Gui_PT said:
Do you guys usually have lag related problems during matches?
I always pick "Good Connection" so I only have lag problems half the time :lol
Problem is that it takes forever to get a match started
I only very rarely have obviously
laggy games, where everyone's connections are yellow or red and players are warping around or disappearing, and usually when that happens it's a problem my end, or is something everyone is experiencing.
That said, I would estimate 70-95% of my games suffer from Transatlantic latency. Bungie can't help this, I appreciate. There is a price to be paid for networking across an ocean, and it seems to be a minimum of 100ms tacked onto your ping. And while it infuriates the
fuck out of me that Xbox Live games only show bars and not actual ping numbers, I imagine it's a Microsoft directive.
Basically, the experience is that every single thing I do in most games of Halo is between one-eighth and one-fifth of a second off the pace of what's "actually" happening. Every BR duel. Every beatdown attempt. Every sniper shot. Everything. It's hard to appreciate just how consistently enraging this can be until you've played a game of Grifball like this, and the hammer just
won't work.
(Part of the reason I went on extended binges of both Left 4 Dead games is because I can play it on dedicated servers with UK & Ireland-based friends and that feels
awesome.)
But really, there's not much Bungie can do about the realities of intercontinental networking, other than handing out host more "fairly". But since Americans in general have better connections than we do in the UK and Ireland, and because the computers talking to those connections to find out how good they are are likely based in Seattle... Americans get host far, far more often. And, you know, there are more American Halo players in general.
If the new system is better at understanding location and bundling Eurozone players together, that can only be an improvement.