dedicatedserversplease wrote:

 

Hi Ghandi,

     Wanted to report what has been happening now that I have logged at least 20 hours of gameplay on the new patch.  Just for a reference point, I have 65/15Mbps connection with a 8ms ping to a server 75 miles away.  On MW2, my in game ping was visible to me on PS3 and I averaged 35-40ms as host. 

 

So I believe the last patch helped "somewhat, albeit ever so slightly."  Like I said before, the chat communication is great, sounds as good as the party chat on Xbox.  Thanks.  The nerfs on the Akimbo's still havent done enough as they are more powerful than primaries.  The issues still lie within the consistency of the game.  There seems to always be 1-2 people in a lobby that seem to be PacMan and eat all the bullets, not just from myself, but from my team. I am almost always host.  I play SnD, so we party up, get into a room, and never leave the lobby for about 4-5 straight hours of gameplay.  During which I am host the whole time and it never changes host.  Yet within that gameplay, there can be games that run smooth as butter and some that are such BS, that we struggle to win against bad players due to them having the extreme advantage of killing us with the 1 bullet magic kills.  The bullets following you around corners is still much worse than it was in MW2.

 

In regards to the consistency of the game, my connection is not fluctuating when host.  I am part of DSL Reports which offers members Line Monitoring software that can be run during gaming. The line monitoring program does not affect the quality of the connection itself, just is in the background in case you want to verify that there wasnt any signal spikes or degradation of my internet during times of WTF moments. I vary rarely, less than once every month or so, ever come across any data that shows my internet connection fluctuating any more dramatically than 2-4ms in ping and 0.3-0.7Mbps of speed, both download and upload.

 

Yet with all that information, and maintainig host for hours straight, lobbies are different each and every game.  My question is why does this occur if it is the same host, but a different opposing team as the first team backs out after getting smacked?  This is where the inconsistency comes from and how it feels at times there is the elusive "sniper frog" program running, look up sniper frog if you dont know what it is, you will have a good time.  http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/sniper-frog-what-infinity-ward-doesnt-wa nt-you-to-know.104693/

 

There should be a cap at just how much compensation a player can receive until they either have to get a better connection, play the game on the poor connection they have or stop playing the game altogether until getting a connection that is necessary for gaming.  I understand you guys want the game available to as many people as possible, but having endless compensation regardless of internet connection is not feasable as well, you will have people who take advantage of it. My suggestion is to have a hard cap, that will help up to a certain point, after that point, its up to you to get an ISP that keeps you within that range..  In order to have the best experience possible we attempt to avoid playing matches with split screeners(who always degrade the lobby and should NEVER be host) and certain ethnic groups that advertise themselves in their gamertags or clan tags (due to the fact bullets never register).  This more often than not improves the game/experience for us tremendously. I should not be forced to look at lobbies and try to determine in pre game if the lobby will run smoothly or not just by looking at gamertags/clan tags.

 

My next point is that you restricted host migration too much to the point where lag switchers are able to do their deeds without the lobby migrating. MW2 would of switched hosts right away, but MW3 lets them abuse it for the entire night if they want.  With MW3 came websites that allow gamers to lag switch by running a program on their computer while gaming.  The other scary thing Ghandi, is that with your broken lag comp system, there are websites that allow you to pay monthly fees to throttle your connection to allow you to obtain the advantage in your title.  That is why I am pushing for a hard cap on the amount of comp allowed. 

 

Let me know what you think about what I wrote and I hope that I can provide some help and insight to the process.  Once again while the patch helped, there still is work that is needed to be done.  There are times where you die before you even see the opponent, yet on their screen you were there for a second, regardless of hosting or not.  Everything just isnt synched properly.  Thanks Peter

Ghandi, hope you got to read that, alot of weapon discussion pushed this post way to the back. Thanks Pete

dedicatedserversplease wrote:

 

dedicatedserversplease wrote:

 

Hi Ghandi,

     Wanted to report what has been happening now that I have logged at least 20 hours of gameplay on the new patch.  Just for a reference point, I have 65/15Mbps connection with a 8ms ping to a server 75 miles away.  On MW2, my in game ping was visible to me on PS3 and I averaged 35-40ms as host. 

 

So I believe the last patch helped "somewhat, albeit ever so slightly."  Like I said before, the chat communication is great, sounds as good as the party chat on Xbox.  Thanks.  The nerfs on the Akimbo's still havent done enough as they are more powerful than primaries.  The issues still lie within the consistency of the game.  There seems to always be 1-2 people in a lobby that seem to be PacMan and eat all the bullets, not just from myself, but from my team. I am almost always host.  I play SnD, so we party up, get into a room, and never leave the lobby for about 4-5 straight hours of gameplay.  During which I am host the whole time and it never changes host.  Yet within that gameplay, there can be games that run smooth as butter and some that are such BS, that we struggle to win against bad players due to them having the extreme advantage of killing us with the 1 bullet magic kills.  The bullets following you around corners is still much worse than it was in MW2.

 

In regards to the consistency of the game, my connection is not fluctuating when host.  I am part of DSL Reports which offers members Line Monitoring software that can be run during gaming. The line monitoring program does not affect the quality of the connection itself, just is in the background in case you want to verify that there wasnt any signal spikes or degradation of my internet during times of WTF moments. I vary rarely, less than once every month or so, ever come across any data that shows my internet connection fluctuating any more dramatically than 2-4ms in ping and 0.3-0.7Mbps of speed, both download and upload.

 

Yet with all that information, and maintainig host for hours straight, lobbies are different each and every game.  My question is why does this occur if it is the same host, but a different opposing team as the first team backs out after getting smacked?  This is where the inconsistency comes from and how it feels at times there is the elusive "sniper frog" program running, look up sniper frog if you dont know what it is, you will have a good time.  http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/threads/sniper-frog-what-infinity-ward-doesnt-wa nt-you-to-know.104693/

 

There should be a cap at just how much compensation a player can receive until they either have to get a better connection, play the game on the poor connection they have or stop playing the game altogether until getting a connection that is necessary for gaming.  I understand you guys want the game available to as many people as possible, but having endless compensation regardless of internet connection is not feasable as well, you will have people who take advantage of it. My suggestion is to have a hard cap, that will help up to a certain point, after that point, its up to you to get an ISP that keeps you within that range..  In order to have the best experience possible we attempt to avoid playing matches with split screeners(who always degrade the lobby and should NEVER be host) and certain ethnic groups that advertise themselves in their gamertags or clan tags (due to the fact bullets never register).  This more often than not improves the game/experience for us tremendously. I should not be forced to look at lobbies and try to determine in pre game if the lobby will run smoothly or not just by looking at gamertags/clan tags.

 

My next point is that you restricted host migration too much to the point where lag switchers are able to do their deeds without the lobby migrating. MW2 would of switched hosts right away, but MW3 lets them abuse it for the entire night if they want.  With MW3 came websites that allow gamers to lag switch by running a program on their computer while gaming.  The other scary thing Ghandi, is that with your broken lag comp system, there are websites that allow you to pay monthly fees to throttle your connection to allow you to obtain the advantage in your title.  That is why I am pushing for a hard cap on the amount of comp allowed. 

 

Let me know what you think about what I wrote and I hope that I can provide some help and insight to the process.  Once again while the patch helped, there still is work that is needed to be done.  There are times where you die before you even see the opponent, yet on their screen you were there for a second, regardless of hosting or not.  Everything just isnt synched properly.  Thanks Peter

Ghandi, hope you got to read that, alot of weapon discussion pushed this post way to the back. Thanks Pete

I did read this post and a much of what you mention is very insightful. The change we are rolling out tonight directly addresses one of the areas you mention.

Cheers,

G IH A IN ID II

Ghandi,

just a quick question on lag-comp I really really really need to know. Is lag-compensation only applied to the host or also on people with lower latency than other participating players? In other words will a four bar player that is not hosting have his latency raised when there are higher latency players in the game? Also is lag comp applied as a general latency or on a player to player basis? For example if all players had 50ms and there's one 150ms, would lag comp put me on 150ms for only this player or for everybody else?

vims1990 wrote:

 

Hi GHANDI,

 

Received some feedback in regards to the controversy of removing dropzone & why it was removed by the devs.

 

 

http://community.callofduty.com/message/205383748#205383748

 

 

Hopefully some of the mature feedback provided may help you decide in whether

 

a) Remove unused gametypes to seperate Drop Zone & Infected

b) Create a moshpit of Drop Zone & Infected

 

I don't play the game mode myself but I know the 50,000 playing Infected (and possibly those who have switched to infected for the meantime) want a change.

We're going to address this very soon. As I said before we view the Community Playlist as being driven by the community. We have heard the feedback loud and clear.

Cheers,

G IH A IN ID II

G IH A IN ID II wrote:

 

BrokenLagComp wrote:

 

operator-1 wrote:

 

baddress wrote:

 

Has anyone ever considered these two points?

 

1) Perhaps a game with as much going on as MW3 is maxing out the CPU on the host's xbox? Current gen xbox is pretty old, when you think about it.

 

2) Perhaps since MW3 gameplay was intentionally sped up so much, the faster play is no longer within the tolerance of the prediction engine?

 

Just a couple thoughts.

Good points, and yes I've considered them: if either point was true, it would indicate that the game is defective by virtue of it being built to exceed the platform's limits.

 

It's also very possible that the hardware & software setup used by developers to build & test the game are drastically different from the hardware & software setup used by customers to actually play the game (in which case the test environment would be useless for customer experience testing since it fails to accurately mimic the live/production environment).

I think you guys failed to consider that people are experiencing this same thing on PS3 which technically actually has better hardware than the XBOX.

 

Honestly, I think as that link above is hinting at, they tried to make the netcode more "fair" for everyone playing ala BlackOps method (or something similar) which put the host at a disadvantage and puts them signficantly "behind" other players depending on the lobby and failed. 

 

The continuing goal is to provide a fair experience for all players. It is not right for those with superior connections to automatically gain an advantage over those without. It is equally as unfair for those with superior connections to suffer a disadvantage. The game needs to be equitable for all.

 

Throw into the mix individuals who throttle or alter their connection to gain an advantage or in some cases with legitimate logic to prevent a disadvantage they are suffering from and you have a wide spectrum of connection types to balance. This is the challenge.

 

Cheers,

 

G IH A IN ID II

Honestly, It's a noble goal. I've said many times to my friends (especially when I started experiencing this in BlackOps):

I don't want an advantage, I just don't want to be "behind the ball" all the time.

On the flip side, if I am trying to play across the world, I understand I am going to have latency issues.. it's just the nature of the internet gameplay.

I unfortunately think there is only so much you can do for people with lesser connections. Its too easily exploitable by people with better connections (and depending on ISP throttling methods, they might not even be intentionally doing it) so you risk banning people because of that even if you think you can detect it.

I honestly felt even when I had a "yellow" connection that most of the time MW2 was still playable even though I felt I was playing at a disadvantage. I could mentally prepare myself for those lobbies better.

Now (in MW3) it's just kind of a roll of the dice what a "4 bar" can mean for you or even a "3 bar" (let alone those odd occasional "2" bars that seem to destroy everyone)

I've seen 3 bar players who are doing HORRIBLE against other 3 bar players straight up smash me because of this when I have 4 bars..and it really does break the illusion of any fairness you guys are trying to create.

(possibly because we have been conditioned to look at our connections via the in game indicators and adjust our gameplay styles accordingly) but also because you guys are breaking consistency that was felt before in mw2