Region Lock turn it on or turn it off? Whether or not you’re for or against this topic question, the imminent founding drive and goal behind ARENA (ranked) remains flawed and at fault, in it’s current iteration. Above all else ARENA (ranked) is founded on equality, where it comes down to prominent skill and other aspects well within the grounds of the player’s (user) power.
ARENA (social) and WARZONE games although suffer from the same issue, are slightly relieved of overwhelming unfairness as the fairness is not as apparent in social games, due to the balancing of less, like and more skilled players.
The main fault is definitely the cross-region ping which creates a slight latency with input registration which in high-end competitive games (Diamond, Onyx, Champion) means that the whole game is played with the odds stacked against you. I believe the ping per region is something akin to:
- Americans (United States) 30 - 50ms - Europeans 120 - 150ms - Oceania (ANZ) 250 - 300msWe as player need to find the best alternative and offer the solution the 343 Industries, Xbox and Microsoft. Could it possibly be personal search parameters to turn region lock on or off? Could we possibly have “optimal region times” that force region lock on, and then region lock is off for the duration of the not so optimal times? Could we possibly go back to host servers (player host)? Could we possibly see population counts per playlist?
Who knows the choice is in the air?
Example of Input Registration Latency (Ping) - this clearly should of been a beat down… I clearly should not of had to chase down the kill?
343i are in a lose/lose situation with the ANZ region on this topic. Region lock on = next to no games in Arena. Region lock off = Arena games, but at high latency.
Even during peak AUS times you are far more likely to find USA players… There is just so many of them when compared to our small player population.
Thinking back to when region lock was enforced, I barely ever found Arena games aside from the Team Arena playlist (which is pointless to play solo).
Unless 343i magically comes up with some new cross continent networking technology that eliminates latency issues and makes everybody all over the world feel like they are playing under LAN conditions, this will continue to be complained about.
i WISH they could come up with some new magical cross continent networking or something. being from AUS, playing halo competitively has completely gone out the window. 343 probably don’t care or understand. Playing at high latency isn’t completely unplayable but it does make a huge difference in playing to win and gain rank. However, before region lock was lifted i had no issues finding any matches apart from FFA, and even now i still cant find matches in FFA with region lock being lifted. RIP australians
It just seems with each passing season the network connection gets worse for Oceania, in terms of latency… I just wish they could slightly make the European and American players suffer a slight increase in latency and give us a reduction… as in location of the dedicated server… ultimately attempting to balance the ping, making the overall game even but compared to LAN events slower… ie attempt to increase Americans to 120 - 150ms, leave European as is, and reduce Oceania down to 120 -150ms… if we are all using roughly similar ping the latency is less apparent and returns to game to a more even feel, albeit a slightly slower experience.