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Perspective of an onlooking Aussie gamer

This entire post is taken from a thread that I started on the Infinity Ward forums on Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:42 pm.

I wrote this up while chatting to three guys over Xfire's built in group-chat VOIP. This was one of their first experiences on Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer together and I thought it would be a good idea to document my opinion after witnessing their experience.

You may say "The game is great, I've not experienced ANY lag", and I've read it before.. But I've been sitting here doing IP lookups and pinging servers that some of my friends are playing on and 9/10 servers (no joke) are located in US with pings of over 150 and sometimes as high as 350 to myself, who lives right next to the exchange and is used to pings of 20-50 in CoD4's dedicated servers, namely Internode/games.on.net.

IF you live in the united states, please take a moment to spare a thought to the people who are being automatically connected to your country because of the faulty matchmaking system which connects players to the location that has the majority of players online at any given time (obviously, mathematically, these are the odds). And so far, most often than not, America..

This game is probably swell over there with your epic internets where you cant tell the difference between a neighbour and someone across the country (especially those who aren't pros wouldnt be able to differentiate without numeric ping as proof). Here, in Australia, WE DO NOT ALL HAVE FAT PIPES OR FIBRE OPTIC CONNECTIONS. Household connections do not get good pings to other countries, let alone do they all handle well such fast reactions as is required for most FPS games to date. For some, this is so even to local servers!

I am sitting here on Xfire VOIP with people from my state, listening to their "WTF"s and "NEW SERVER" pleas.. We then find ourselves discussing what we can call these p2p networks which have replaced our beloved dedicateds, because we do not feel they are worthy of being called our 'servers'.

Even when they try to stay unbiased by pointing out the good things in the game [Excuse me, "Omg, fucking massive ping again!" --wardog, lol], trying to convince me that they're not bashing the game and, I assume, hoping that sometime I shall get it so they have another Aussie to play with, and one more chance at a local connection.

"It's not complete shite, you just have to be patient.."
"You shouldn't have to jump between servers in order to play together!"

Don't even think about clans, I just witnessed the three of them flailing about for 5 minutes just trying to get into a server that they could ALL be on. How the hell is that a good thing? It should not be difficult to play with your friends, let alone other randoms from your own country who have the potential to be your next best gaming friend. This is pathetic!

To be blatantly honest, the best experience they seem to have had was when they abused every foreigner to the point that only Australians were left in the 'group', which then resulted in an Aussie server.. But that only lasted half a round.

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3 comments:

AgentOrange said...

But why be mad at american gamers cause you have bad net in Australia :) I myself live in Norway and so far had pretty good online gameplay so far, no dcs, no lag, no nothing, althou i prefer the old dedicated system, and generally i think matchmaking for games suck, i can at least log on and shoot some pixels in the head from here. The fact that you have bad net in Australia is rather a problem for your government to fix aint it? Anyways, hope stuff works out for you, cause I really start to like this game in multiplayer mode now when i played tru the maps a couple of times. Peace from the west coast of Norway

Niphty said...

I used to play America's Army with some Aussies quite often, and it was amusing playing on BigPond servers and whatnot, experiencing the lag in the other direction; and it DOES suck. Hardcore.
I certainly can understand your plight, but I highly doubt it'll be corrected. They have no plans in place with companies to do hosting, and no plans for plans, so it seems we'll be without that option this iteration.
In all, on a console, the MP is decent. I refused to play it on PC due to the lack of support. Console prices + less features + short campaign = no thanks. If I had nearly the friends on Steam I do on my PS3, I might've considered it more, but I don't. While the PS3 is currently having issues with Spec-Ops lag, they're working to fix it, which is more than they've hinted at for the PC people. Not one word about what's going down, or if they're concerned about this community at all. Sad day.

The Request Line said...

They have single handedly fucked the sale of all future games for me.

I'll download pirate versions and play localy and decide if the game is actualy worth buying now. if they released a demo and used it for beta testing then well i could understand but instead they have just shoved the spoon in our arses on this one and told us to like it or lump it. I am a PC, i played it on a XBOX360 today and found it to not feel very comfortable for me, even though i beat my "console fanboy" at his game i felt it was shit house gaming, and fps dont get the justice they deserve on a controler. I dont understand how they could crush something that was working great, removing dedicated servers has lost alot of hosting companies posible revenue.