Dedicated servers or Halo will flop again

[Tactical Suicide]

Hey everyone,

 

Have been playing high level Halo, SC2, LOL, chess for a good while now and now playing DOTA 2.

 

Halo is by far my favourite game out of the above.... When it's played on LAN

Going by online standards, I would rate Justin Beiber better then Halo (yeah Justin Beiber the little a-hole)

 

Halo puts all the properties of the competitive games above into a space age FPS.

 

Halo :

Highly strategic,

High skill cap,

Requires great team work,

Very fun,

Constantly updated to maintain balanced gameplay

Competitive (On LAN)

but highly frustrating and imbalanced online due to peer 2 peer lag

 

 

Now what makes a game competitive?

 

Most importantly it need to be an equal playing field, one player/team cannot be given an advantage from random properties that are implemented into the game.

Examples : Random ordinance drops in Halo 4, Bloom in Halo : Reach.

 

The No.1 thing that makes online gaming fair is a dedicated server, It allows every player to have the low ping based the distance they are from the server.

But what if the server is located in L.A California and players on the east coast have 70 ping instead of players in L.A having 12. This is unfortunate but you have the same opportunity to relocate to L.A giving all players equal opportunity to optimal connection.

Where as Peer to Peer connection which has been used in every Halo game so far does not allow for this consistent location of the host so you can assume your average ping and adjust over hundreds of game to playing on 70 ping that it becomes very normal to you and only hinders give the players on 12 ping a slight advantage. But in peer 2 peer you will get a random host from new York who has bridged himself host and deliberately downloads torrents while he is host of the game causing 500-1000 ping for all the other players.

In online Halo where you have 2 teams of 4 versing each other from opposite sides of the country or even the world, the team with host will be at an immense advantage, all 4 players on the team with host are sitting on less then 60 ping while the other team are all well above 400 ping, so how is it one team being able to 4 shot every time while the other team would be lucky to pop the hosting teams shield with 5 or 6 shots and melees don't register.

I'm sure everyone on the website has experienced the games where it takes your full BR clip to just pop and enemies shield or players teleporting and getting assassinations while they are in front of you, or standing on custom for 3 seconds shooting the enemy while he runs straight at you, for him to still pick the overshield up over you and kill you and then tea-bagging you because he thinks he made such a great play...... (insert rage face)

 

In league of legends, the server I play on is located in Sydney Australia giving me an average of 27-29 ping (if nobody is downloading porn from my net ).

The only time I will get high ping is when the server crashes (rare) or I am uploading or downloading other content.

 

Now in peer 2 peer I can not be downloading and will match a player across the other side of the world and one of us will have to put up with 300+ ping while the other player is playing on LAN connection.

 

Now since having a equally fair playing field is a must for a competitive game, how can one player having to play with 300 ping delay while the other plays with 0 ping delay be fair?

 

It's not fair, plain and simple.

 

Online ranked matchmaking in Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo: Reach's Arena, and Halo 4's CSR crap. are all a farce due to none of the games being eligible for competitive ranked play since they were not balanced. Fair enough dedicated servers were not really available to console gaming back then but there is no reason in the modern day for Halo 5 to be peer to peer if they intent to be a competitive game.

 

So putting above into a nutshell.

Peer 2 Peer online gaming is a random property. Competitive games eliminate random properties.

Dedicated servers are consistent.

 

Halo 2 : anniversary and Halo 5 multiplayer need dedicated servers or you may as well not bother with ranked matchmaking.... because who the hell would play unbalanced ranked gameplay on peer 2 peer connection, when the titles I mentioned above have created great competitive titles on dedicated servers.

 

Thanks for reading, feel free to post any feedback.

 

 

[BeckoningZebra1]

I agree, Dedicated servers are absolutely the way to go with the next Halo.

 

But if we don't have dedicated servers, I'm still going to play, and Halo can still be competitive without dedicated servers. Halo 3, widely considered one of the most competitive multiplayer games ever, -No dedicated servers.

 

When a game doesn't have dedicated servers, it only means that the game now relies on the players' connection to one another. If the two players both have excellent connection, there generally aren't any problems. The only real problem that comes with using players as the host, is that at times, the host will have greater connection and will have a very, very slight advantage over his opponent. 

 

That being said, Halo can still be a competitive game without dedicated servers, but I'd like to have them because they are indeed better than player hosts.

[Delpen9]

Halo 5 has already been officialy announced to have dedicated servers well BEFORE E3 2013. Otherwise, I found your post to be very informative. Thank you; I liked this

[Twinreaper]

Iirc dedicated or peer host connection, the Live service is orchestrated to utilize bandwidth from players with good connections, to assist with those who do not. There is a whitepaper on it somewhere, I just cant seem to locate it right now. Dedicated servers yes are superior, but it also depends on what region or regions they intend to impliment them. Similar to the Azure service, the dedicated servers will likely be scattered around various datacenters and not located in one specific "epicenter" so to speak.

[WonderWombat]

Good news, Halo 5 will have dedicated servers.

[Delpen9]

They freakin' confirmed that a year ago!