The latest TU

Games Other Halo
#1

It wasn’t so bad when the BR was made into something actually capable of outgunning the DMR at mid-range, because that’s what the weapon’s role is within the sandbox. It took me a short while to get used to it, but then I was going like +15 or 20 sometimes and it was all great.

Then the next TU came along, and suddenly the AR is capable of outgunning the BR at mid-range. I mean, what the actual hell? Yes, it was a fierce mid-ranger in CE when the reticle didn’t even have to be red to hit Grunts, but this isn’t that game, and the BR should hold that role.

Any logic in melee arbitration also seems to have gone out the window: when I land a hit on a guy, animation and all, I expect that to have some effect on their shield, maybe even kill them if the shield is flaring. But no. I die, 9 times out of 10. I swear that yesterday on Solace, I held down the button to get an assassination on a guy with a Fuel Rod, although half the time that just gives me a melee kill for some reason. But this time? Not even a kill from behind, his shield just popped and he spun around and blew me to hell. I’m tempted to just give up until the next update.

And that’s to say nothing of how utterly arbitrary headshots have been almost the entire time I’ve been playing the game; I can land two or even three on a guy with no shield and it’ll do nothing.

Am I the only one who thinks these changes are ridiculous?

#2

Sounds like your dealing with lag on a majority of those issues.

Also the AR got a 50% reduction of bullet magnatism a long with a cut in spread. Meaning it became a close range monster but at meduim range you have to be fairly accurate with it in order to kill someone faster.

#3

> Sounds like your dealing with lag on a majority of those issues.

Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.

#4

Maybe they took the time to learn the intricacies and complexities of the Assault Rifle instead of trashing it and calling it a “noob weapon”. Because seriously, the Battle Rifle is closer to a noob weapon than the AR due to the ridiculous ease with which it dispatches other players. Also most of the things you describe are probably latency related issues.

#5

> > Sounds like your dealing with lag on a majority of those issues.
>
> Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.

Ever though that the lag might be due to your own Internet connection (i lag whenever someone uses an Internet browser in my house)? Or the fact that the host probably has a horrible connection? Because im pretty sure the netcode in this game is much better than that of previous games.

#6

for the most part, the netcode is better. ITs the lack of filters and host selection that makes it seem worse.

#7

> > > Sounds like your dealing with lag on a majority of those issues.
> >
> > Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.
>
> Ever though that the lag might be due to your own Internet connection (i lag whenever someone uses an Internet browser in my house)? Or the fact that the host probably has a horrible connection? Because im pretty sure the netcode in this game is much better than that of previous games.

I wouldn’t say the part where one blames the game is as much about the net code as it is about matchmaking quality. First of all, because there isn’t a ton you can do to improve networking quality. Lag is lag, part of it consists of processing and transmission delay which can be affected by minimizing the sizes and numbers of packets, but a lot of it is just propagation delay which can’t really be affected. That’s why most of what you call “net code” is really just ways try to hide the latency from the player.

In terms of actual networking efficiency, I doubt there’s much difference between Halo Reach and 4, and both are definitely better than Halo 3. If Halo 4 seems more laggy than Reach, assuming it’s an objective comparison and that actually is the case, it probably has to do with matchmaking quality.

Obviously, the first thing you should always consider before blaming the game is your own connection. But aside from that, bad experiences with lag probably have to do with suboptimal matchmaking, i.e. getting matched with people further away than you should. That, on the other hand, probably has at least partially something to do with the population of the game. In the end, being a player host based game there is only so much that can be done.

#8

> for the most part, the netcode is better. ITs the lack of filters and host selection that makes it seem worse.

I’ve got to disagree on that one. I can count the amount of laggy games I got on Reach with my ten fingers. With Halo 4 it seems like every other game has noticeable lag. I even had more people using the internet back during Reach than I do now.

#9

> It wasn’t so bad when the BR was made into something actually capable of outgunning the DMR at mid-range, because that’s what the weapon’s role is within the sandbox. It took me a short while to get used to it, but then I was going like +15 or 20 sometimes and it was all great.
>
> Then the next TU came along, and suddenly the AR is capable of outgunning the BR at mid-range. I mean, what the actual hell? Yes, it was a fierce mid-ranger in CE when the reticle didn’t even have to be red to hit Grunts, but this isn’t that game, and the BR should hold that role.

All of the weapons tuning took place in the June 3 update. They didn’t spread it out over multiple updates.

And since when was the AR more useful in any situation than a pistol/BR/DMR in previous Halo games? At least now, it’s worth keeping at least as a secondary. All 343i did is make it useful and then balance it by making it require decent aiming.

> Any logic in melee arbitration also seems to have gone out the window: when I land a hit on a guy, animation and all, I expect that to have some effect on their shield, maybe even kill them if the shield is flaring. But no. I die, 9 times out of 10. I swear that yesterday on Solace, I held down the button to get an assassination on a guy with a Fuel Rod, although half the time that just gives me a melee kill for some reason. But this time? Not even a kill from behind, his shield just popped and he spun around and blew me to hell. I’m tempted to just give up until the next update.

Holding down the melee button to assassinate was a Reach feature and does not work in Halo 4. In Halo 4, the game decides whether you get an assassination or beat down, not you. From my experience, this has to do with the angle you approach the other player at: if you’re directly behind, you’ll get an assassination; if you’re at an angle but still behind the player, you’ll get a beat down.

> And that’s to say nothing of how utterly arbitrary headshots have been almost the entire time I’ve been playing the game; I can land two or even three on a guy with no shield and it’ll do nothing.

Honestly, a lot of these issues you’re mentioning sound a lot like lag. If you can go into Theater mode, slow the clip down, and see that you did in fact fire more than once while your reticle was directly over the enemy’s head and it didn’t register, the issue was lag.

There was a very popular film clip in Halo 3 of a guy grabbing a Sniper Rifle and shooting someone who was standing still four times in the head and nothing happened. Just sayin’ the issue may not completely be Halo 4’s fault.

> Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.

So stop playing Big Team. Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo: Reach were all very laggy in Big Team, and it makes sense, because the number of connections to the host are doubled. You get more blackscreens because host is constantly migrating due to players constantly quitting. I guarantee you that you will get less lag playing a populated playlist with 10 or less players.

#10

> > Sounds like your dealing with lag on a majority of those issues.
>
> Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.

That’s H4 for you - Worst multiplayer game I play for Lag and that’s including Halo reach which has a smaller population than H4 does. See :

https://forums.halowaypoint.com/yaf_postsm2567780_Is-Halo-4-s-Netcode-Bogging-Down.aspx#post2567780

if you want to see why hosts selection was also nerfed to make it so much easier for new players so they buy a Gold XBL pass.

The sad part is, they can fix this without changing the game - they need to change the Set Up Servers to pick the best connection per game instead of using “Host History”.

#11

> > for the most part, the netcode is better. ITs the lack of filters and host selection that makes it seem worse.
>
> I’ve got to disagree on that one. I can count the amount of laggy games I got on Reach with my ten fingers. With Halo 4 it seems like every other game has noticeable lag. I even had more people using the internet back during Reach than I do now.

Totally agree.

70% of my H4 1400 War Games are lagged by 0.5+ seconds.

Switched back to Halo Reach ,enabled the “Best Connection” filter and only 5% of my Reach games EVER Lag as bad as H4 does. So If I play 20 games in both, in Reach 1 game will be Lagged as badly as 14 games in H4 - 14 times as many bad laggy games in H4.

And Reach has 500 to 1,300 players in the BTB Lobby, where as H4 had 8,500+ people in BTIS Lobby.

The issue is that H4 uses “Host History” - where as Reach selects the best player for each game, and that can be solved on the Server side without changing the game code - if 343 cares at all.

#12

> > for the most part, the netcode is better. ITs the lack of filters and host selection that makes it seem worse.
>
> I’ve got to disagree on that one. I can count the amount of laggy games I got on Reach with my ten fingers. With Halo 4 it seems like every other game has noticeable lag. I even had more people using the internet back during Reach than I do now.

You can have the best netcode in the world, but if the host sucks it dont matter. If the host has a 400ms lag with packet loss, nothing any game in the world can do to make up for that.

#13

> > Hahaha. I haven’t even started on the visible lag issues yet. I’ve played matches with seven or eight blackscreens, players teleporting everywhere, impossible to hit, and me getting teleported into the line of fire when I’m trying to back away, and getting killed as a result. It’s absolute nonsense.
>
> So stop playing Big Team…

That happened on Haven. I was trying to back away from a firefight and let my buddies take some of the heat, and the game just kept putting me back in the line of fire, and then I died.

Great.

Well, maybe it’s all lag, and to be fair, the gunplay in H4 is sublime when it actually works, easily the best since H3 (which is my favourite game of all time). But it’s not like 3 or Reach were this consistently frustrating. And I had a worse connection back then.

#14

Op, when you are in the pre-game lobby hit x to bring up the player screen. The player on top of that list has host.

Once you find out who has host, check to see where they are from. If they are from another country I would back out of the game before it starts. You’re not going to have fun the majority of the time if the host is a foreigner to you.

Once I learned this I have cut down laggy games drastically.

#15

> > > for the most part, the netcode is better. ITs the lack of filters and host selection that makes it seem worse.
> >
> > I’ve got to disagree on that one. I can count the amount of laggy games I got on Reach with my ten fingers. With Halo 4 it seems like every other game has noticeable lag. I even had more people using the internet back during Reach than I do now.
>
> You can have the best netcode in the world, but if the host sucks it dont matter. If the host has a 400ms lag with packet loss, nothing any game in the world can do to make up for that.

Yes, but they should NEVER have been picked as Host in the first place. This is where H4 falls flat on it’s face - it doesn’t evaluate the current connection of all the players in a match and then select the best (based on upload, download and ping time) - they use Host History and that always favours a new player who doesn’t have a “history”.

So if you had a poor connection and played lots of games - that’s your host history. Upgrade your internet connection to something phenomenal and your host history will prevent you from every being selected as a low latency host. This is dumb.

It’s pretty clear 343 never tested their net code / host selection or any options on anything except local intranet - nor do they care.

#16

and i clearly pointed that out in the original post he replied to. That host selection is what is ultimately borked in this game.

#17

Yep if you don’t four shot it the ar will git yeh. Gotta be on point.

#18

At Mid-Range, I’d take the BR any day.