Unreal Realities

Another blog from our slightly random Maiketh. Enjoy

You know, there is a bigger world out there!!!

I see this problem a lot, mainly on the Xbox which I do most of my gaming. There are games built to be played online. You get through the campaign as quick as you can so you can get into the multiplayer experience. Jump on live, wait with baited breath as the system looks for a suitable game. Bang the group come up on your screen and the time ticks down. The level loads up and away you go. Moving around slowly as you get used to the game and an enemy comes around the corner, you unload most of your clip into him, then you dead. Respawn, and way you go again. You see an enemy down the road, he sees you at the same time, bang your dead before you had a chance. This is when you start to think, am I really that bad, are these guys on speed or something. How the hell are they killing me so easily?

Yes there are good players out there but not that good. Too many developers can’t see the world outside the US. Take Modern Warfare 2 for example. Awesome game, multiplayer is awesome, for the first few attempts before you get sick of seeing the kill cam and what looks like you walking around like a stunned monkey the whole game. The other day I was defending a hq, I was crouched to the side of the door, a guy came in, at point blank range I unloaded my most of my clip into him before I was dead. Now in MW2 you get to see what the person who killed you saw, well what I saw was me looking ahead and not firing a single shot.

How does this happen? Simple – ping. As gamers we all know what this means. In MW2 the game will search for host that you have 50 ping or less, well I can tell you that that is a load of crap, I have not played a single game where my ping as been anything more than the lowest red bar. I was also in a game the other day, there were 20 of us, and we had by chance over a bunch of games got into a game of all Aussies and one American. This American stuffed up the game for the other 19 in there. He was not arrogant or stupid or there just to be a problem, he stuffed it up because all 19 Aussies had the dreaded single red bar and he has a full green.

What these developers miss is there is a big gaming community outside the US. While the auto find feature is very good for people who live there and I am not saying get rid of it. There should also be an option to look through games that has been marked as being good for you and chose the host that you have the best ping with. This would put gamers on a more level playing field. I play MW2 with a bunch of people and the most common gripe about the game is the bad pings we all get being stuck in games with people from America.

There are some games out there that will give you the option to choose your own host to play on, but all need to do that. It is not that much harder then what they already have, the games have been searched up and are already in a list, now all you would have to do is show it to the player for him to choose instead of the system choosing one for itself.

While out market is not as big as the US market, which I totally understand but we are all gamers and we want to play the game in the best possible way. Yeah we can’t use the straight game find, we have to look for ourselves, but I don’t you would find a single gamer who would be annoyed at that, just as long they were on a even playing field when they were on.