I haven’t been playing as much Halo Infinite over the last few weeks for many reasons (mainly due to desync issues and being bored of the game), however since the Geo Filter patch I have been maintaining a record of my game connections and also decided to record Tactical Ops variants due to the many complaints on here about weapon variety and associated challenges.
For the record, I am based in the UK and these games have been played on Xbox One X and Xbox Series X. This is obviously my personal experience so others may not experience the same, however I believe the test sample is substantial enough to determine patterns for my experience. Here are the results:
SERVER LOCATIONS:
Games played (11/2/22 - 15/3/22)
Total games played: 150
EU servers: 129 (86%)
US servers: 21 (14%)
SPECIFIC SERVER LOCATION DISTRIBUTION AND PING:
Amsterdam (18ms): 119 (79.3%)
Washington DC (83ms): 13 (8.7%)
Dublin (18ms): 10 (6.7%)
Dallas (113ms): 6 (4%)
Los Angeles (153ms): 2 (1.3%)
Note1: from my personal experience, desync is prevalent and noticeable in all games regardless of server location, and I can confidently make the statement that desync is not related to my ping in game; however I wouldn’t rule out that desync could be caused by players connecting from further away (as an example and as you will see from above, I have connected to US servers in 14% of my games so I could be causing desync for US players in those lobbies).
Note2: playing on US servers is not an enjoyable experience even if it is only 14% of my games played. In addition to desync issues, there is clear latency and lag which causes additional hit reg issues. It’s not a fun experience and I genuinely feel bad for players in remote locations that have reported that they experience ping higher than 200ms.
TACTICAL OPS VARIANTS (10/3/22 - 15/3/22):
Total game played: 31
Battle Rifle: 13 (41.9%)
Sidekick: 10 (32.3%)
Mangler: 8 (25.8%)
TACTICAL OPS VARIANT DISTRIBUTION:
SK
MG
BR
MG
BR
SK
BR
BR
BR
SK
BR
BR
MG
SK
SK
BR
MG
MG
BR
SK
BR
BR
SK
BR
SK
SK
MG
BR
SK
MG
MG
Note3: In my experience I do not see a pattern to the Tactical Ops variants, however it was weighted slightly more to the BR (which is absolutely fine with me, however approx 58% of my games were with the terrible Sidekick and Mangler variants).
Note4: Whilst it is infuriating that Tactical Ops variants sometimes appear to intentionally avoid challenge criteria, I believe that it is random…however my distribution does show that a couple of times the longest gap between variants was for the Mangler at 9 games (which equates to approx 90 minutes of game time between games). Is this coincidence that this happens with the Ultimate Challenge being for Mangler kills? I’ll let the conspiracy theorists discuss that one.
Please let me know if you would look any more specific information on these stats.