TIPS FOR MATCHMAKING

To the Halo community and 343i,

(If you can’t be bothered to read it all, read the bullet points to get to the main points)

Compared to how it was at the beginning, I would say things have improved around 40% for me and my friends. Sure, there are still a lot of bugs etc to fix, in match making/lobbys/backing out with friends. But I will state the improvements I have legitly seen, and that I’m extremely happy about.

First of all for the first time I have noticed that after you finish a game you can actually stay in the post game lobby and play another match! I get this almost every time which is fantastic.

Secondly, finding a match can still take a while, but I’m finding myself almost saying that happens occasionally now. Which is FANTASTIC. The true max ammount of time I have to wait, when searching by myself, with a friend, or two friends is around 4 minutes. Usually we find one within 1 minute- 2 minute, which as you can imagine has made me and my friends very happy, as recently we’ve actually been able to play multiplayer regularly.

So THANK YOU 343i, for working around the clock to provide us with the server side updates, and I’m very much so looking forward to recieving wednesdays update because I’m confident it will make things even more smoother than you’ve already made things COMPARED to how they used to be. Obviously things have screwed up, that’s obvious - but I stress the fact to everyone that they are simply working on it and things are improving, period.

Me and my friends normally ensure we have our NAT types OPEN every time before we play matchmaking to achieve getting into a game, and if they aren’t, we have a method which may be useful to everyone. I will list it below.
If you want to make your NAT type open, me and my friends normally go to Settings → Network → Test Multiplayer Connection → When it says everything seems to be ok, dont do anything apart from holding down LB, RB, RT, and LT and then it will get your nat info on the right hand side. Wait until it has got the info on your nat, and then ensure that it says something similar to “Your NAT is behind a cone NAT”. If it doesn’t and it says something like “Your NAT is behind a port symetric” or “Your NAT is behind a Port restricted” then simply press b, back to the “Everything seems to be ok” screen, and then repeat the process of holding the bumpers down, and get the nat info, and then hopefully is will say that it’s behind a CONE NAT. Normally when you’ve achieved the results of the “behind a cone nat”, then your port will become open. This doesn’t work for everybody, but in 9/10 cases if you repeat it a couple of times it makes your port open - and I believe this contributes to the connection of multiplayer matches in the Master Chief Collection.

Happy Matchmaking!

^^^^
LET ME KNOW IF THIS WORKS FOR ANYONE.

anyone see this?

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> anyone see this?

Thanks for the tip.

I’ve been using this method over the last few days (getting NAT from moderate to open) & it works every time. I found a Youtube tutorial which guides you through what you mentioned above method - a very easy & quick process.

Great tip, especially for anyone who may be new to Xbox LIVE (or online gaming in general). Knowing to have your NAT open is pretty crucial to really enjoy any online games. Also, I’m glad you’re seeing improvements! I wish I could say the same, though. Over the last day and a half, searching for any games in any hopper by myself usually equals a “Failure to connect” warning, even before I hit the four minute mark. Searching with two people has generally led to some “okay” results in Big Team Battle, but finding games in Halo 2: Anniversary or any other hopper usually ends in failure. Adding people into the Party (through brute force tactics) usually makes it even worse.

However, when we DO find a game, we’ve been able to get into the next match (as long as everyone stays, and the game isn’t forced to search for more players). Our best streak so far is four. Unfortunately, that also meant getting our teams switched, so that one or two people went on to the other team, effectively ruining the experience.

It’s great that some people are noticing changes, but the game’s still broken. Hopefully the content update on Wednesday makes it playable.