Robot Pants said:
Never made sense they didn't put this in 2 or 3. It's THE best part of Gears for me. This song got my nips hard. My online buddies and I always sound out the duna na na na na part when one of us comes back from AFK or just signs on to jump into party chat.
As for the the first subject of dedicated servers I see discussed I think I've just come to the conclusion that the reason I get this bad of an experience is thanks to my location of being in central USA. It's often like this with games that my competition found in matches from the states around me is just the worst of the worst, and the internet available to people in this section of the USA is awful. In Street Fighter 4 when I get my laggy matches I'll look at locations and it's always surprising to me that most of them are from people living near me rather than people on either coast. Their play style is always the absolute worst too. No combos, jump back fireball, always uppercut on wake up, etc.
This is probably the reason when the dedi's are down it's so bad for me. They are almost ALL SOS users to begin with, and if dedi's go down then their trash connections might get snatched up as host, which just turns the game to crap. My friend from Alaska always pointed this out to me in other games, and I think he might be right.
Is there a dedicated server for the central states, the west coast, and east coast?
Now on to the SOS. It's easy to counter? ON PAPER SURE! I mean everything is easy to counter on paper, but the fact is your ideal situation is NOT going to be what plays out. The situation that caused me to chuck a controller yesterday was this:
I'm at the place where nades spawn at Trashball. I'm where the nades pop, he's down one of the hallways with a SOS. He rushes me, so I start unloading Lancer as he just side rolls towards me and I'm backing up. He pops to another wall and shoots at that wall, and I'm basically 270 degrees the other way behind him and he gets the kill.
What did I do wrong? I used my rifle. I backed off. What did he do right? Nothing. He rushed a rifle user down a hallway for easy bullets to hit him, he wall hopped to the wrong wall not close to me, and he did NOT aim in the right direction. Yet what was the result? He got rewarded for hitting the right trigger.
Let's look at a map like Hotel. TDM, 5 SOS users on the other team. Where should you go? The answer is outside. If you go inside you will probably lose the fight for the torque, and the digger/boom will help you a lot more to flush out corner campers. However, can you count all the corners they can camp in there? It's a lot. So what does this do to movement? Cripples it. I am now forced to check EVERY corner. ALL of them. Even then if they get a good corner position you can't see them sticking out or their shadow, and then you going around results in death. Someone camping around a corner like that with Gnasher is NOT a guaranteed kill like the SOS is. In old Gears games if someone camped a corner with Gnasher you guys were at a 50-50. The person willing to engage the camper wasn't auto screwed, because with a good angle wall slide, it could result in the camper missing their shot, and BOOM you have a shotgun battle to tackle. With the SOS you don't get this, your good angle slides won't matter due to it's arc, range, and insta kill powers.
Simply put, a SOS user around a corner results in you having to give up on him and going to a different part of the map. No other weapon you spawn with can do this. Power weapons should have this kind of effect. You should be afraid of boomers, torque, diggers, etc near you, but spawn weapons being able to control map space like that is idiotic.
Let me guess, you want to say, go with a buddy? You both run the risk of dying thanks to its arc. Or one of you will die and the other lives. What happens then? The SOS user will shoot and run. With so much cover he can make his daring escape more often than not.
What has this changed to the overall flow of combat? Encouraged a shit ton of campers. People with their buffed up rifles now on Gridlock willingly go up to towers to camp so they can avoid SOS users. Too many games boil down to people around corners, and people moving not far from spawn with rifles. An entire team holding down the top of Thrashball is a fight you cannot win.
If this is the future of Gears of War, then count me out. The last 5 years was not about corners and cowering like a bitch, nor was it about shooting 1 shot, then running away. Don't get me wrong though, I still stand by this game being one of the best console experiences out there, if not the best, but my luck for finding fun games is shitty it seems.
Also, to those defending the SOS. Let's hear some examples of what it ADDS to the game. What is it about this weapon that makes this game funner to play ? I'd love to hear this.
