It doesn’t work…
At the release of Halo 5 we were looking forward to see the end of the era of insufferable peer to peer matches with dedicated servers to provide us with a stable connection and endless enjoyment of competitive gameplay. - Not quite so though.
The concept empirically gives players that live close to the location of a Microsoft Azure server a constant advantage over such that live further away from them. This is all the more so a problem since we don’t have the region lock anymore, allowing intercontinental matchmaking again.
Now all this could have easily be foreseen - it hasn’t been, fair enough. But “without a struggle there can be no progress”. With the qualification for the world championship going on in online matchmaking and Halo taking a step to an internationally respected e-sport let’s not indifferently shrug this issue off. Let the struggle push us to some progress.
Players from the US might not care much, since their quantitative ressources in Microsoft servers are excellent compared to the EU or other regions. (In Europe players with good stats will always come from a location that has a fast connection to the servers in Ireland/UK/Netherlands - you will not find a person wrecking constantly in the South of Italy or Spain.) But even US players will know the occasional unsatisfactory experience when playing on non-US servers…)
How it could work…
When we think of a solution that helps both making competitive matchmaking something that can seriously be regarded as competitive and increase the population of Halo 5 over all, we have several options.
- Give ranked matchmaking a list of servers players can choose from, as in any other nameworthy competitive shooter. Now that we have social slayer playlists we can let take off ranked matchmaking to its full potential. - Consider bringing back peer to peer, with a half time giving one side the host advantage before and the other side in the second half. (That would already be a progressive concept when keeping dedicated servers.) - Finally increase the number of servers around the world. (Special tip for Microsoft: they might use a geographical map to find out where servers should be settled in the infrastructure of the internet instead of sticking with the tax-free countries just.) This would at least lower the unequal ping times intracontinentally. - Use inbuilt ping delay on those closer to the server to level the latency difference with other participating players. (The argument that people who constantly have a good connection will not accept to suffer this delay, because thus they will not get used to a certain way of playing is invalid considering that this is already the case for the mass of people that in fact do face different conditions of shot/action registration, moving speed etc. in every match.)Competitive means equal conditions for everybody, as close as we can get.
We appreciate a respond.
As an American, I’d just like to say screw the EU and Asia.
On a serious note, if you or anyone else really want a return to any kind of P2P MM’ing settings, you’re just wrong and I’ll leave it at that.
I do think MS should invest in more servers in other parts of the world. Especially Mexico and other parts of Central America, Every time I see someone lagging really, really bad … that’s where they seem to be from.
What if they could see the location of some one and nerf their connection if they live really close. The US and near by would get a small nerf.
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> As an American, I’d just like to say screw the EU and Asia.
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> I’m joking
> … maybe.
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> On a serious note, if you or anyone else really want a return to any kind of P2P MM’ing settings, you’re just wrong and I’ll leave it at that.
That’s the kind of answers I expected from Americans. Really elaborate arguments you bring up there…
P2p is garbage, selecting servers would lead to more boosting than there already is. Which leaves acquiring more servers, which would probably cost money. For a game that’s only getting older I don’t really see Microsoft spending money on it. But who knows? Maybe Christmas and all the tournament hype will keep the game alive and they’ll give us more servers? It would be the best option of the three in my opinion.
Today I had a spree of focused games I managed to become top scorer every game but if you compare it to expanded I’m near the bottom never going above 7th place.
It’s really irritating cause every thing I learned playing on focused doesn’t work at all on expanded and means that I start to forget how to do the things I was doing.
If I can play a few games of focused I can comfortably pull off a ninja or at least not get killed trying.
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> > 2533274820921394;2:
> > As an American, I’d just like to say screw the EU and Asia.
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> > I’m joking
> > … maybe.
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> > On a serious note, if you or anyone else really want a return to any kind of P2P MM’ing settings, you’re just wrong and I’ll leave it at that.
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> That’s the answers I expected from Americans. Really elaborate arguments you bring up there…
Have you played Destiny lately? That’s all the argument anyone needs against using P2P MM’ing.
Other than establishing new servers, peer to peer is the only solution I can realistically see happening. Like others have stated, a server browser may create opportunities for cheating. Peer to peer has its own drawbacks, but I’d take them over high ping any day.
Op I totally get what your saying. Should this game have selectable servers based on ping? Yes! Should they add more servers or rent data centers to even them out properly for gaming? Yes! The bottom line is MS should let H5 use servers all over the world even at locations that aren’t MS locations. Make no mistake region lock was a good idea but once it was lifted that was a killer for the game… What I find very strange is the whole purpose to having dedicated servers is being able to access them and know what one we are on. That is how one gets away from the host advantage. But what we have now is unpredictable. We have no idea what server we are on currently which just defeats the whole purpose of dedicated servers. Even when using Focus I get players thousand of miles away! How well do you think that would perform! LOL.
At the end of the day if you want to get Halo to grow you have to get the game to play better as a whole for more players. We are nowhere near that at the moment…
Zippy.
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> Have you played Destiny lately? That’s all the argument anyone needs against using P2P MM’ing.
The idea of bringing back peer to peer goes with introducing half times to change hosts. Read an argument and properly adress it. - Half times should as well be applied with dedicated servers.
[I added a further thought. See OP.]