which CAN be eaten up by a MM game if anybody else is on the network.
Beyond that, Jitter/Ping is MUCH more important than those for FPS games.
Do you always play with your mates? Does the problem go away if you join a game by yourself without your mates? If just one of your mates has a crappy connection, and you’re in a party with them, your game is going to suffer. It might be that they are actually supposed to have a good connection: but maybe their modem is dying, their ISP is having routing issues, or heck, their wireless network is getting interference (another source of lag, dropped packets from wireless networks)
Does the lag go away at certain times of day? (For example, if you play at 11:00 PM does it get better)? If you have cable internet, your internet might be affected by everyone else coming home and doing stuff (happens where I live all the time, I just know for the past three years to not game between 1700 and 1800.
I could go on and on man, but here’s the thing that gets me: you’re saying every game you play has lag. I can remember five games I’ve played out of nearly 1000 that I’ve seen lag (outside of the lag spikes you see when a host quits).
I believe that you have lag. I’m doubting that it’s all just the fault of the game. I have lots of co-workers who play, and my own mates online, and I’ve never heard of complaints of lag except on the forums. (And, ironically, all of them say “my connection is good” without any actual troubleshooting to confirm that it actually is good). Just because two other games work okay, doesn’t mean that your internet connection is absolved from any scrutiny.
Okay then, the assumption on my part was that people would safely assume that with those sorts of high quality connections we would almost certainly have perfectly adequate u/l speeds. As it happens, we have more than adequate upload speeds; we in fact have good u/l speeds. I have 6mb, personally. My friend who has 79mb d/l has even faster u/l than I.
I understand latency, I’ve been online gaming for ten years. I understand the numerous variables in play.
What I’m saying here in this thread is this is a Halo 4-centric issue for us. I’m not making it up, I’ve considered the possibilities, the potential causes. Fluctuating latency bars have not been evident in Halo at this consistency since launch. Something is wrong.
It’s actually gotten to the point that a badly connected match is now predictable even while still in the lobby. How? Because in Infinity Slayer we are experiencing seriously extended search times. A first, for us (IS is normally rapid). Even when the matchup is complete, each stage of the match preparation, such as map voting etc etc, is taking longer than normal, like there’s a hold up, a delay. When the match finally gets underway? Yep, it’s a lag-fest. It seems like we aren’t being matched with local players at all.
> Dude, If Microsoft and 343i just dropped some money on ded servers it would end all these issues.
Exaclty.
> Yep, it’s a lag-fest. *It seems like we aren’t being matched with local players at all.
[/quote]
*
>
> And as I said, that right there is likely your problem, as well as having poor state-side ping/jitter.
>
> Halo is played predominantly in the US/Canada, which means that, yes, statistically, the system can’t always put you with players in the UK; you’re statistically going to be playing people in Canada/USA.
>
> I’d be interested to see how “great” your internet connection is once you start doing a speedtest/pingtest to US/Canada-based servers.
I agree with OP on this one.
Halo 4 just gets random, unexplainable lag sometimes.
If you dislike lag OP play another game.
Halo 4 has garbage networking and constantly matches international players even in peak local hours when there’s plenty of geographically closer matchups to choose from.
Even the prefer good connection filter from prior Halo games would frequently match players with 200ms+ of latency between them.
> The way it works is if someone in the party has the slightest bit of lag then everyone will. That’s how they make spartan ops work so that everyone is seeing the same exact thing.
That only applies to Campaign and Spartan Ops. Matchmaking uses an asynchronous netcode, which doesn’t behave in the manner you describe unless the host is the one lagging.
> > Yep, it’s a lag-fest. *It seems like we aren’t being matched with local players at all.
[/quote]
*
> >
> > And as I said, that right there is likely your problem, as well as having poor state-side ping/jitter.
> >
> > Halo is played predominantly in the US/Canada, which means that, yes, statistically, the system can’t always put you with players in the UK; you’re statistically going to be playing people in Canada/USA.
> >
> > I’d be interested to see how “great” your internet connection is once you start doing a speedtest/pingtest to US/Canada-based servers.
>
> You’ve just basically repeated what I already said. Why on earth should I ever need to ping test US/Canada based servers? Of course a British based service is going to ‘lose points’ under those conditions, it’s common sense. So what’s your point?
>
> “Statistics” have nothing to do with it, you’re pulling that out of thin air.
>
> The actual point of this discussion and solution to localisation issues would be to enforce strict local search criteria only, selectable by an option in the menu.
>
> There are plenty of European based Halo players to justify this move. PLENTY.
>
> Frankly, I’d be perfectly happy to never have to play on a US/Canadian based server ever again. But apparently that isn’t allowed.
> There are plenty of European based Halo players to justify this move. PLENTY.
Europe apparently isn’t a big enough market to cater for.
As an Australian I find this game consistently awful because it will frequently match match me with international players.
It would be quite the -Yoink!- to be from Europe and get some playable matches outweighted by the majority of matches on American host.
This game was a joke on launch, I was constantly being placed on 250ms+ Californian hosts where nothing registered period at times. You know it’s bad when you can’t even camp and kill noobs with the Boltshot because neither it nor the follow up melee register.
Lol! “It can’t be our fault, its the netcode!!!”
I must have been blessed with a copy of H4 with impeccable netcode. Lucky me.
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Lucky you indeed. Thank you for your moronic contribution.
Anyway, it was better tonight. Hopefully whatever was at fault has been remedied.
> I must have been blessed with a copy of H4 with impeccable netcode. Lucky me.
You’re probably pulling host and giving everyone else crap connections, lucky you.
When players on 3 and 4G wireless connections are pulling host you know this games networking is -Yoinked!-.