Why do games take so long to start in Big Team Slayer? This are some typical scenarios:
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Spend a long time searching for players. Watch “Incoming” in tiles other than people in my party pulse for a long time, then disappear and search starts over.
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Start with players from previous game. A few leave. There are enough to start a match, but Halo 4 starts searching for a few more to replace those who left. Searching takes a long time, so people get tired of waiting and start leaving. The longer it searches the more people leave because they’ve gotten tired of waiting and given up.
I have seen cases where Halo 4 spent minutes searching for players to increase the number of players from 12 to 16, but in the end started the game with 10 players.
I thought one of the good things about join-in-progress was that it allows games to start with less than full teams. So why won’t Halo 4 immediately start new games when there are enough people left from the last game to do so?
I’ve seen it take several minutes to start a new game even when there are 50,000 people in the playlist. Sometimes I give up and quit playing solely because I’m tired of wasting so much time watching “Searching for Player” and “incoming” pulsing instead of actually playing.
I expect it to take a little longer to come up with 16 versus 8 or 10, but this is inexcusable given that games can start with less than full teams.
Could it possibly be… Lag?
I’ve been hearing that the MM is longer than Reach or Halo 3, but apparently I’ve had good luck so far. My BTB games in H4 are taking just about as long as Grifball in Reach.
I don’t know what to tell you.
Searching with a full team in BTB is a joke. It takes forever to find a match.
> I’ve been hearing that the MM is longer than Reach or Halo 3
By all reasoning it should be faster if only because starting games with less than full teams isn’t something to be avoided at all costs.
The current implementation creates a vicious circle. People leave because they got tired of waiting, which makes things worse. It should just start games as soon as it can find 12 people and add teammates to each team equally as it can find them.
> It should just start games as soon as it can find 12 people and add teammates to each team equally as it can find them.
When you highlight a gametype, the “specs” of the game include “minimum number of players”. I thought that’s what that meant- starting a game without a full lobby. Maybe not?
It’s just like Halo 3 ranked Big Team battle (before they cut that playlist). Search times got longer and longer and getting to say lvl 20 was a huge feat in itself because with so many players playing it was hard to rank up. Same with Squad slayer. I played alone for the most part and got up to 43-45. Sometimes it would take anywhere from 10-30 mins to find a game!
This is what will slowly start to happen in every playlists as trueskill sorts players up. Higher skilled players are going to have annoyingly longer search times than lesser skilled players as trueskill puts everyone in their skill level divisions and the player population continues to decrease over time. Thats the main factor thats going to make search time annoyingly terrible.
I don’t think 343 will keep this tight trueskill for long if it becomes an increasing issue with search times. JIP ruins a lot of that as well making BTB games start really uneven. I’ve even been in BTB games where one team didn’t even get extra players to join in later. It’s like the system broke with the high trueskill level since it couldn’t find as many players. Even the few times I was in a full party either A) the game would constantly split my team up, B) take ages to find a game, or C) even after we got split up if we stayed the next game after would be another JIP splitting us again.
When they bring CSR in for the special playlists they should make the current playlists we have more social so search times are faster.