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play with friends.....problem solved. next please.

This is one of the lamest excuses for poor online. Even ignoring the fact that friends aren't online all the time ready to play with me at my every beck and call, $50 a year to only play with friends is retarded.

 

[Prine]

Still one of the best online games you can play. I was playing Single player co-op, god its so much fun fighting the flood now. My shotgun and sticky skills have improved enormously on single player thanks to multi. I can pretty much skick anything on single player.

PS: Halo2, like Halo has been played religously since its release. 6 monthson and i play it almost everyday.

 

[Solid]

halo 2 rox.

 

[aerofx]

Why do people own it? hmm.. I for one enjoy the game even with the cheaters, quitters, whiners, etc. There are ways to avoid it like many people have pointed out in this thread so to hear people sell their system and Halo 2 just because they can't handle the shit that happens online is just absurd.

 

[Prine]

I just put the volume down, and blast my music on the computer when i play matchmaking by myself. Good times

 

[blackadde]

I own it because the TV told me I would be a loser if I didn't. Then I went back to my PC.

 

[Yusaku]

I own it because my friends pretty much made me own it. I haven't even looked at the new maps yet.

 

[KINGMOKU]

The trouble is that online gaming is a really good idea, but it is marred by one, fatal, flaw.

You have to play with other people.

And almost without exception, other people are asshats.

Bungies matchmaking was good on paper, but (for myself) it has turned out to be a disaster. People view it like their "score" and its all they care about. I would rather play games where some of the people are so far out of my league that they kick my ass the whole match, then have another 7 teammates who only care about their ranking.

I havn't played Halo2 matchmaking in MONTHS. Pretty much only custom games with friends. Its the only way to play.

:lol :lol :lol


Man your killing me. LMFAO! Man online gaming sucks so hard sometimes, you wonder why you even power up at times.

Nothings worse then some random TK dick, who just will NOT stop. No way to talk to them, they just keep going, and going untill they get banned, or get you banned by retailiating.

ASSHATS. :lol

 

[GhaleonEB]

This thread isn't so much my questioning whether or not Halo 2 is a good game to own or buy, but just to maybe find some insight as to why people own it.

In two hours of play today, and about 4 hours of play last night on XBox Live my party and I probably participated in twenty or more matches, and that estimate is on the very low side. The point is, of all those matches maybe four or five were quality matches in which nobody dropped thirty seconds into the game.

The swearing, the slurs, the smack talk. All of that I'll put up with to a degree, after all it is online gaming. But people just quit, they're not losing, half the time they haven't even fired a shot. This all begs the question:

Why own a game to play online when you only ever play 30 second matches before you quit?

Training or Ranked. It doesn't matter there's just so many people that quit, be it when the chips are down or because they just don't like the gametype. If getting enough people for a decent custom game weren't such a chore I'd leave matchmaking entirely.

So anyway.. if anyone knows the answer, enlighten us as to why people do such things.

Your question is "why do people do such things?", but your topic is about why people own Halo 2. Well, here's a rant from Bungie on the former question from yesterday. As to the question in the title, I own it because the game kicks all kinds of ass and it's only one out of ever four or five games that I have any dropping or other issues. Lots and lots of good experiences.

The Noobefaction of Gaming

That's right, I said Noob. Which as anyone l337 ("elite") knows, actually makes ME a noob. Kind of like an uncle trying to be "cool." It's an embarrassing contradiction. Some of you might not even know what a "noob" is. Well, it's short for "Newbie" which originally meant a new player who hadn't quite grasped the rules yet. As a matter of fact, its origin as a term was probably quite gentle, even charitable. "Aaaw. Let me help you dear, dear Noob. The railgun is at the end of the corridor on that crate."

But times have changed. Noob is now a catchall for any adjective, noun or pronoun with a negative connotation. You could for example say, "Your hat is totally Noobish." You could even apply it as a verb, "I'm going to give you such a Noobing you Nooby Noobster."

But really, I wish "Noob" was the worst of it. I think I could walk right up to the President and call him a "Noob" to his face and he'd probably smile and say, "Thanks son, always a pleasure to meet young folks." But if I called the President any one of the things I hear on a typical Saturday morning, a secret service guy would snap my neck, Seagal-style and toss me off a balcony. And I'd deserve it.

Behavior on Xbox Live, and frankly any internet gaming experience, can be joyous. Pleasant. Satisfying. Rewarding. But occasionally it can be home to some of the rudest, stupidest, most idiotic, insulting dialog you will ever hear.

And how can you do this? How can you get away with such horrible behavior with no repercussions? Multiplayer, microphone and the velvety luxury of anonymity. That last one is questionable, but we'll get to that.

If parents heard what their golden-haired angels were doing on the internet, or on Xbox Live, there'd probably be some serious spanking apocalypse going down. Most parents would hear what I hear most times I play – the odd curse, maybe a grudging "good game" in the post-match lobby. Other times? An idiot screaming abuse at complete strangers. Now, if I play ten games, I might hear that once. If I meet ten people on the street, how many of them are going to scream insults into my face? Statistically? None.

That's a valuable fact. It means that video games are not, like all other fads before them, the harbinger of the end of civilization. They are like every other technology, working out the kinks and the bugs.

When the telephone was invented, the first words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell were, "“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” If it had been invented today, by BunGsuxGoatz, the first words would have been, "Suck it noob! I OWNED CHOO! Taste that? That's tealeaves NOOB!"

When you talk about time scales in videogame culture, you have to speak in shorthand. The games industry has really only existed, properly for about 25 years. So things have evolved rapidly from glowing white squares to 3D, photo-realistic universes in record time. If only other industries grew up that fast – we'd have space-capable flying cars and magnetic induction toilet flush. Actually that last one might be a bit dangerous.

The point is, it's hardly surprising that this kind of rapid evolution has resulted in teething troubles.

And they're being worked out. The nature of Live and other gaming services is that the player is given the freedom to play against anyone he or she likes. Custom games, or games you set up in a group, club or clan, are controlled. They are friends or acquaintances. Rivalries tend to the friendly and enjoyable.

But to give players the most freedom to play whenever they like, we have to open it up to the broader population. And as a wise man once said, "A person is smart, but people are stupid." The bigger a group is, the more likely it is to act like a herd. Here's an experiment – go stand on a street corner, downtown, at lunchtime and stare, rapt, up at something. A window, a lamp post, whatever. Ten minutes later, everyone's doing it. And on Live, the herd mentality even works on smart people.

One jerk. One moron, runs around screaming abuse at players, acting out in the most infantile way possible, and soon, everyone is screaming at him. Unlike the old, "Stand up to a bully and he'll back down" myth, ignoring these clowns actually works. The trouble is finding a Zen-like space to inhabit while finishing the game. Bullies on the other hand will punch out your teeth and steal your lunch money when you stand up to them.

And cheats? Now, in a way, I can understand what a screamer or insult-hurler gets out of it. I met enough of 'em in junior school. He gets attention (and I say "he" with all deliberation – since girls are almost invariably pleasant – and they have to put up with the most abuse) and he gets off on making you mad. Cheats get nothing. People hate them, and their achievements are completely meaningless. They are almost invariably the worst players in terms of skill and ability, and eventually, they end up matched only against each other, in a kind of hell. Which they are welcome to inhabit.

Which brings us to the question again. What is Bungie doing about it? Seems like the preceding screed blames everything on the cheats and screamers. It's not THEIR fault Bungie's lousy code makes all this possible. Well, actually, it IS their fault. They are the cheats and the screamers. Ultimate responsibility lies with them. The question then is, are they going to stop? Eventually they will. They'll grow up, they'll get bored, they'll move along.

But for some of this stuff, you won't have to wait. Cheats, hackers, modders – and yes, this includes the ones who demonstrated a way to "unban" their banned accounts – are going to be largely history within a week or two. If I were them, (and one or two of 'em are reading this now) I would delete anything on my Xbox that shouldn't be there, and I would do that today. Feel free to ignore that, but you've been warned, and besides, we don't really owe you that courtesy. If you can't play Halo next week, it was your own fault. We're not going to unban you.

We're realistic, we know that every time we fix a crack, some jerk with a jackhammer makes a new one. We know that we can't stop screaming, cursing without silencing the good along with the bad, and we know that human nature is going to ensure that the system is never perfect. But it's going to be better.

We work very, very hard on this stuff, contrary to some of the less-thoughtful emails we get. There's a room behind me, filled with people working long hours, on difficult problems, in a complicated matrix of online code, gameplay problems, hundreds of ISPs, modems and different situations. Of course it takes time, and of course we appreciate your patience.

We have a special responsibility here and we take it seriously. Halo 2 is a really big online game – especially on consoles. It has more simultaneous players, more sessions and more people than any other console game out there, at least for the moment. So we encounter problems on a different scale. We have a responsibility to Microsoft, to Xbox Live and maybe gaming in general, to try and manage the process in a cool way and learn all the lessons we need to. We're still learning.

On the next generation of Xbox, the 360, some systems are already in place that will make Live a much nicer place for the nice among us. Imagine a perfect world where you only played against pleasant, well-behaved, skilled, non-cheats. Sounds heavenly huh? Well, looking at what they have planned, I think that's going to be largely possible. I hope Bungie's next game is one that takes advantage of that idealized, happy space.

I genuinely believe that as this technology and community matures, the bad apples will be shaken out and the good ones will float to the top. There will still be bad people – but they can all hang out on their own. In a dark place of their own making. And guess what? They're not really anonymous. We know who they are.

But what do I know? I'm just a noob.

 

[ArcadeStickMonk]

That's tealeaves NOOB!

Oh lord, that is some black comedy.



As for the thread title, Guivre is pretty much paraphrasing a multi-part rant that I subjected him to over team training early this afternoon.
"Why do they even own the fucking game?"

I wasn't at all refferring to verbal abusers or cheaters, just the shitheads that would drop on either our team or the other, at the first instant that something didn't go their way, thus making the round pointless, literally every 3 out of 5 games.

Due to these people, and those that proudly call themselves "modders," I have sworn off team training forever, and possibly even matchmaking in general.


*At post game screen*

You like niggers.

I'm moving to the ocean.

 

[Xenon]

MS should keep track of disconnection rate in conjunction with loosing scores. Each player should be able to see another stats so that players with alot of wins but high disconnect rates can be called out for the shitbags that they are and servers could be created that block players with a certain % of losing disconnects. The % would lower every week without losing disconnects. So people could get back if they are good.


the match making in Halo 2 sucks because of that fact I logged less hours online than I did with the demo version of Whacked!

 

[Chittagong]

I had a huge problem with quitting and cheating before the Map Pack and the new Team Preview playlist.

Team Preview is awesome, very cool game types and people who are really dedicated to play good games. I played with Big Team ranking 25-40 (!). I play every night a few hours, today no quitters or cheaters.

Big Team is the most problematic, attracts lots of cheaters + ends up often in bad balance 7 vs. 8 guys, then one quits from the team with 7, then it's 6 vs. 8, someone gets discouraged and quits and so on...

Team Preview!

 

[stonedwal]

It's got shit all resale value, and I might play it again some day.

 

[Wario64]

so i played a 4 on 1 team slayer game (i am the '1'), and i actually almost beat the other team. final score was 20-18. post game results convo:


them: "that's why you suck. that's why im level 29 and you're not"
me:...

 

[rastex]

I got a chance to see first hand how one of these people function, as my brother is the type of person to abuse the game. And for them it's just so inconsequential "it's just a game" etc, and they derive a small sense of humour from it that they have no reason to NOT be an asshat.

Personally, the way I deal with it is to improve myself and my game, and to just adapt the game around my circumstances. Usually I play Team Slayer or Rumble Pit, for the latter gametype having people drop doesn't matter, and for the former when people on my team drop I just treat it as a challenge. See how long I can last between kills, just try to think of creative ways to fight back and that type of thing. I know my chances of winning are VERY small so I don't even try to win, that'll only cause a lot of frustration, so I set other goals for myself, ones that are more realistic, and provide entertainment. In 3S when I was starting out and playing against a super high ranked player, my own goal would be to make sure I wasn't perfected, then it was to win one round, and so on. I remember playing a guy 20 times in a row while he was Ken, and I wouldn't give up because even if it was "cheap" I knew I'd be able to beat him eventually, and slowly after the 15th, 16th game the matches started getting closer, until I started beating him consistently, and he dropped. But it doesn't matter because now I can play against any ken easily, and my own Ken improved as well.

In the future, and this is happening with 360 Live, is the whole reputation system, so asshats WILL have a reason to curb their behaviour, which is good. But you're never going to have a technical solution for ultimately a social problem, so you're just going to have to learn how to deal with asshats to get the benefits of online gaming. And what are games other than a set of goals? The goals are entirely arbitrary and once you realize that then you learn that you can set your own goals for yourself, make the game your own and ultimately make it far more fun for yourself.

People already do this with things like speed runs, or I remember another example where one guy made a little game in GTA where he set a time limit for himself and tried to take pictures of a bunch of different landmarks.

 

[Reilly]

I'd never pay for online gaming. That's like paying for water.

 

[StoOgE]

I play around level 12-15 or so in rumble pit and enjoy the hell out of it. I prefer team games but dont play them as much because my having fun depends way too much on my team not sucking ass.

 

[Musashi Wins!]

I'd never pay for online gaming. That's like paying for water.

Ask your parents about that.

 

[Prine]

Ask your parents about that.

*thumbs up*

 

[Musashi Wins!]

*thumbs up*

Halo2 glitchfest! Prine am cry!

 

[monchi-kun]

This is one of the lamest excuses for poor online. Even ignoring the fact that friends aren't online all the time ready to play with me at my every beck and call, $50 a year to only play with friends is retarded.

maybe they're not your real friends then? most of the people i play with are co workers or are in the same time zone so it's fairly easy to send off an email during the day to confirm an evening session.

 

[Ironclad]

I own the game so that I can play online with the regular group of Gaffers that I play with. Otherwise, I find matchmaking absolutely useless. I can't stand rumble pit and head to head mainly because the majority of the players are morons, and I am not going to play team games with random people. I hate proximity chat too. If only there was an option to mute the entire opposing team.

 

[Do The Mario]

Because playing the multiplayer makes me fucking hard.

 

[Speevy]

I enjoyed Halo 2 quite a bit.

 

[Comfort_Eagle]

Why do people own it?

Because they have really bad taste. Its probably been said before....but i didnt read the thread.

 

[Sean]

I don't care for server browsers too much. I remember trying to get in a game on XBConnect for Halo 1, it was a nightmare. Refreshing the server browser, joining a game and having it be full, joining a game and having it be unavailable, then refreshing the list and repeating. When I finally did get in a game, I would get booted for not having 4 people on my Xbox, or some other stupid reason. Not to mention 99% of people only played one freaking map (Blood Gulch) over and over and half the games were laggy.

I love the matchmaking system in Halo 2. At the press of a button you get matched up with people of equal skill, split up into even teams, it figures out the best connection to be host, etc. It always keeps the games interesting and fun. It's not 100% perfect (sometimes one team gets an extra player for example), but it is very convenient.

The ideal solution would be to have both the matchmaking system and a custom server browser for the people who want it. I believe EGM said that PDZ would be like that, so I'm looking forward to that.

 

[Speevy]

Because they have really bad taste. Its probably been said before....but i didnt read the thread.

Wow. Yeah, you didn't read the thread.

 

[Dr_Cogent]

Dude you've just asked one of the biggest online gaming questions I've ever had. Not exclusive to Halo 2. EVERY online game has this to some degree. I just don't get it.

There are a ton of fuck wads who do it in Splinter Cell.

 

[ArcadeStickMonk]

There are a ton of fuck wads who do it in Splinter Cell.

Interestingly enough, I took returned Chaos Theory because I couldn't stand to play it in any capacity.

Guivre and I had some fun playing mercs in Pandora Tommorrow, but I couldn't stand having to wait ten minutes for a game to fill up just so-
A: Spies drop after the first time I kill them through the ceiling with a shotgun
B: Spies pull that aggro shit and tell me how gay I am because they managed to hit the A button and grab me

But I do remember in Pandora how it seemed nobody ever stayed for the final two minutes of a round. Guivre and I owned the theatre.

 

[LittleTokyo]

One of my big problems with Halo 2 was the hyped online play. After I realized how broken it was I ended up selling my XBOX. Not being able to choose game type or map and when players quit no one can fill there spot in are two completely assinine flaws in the online interface. UT2004 us leagues beyond H2 in terms of online.

 

[border]

maybe they're not your real friends then? most of the people i play with are co workers or are in the same time zone so it's fairly easy to send off an email during the day to confirm an evening session.

I don't know that many people that have an Xbox, Xbox Live, AND Halo 2. What's more though, is that playing with friends over and over is just as boring as matchmaking. Every match ends up nearly the same because the skill level of your opponents is totally static. Playing the same group of people over and over is not much different than playing people of equal skill over and over.

The ideal solution would be to have both the matchmaking system and a custom server browser for the people who want it. I believe EGM said that PDZ would be like that, so I'm looking forward to that.

As much as you can criticize Bungie, I think they were at least smart enough to realize that a Server Browser and Matchmaking System would not work in tandem. Eventually the majority of people would wind up using the Server Browser, and the quality of matchmaking is contingent on having a large pool of potential opponents. If 70-80% of players go to the Server Browser (and I'm almost positive that'd be the case) then it breaks Matchmaking. It has to be one or the other because doing both just won't work.

 

[Speevy]

One of my big problems with Halo 2 was the hyped online play. After I realized how broken it was I ended up selling my XBOX. .

You could have just sold the game and bought something else. Phantom Dust for instance. Whatever you do, don't sell your PS2/GCN if some random game isn't what you had hoped.

 

[Neex]

One of my big problems with Halo 2 was the hyped online play. After I realized how broken it was I ended up selling my XBOX.

Wow, that's an overreaction and misstatement if I ever heard one.


I play Team Slayer (As well as occasional other gametypes), with one friend in particular, and occasionally with one or two others. With my friend and I playing on a team, we can generally take on whatever the other team dishes us. With a full team of friends, I have the most fun I've had with any game, especially when we are all in close proximity (college dorm hall).

I played Halo 2 three nights this week. Ran into a few TK'ers, which I can count on one hand, had a few quitters, and no cheaters. For about ten hours of online play, that seems like a pretty low percentage of bad experiences, so I don't know what a lot of you are whining about.

...And we won most of 'em. See for yourself:

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/PlayerGameList.aspx?player=Neex

 

[Prine]

Halo2 glitchfest! Prine am cry!

:lol I know your spending all of you're sunday trying to pull off the super jump. NERD!

I own the game so that I can play online with the regular group of Gaffers that I play with. Otherwise, I find matchmaking absolutely useless. I can't stand rumble pit and head to head mainly because the majority of the players are morons, and I am not going to play team games with random people. I hate proximity chat too. If only there was an option to mute the entire opposing team.

Dude, you always start the beef. When you kill someone you call them nubs and morons. You're just as bad :lol

 

[Musashi Wins!]

That was dissapointing to see all these people going for glitches in a short time of play last night. It didn't use to be like that. Yuck.

So...the real reason I own them is because I have a Halo LE Xbox and it would seem strange not having the games for it.

 

[Kolgar]

I don't have an answer.

So disappointed was I with the lacking single-player mode and the rude, hostile community (at least the members I played with) that I traded in the title as soon as I was able to slog through the SP game.

Bye, bye, Halo 2.

 

[Ironclad]

Dude, you always start the beef. When you kill someone you call them nubs and morons. You're just as bad :lol

What?! I only start talking back to them after they start. Otherwise, I have no reason to call them such things.

 

[Property of Jumpship]

I own it because the trade-in credit is so weak. Fuck you EB, Gamestop, and Game Rush!

 

[FightyF]

I haven't played it in a while...but when you play with people on your friends list...it's awesome. I've never played with the general public much.

Besides, we played some custom gametypes (HaloStrike and FLF), so I'd always create rather than join a game.