Stay calm. Count to ten. It will be ok.
Against my better (oh, you in the peanut gallery just hush!) judgment I picked up Halo 3 today, primarily because it’s one of the few titles that support cooperative play. My good friend Daniel has been bugging me with XBL messages to get the game, so I did. Logged in, joined his game along with his soon-to-be brother-in-law (/kick hyphen spammer!) and his wife. Cool! Four player game, let’s see what’s up with Halo 3.
Then I watch in horror as the player list fills with 12 other random XBL “people.” I kid you not, the first ten seconds of the game contained every single negative aspect that is normally associated with XBL “people.” In under five minutes I was seriously considering getting back in the car and returning to Gamestop. I sucked it up and completed the match (don’t want to jeopardize my reputation by having those “people” spam negative comments onto my account), shut off the 360, and walked outside for some fresh air.
There are reasons I don’t play public XBL matches, and those reasons are pretty much embodied by the Halo crowd. Ghetto gaming at its worst.
To be fair, after a cool-down period and dinner, my friend called back and he and I did some co-op play which was better, although laggy as hell. Is that normal for Halo 3? I’ve been in multi-player and co-op matches in other games with full player rosters and they were perfectly smooth. I’ve hosted co-op before for some friends, also very smooth. Daniel and I each tried hosting, and while it was moderately better when I hosted, the bulk of the time it was what I would normally consider unacceptable. Do I need to shut off WPA for Halo 3 to get better latency? Jeez…
Tags: Halo 3, Xbox 360, Xbox 360, Xbox Live
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But, mostly the issue lies with who started the game. If the host has a bad connection, be prepared for some lagginess.
Lets say your friend has a 756 or 1.5 connection and you have a 10Mb connection, you should host.
So many kids login and try to start the games, and then you have major lag.
Also, the multiplayer is full of junk. For example, my 10 year old son plays. We always have to listen to the conversations, but he is intelligent enough to leave the bad mouthers or mute them.
But, people still do not listen, and kill people left and right..
Just imagine an FFA PvP server and you have Halo 3.
(PS: Just wait for Fable 2 or try Crackdown or Kingdom Under Fire…all excellent co-op games)
I tried a console FPS this weekend, Call of Duty 4, at a friends house this weekend. He pretty much slaughtered me only because I’m more of a mouse and keyboard player and not use to the controller way of doing things. I can only imagine how bad it would be if I picked up the game for the Xbox. I’m sure I would be trash talked till the end of my days.
I still don’t have a Gold Live account so I’m safe for now, but at some point I’ll need to learn to play FPS on the console, because thats the wave of the future.
Basically, I feel your pain. lol
Seems sort of silly to have to pay for online play when you’re supplying the bloody bandwidth.
Can you password protect your servers in Halo 3?
Yeah, FPS genre held all the douchebags until WoW came out, then the douchebags moved there. Sad thing is, when it was FPS on computers, you could camp the shit out of said douchebags but in games like WoW? They just sink tons of time into it, level up and raid/arena to get the best gear available so the fights are weighed in their favor
(That said, I still owned a level 70 Arena geared Human Warrior with my level 70 Orc Hunter who was wearing blues and greens - not a single purple - one on one. The guy was so pissed off he tried to corpse camp me - it was in Nagrand and I later died to a group of Alliance… he loved the freeze trap, concussive shot, enraged pet + intimidate, kiting I did on him.)
Oh, I’m fairly horrible with the controller on faster-paced FPS’ anyway, so I tend to prefer those on the PC while on the 360 I prefer something slower and more tactical like the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series, or the Rainbow Six: Vegas ones. I will say the little bit of the Halo 3 campaign I played during co-op, I did like the way they handled the aim assistance. I picked up Battlefield: Bad Company a couple weeks ago and while there is an option for aim assistance, I sure as shit can’t tell that it’s working. With a controller, I can quite literally draw an outline around my target without hitting him once!
I don’t mind a little friendly trash-talking. I do it myself. I even trash-talk the mobs in co-op (or my friends if I turn the tables and whack them once just for the helluvit) but the public XBL people are something else entirely. Ya know, I grew up on FPS and even now unless you’re in a clan, you’re playing public games. But I’d almost go so far to say that XBL is worse than Counter-strike, which is really the only FPS I stopped playing shortly after purchase because of its “community.” Normally on XBL I only play with friends or with the Adult Gaming Enthusiasts gang.
@Smaken: you can set a few options, such as only allowing people on your friends list to join, but not actually going so far as password-protecting it. I’d figure if they knew the password already, they’d be on your friend list.
@Openedge1: I’ve hosted before and played many a game with friends but have never seen anything like this lag. It was often in the area of “seconds per frame.” The public game we played was smooth as silk so either the co-op is flaky or one (or both?) of our connections got wonky. And yeah, Crackdown is awesome in co-op. Another friend and I did that for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.
I never had any lag problems with Halo 3 co-op. I’d join you in a campaign if I hadn’t traded it weeks ago to put money down on a Fable 2 pre-order. You’re welcome to add me for other games, though: my gamertag is hallower1980.
I know what you’re talking about, online players trash-talking in ways you don’t hear in face-to-face sports. I only really enjoy competitive multiplayer with friends, and even then I prefer co-op. The one exception is Call of Duty 4, which is a blast in multiplayer.
And at the rate CoW is growing, we might even be able one day to set up some 12-on-12 CoD4 matches with no one but friends.
I got COD4 on Steam. Loved the campaign, but the multiplayer was the same brain-dead run-and-gun small skirmishes on small maps I did a decade ago. Looked damn pretty, but the game itself? Been there, done that.
I also made the mistake (or maybe it will pan out later?) of getting Frontlines for the PC. Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been better off getting the 360 version.
But yeah, send me an invite Aaron, my gamertag is Talyn328. That would actually be cool if we had enough CoW guys to make our own XBL clan and take the guild multi-platform and multi-game. I know Hud and Bildo both have 360’s too; no idea about anyone else.