Maybe Player 2 wasn’t pulling his weight, but Player 1 still isn’t very good. There’s a word for the guy who wins exactly 50% of his battles. “Average.” If Player 1 hadn’t been playing at all, the final score would have been 1500-300 when time ran out, an absolutely titanic victory. Whereas if Player 2 hadn’t been playing at all, it would have been a draw.
I think we can agree that low K:D means you’re bad, and low volume can mean you’re bad. As long as we also agree that high volume does not mean you’re good.
I get annoyed when I play with kids who don’t appreciate that every time they die, the other team gets a point. I’ve been in lobbies where someone gloats over his 20-25 game. “Dude, I fucking rocked you. See that? Twenty kills, assholes.” But he was minus five for the game – he actually hurt his team by participating.
(All this, of course, applies only to TDM game modes.)
The triple AAA titles on the 360 don’t suffer from much lag at all, if any. You notice it if the host is downloading porn or something, or if the ping is prohibitively high. There are lag switches and ways to augment it and screw everyone else, but developers and Xbox Live crack down pretty hard on that kind of thing.
The connection bias I was referring to seems to be native to Blops. For some reason, the multiplayer architecture Treyarch has set up prefers West Coast hosts. You don’t notice the same fuzziness in the connection in, say, Modern Warfare 2 or Halo 3 or Halo: Reach unless there are low level shenanigans (something else hogging bandwidth on the host’s connection, for example) or playing against people overseas.
I lean towards this more. Going even with your kills and deaths is solid. It’s average. I have no problem with someone that goes even, but if you’re getting 50 ills and getting 50 deaths, we’re all pissed off at you because you’re playing like an idiot. If you’re 10 and 10 and communicating effectively, that’s perfectly bearable. 50-50 over the course of a handful of games is going to get everyone mysteriously leaving after that.
A hypothetical person that would get 50 kills and 50 deaths isn’t even necessarily a BAD player. Just a stupid one. There’s something to work with, but it’s a chore to work around that.
Disagree. Perhaps they could be more useful, but as long as a player puts up a positive K:D, he is helping. If everyone on your team is 5-2, the match will be slow and boring, but you’ll win it. Final score 3000 to 1200.
A 5-2 player is useful because, amongst other reasons, they’re taking a roster spot from somebody who is going to be negative.
There’s nothing special about the xbox 360 that can change the nature of computer networking. The host is always going to have 0 ping because his data is just going directly to his own machine. Anyone else is going to be at a disadvantage to that. And typically residential connections are behind way more jumps than a data center or other server hosting facility, which means that your latencies are going to be larger than they are to purpose-built servers.
Now - the disadvantage can become relatively small and hard to notice, but it’s luck of the draw. I’ve played mw2 with its completely shittastic matchmaking system, same as used on the 360, and about 20% of the time (of games where I wasn’t the host) I’d get what I’d classify as a good game. If I were to play mw1, I’d get good games 100% of the time - and not by having an artificial host advantage over anyone else. Lots of players could be on equal footing. Here’s a video showing how host advantage works even on a 4 bar (ugh, really, pings are too complex to figure out?) game.
I suspect a lot of the things you don’t notice are because you’ve never had better, so you don’t understand what it is you’re missing - if peer to peer matchmaking is all you’ve ever experienced, it seems like the norm.
Because at 10-10 there’s still plenty of time to take up the slack. 50-50 essentially cuts the game in half, which reduces the amount of time your teammates have to make up any deficit.
I do also appreciate the depth of your console gaming experience. I’m not telling you that playing over Live is perfect. I am, however, saying that when done right, peer-to-peer is really solid. I haven’t played a lot of games with dedicated servers (most recently, the steaming pile that was Homefront), but that was done horribly and worse than any Halo or Call of Duty.
In this instance, Blops’ online quality is the worst of any Call of Duty and worse than any Halo games, which I’d consider to be the gold standard.
What does console gaming experience have to do with? I know how networks work, I can even design them. There are also plenty of PC games that don’t use dedi servers for when it’s deemed unnecesary like say borderlands with 4 player coop. I’m just saying you can’t get around the inferior nature of hosting games on someone’s residential connection on their machine - both in that they always get an advantage, and that their connection is certainly not ideal to be hosting that sort of thing.
Again, that’s not accurate. Someone sitting in one area, influencing the spawn, sometimes prohibitively, just going 5-2 is not helping. A team of 6 people going 5-2 is 30-12. What about the rest of the game?
Then the timer runs out. In TDM, a kill is a point for your team, a death is a point for the other team. If you kill more than you die, even if you’re a low score per minute camping asshole, you’re still going to win - how could you lose? You just might win after the timer runs out rather than racing to the score limit.
I have a 360, and I’ve played on live before - I just don’t know why you think it’s relevant to the discussion of whether or not a player hosting a game confers an advantage to that player - it would do so on any platform. You said most xbox games don’t have that connection bias, as if the xbox somehow magically changed the rules of networking.
That’s true, at least as far as the first part goes. There is a time limit. The problem comes with having an entire team that’s disciplined enough to camp and wait.
Again, the connection bias I was talking about was Blops only, with regards to West Coast hosts.
I have no idea why or how it would systematically prefer west coast hosts, that sounds strange. You’d think if they were going to deliberately build in a geographic component to evaluating who was host, they’d favor people from the center of the continent.
No, no, and yes. The care package will drop wherever the helicopter gets shot down. The best way to do it is a SAM turret, and if your opponent calls in the care package and it happens to come over the SAM turret at the edge of a map, the care package won’t even be retrievable.
Also, when you hear they have a chopper gunner or something like that coming in, find out what side it’s coming on and get the launcher ready. You can lock onto it before it’s even firing or over the field of play. If your team works together, you can take it down before it even fires a shot.