Evening all,
I've been on this forum many times since MW3 came out and refrained from posting until now. The reason I discovered this forum was purely down to connection issues I was having with MW3 which I'd never experienced before. I've followed it fairly closely for a few months now.
I've enjoyed reading the input from fellow gamers as well as that from Ghandi et al.
I live in the Northwest of England within 50miles of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Lancaster, Preston and some larger towns. I have a wired Virgin Media connection - 100down 10up which achieves consistent pings across the UK of rarely more than 75 (furthest extremes), locally its between 10 and 25 normally, and overseas around 100 within reason (France, Spain etc.) I have zero packet loss and an N-based router with QOS and all that good stuff.
I have an Xbox with the first two DLC packs. I do not have Elite. I have downloaded Terminal and the free Face Off maps. I'm unsure whether to purchase the rest of the map packs due to how this game is, and has been running for me.
I've played COD since COD4 when I had a 10/1 connection and generally felt that my connections then were manageable. When MW2 came along I was still on the same connection and rarely struggled with connection. Black Ops coincided with an upgrade in internet to 50/5 which meant that I pulled host quite frequently. I always felt I did better when hosting a game in Black Ops.
I've played with the same people for 2 or 3 years now. We predominantly play 6 v 6 Domination. Most of us have internet through Virgin Media and are on 50meg down upwards, a couple are on BT Infinity with around 40down from what I'm told. This group of players has dwindled from a regular 6+ man party on MW2 and BO to 2 or 3 of us playing if we're lucky. Most of the lads have abandoned it due to constantly feeling like they are behind in the game. The few of us who have stuck with it have problems more than half of the time, and get quite vocal in the party chat about it - "I shot him first" etc... Funnily enough the lad who has Sky TV's free broadband and gets around 1.5meg down and 0.4up seems to rarely have any problems like the rest of us. This connection is terrible as well - he can't watch Youtube videos without leaving it to buffer for 50% of the duration.
The problems I come across are:
+ In most games there seems to be one or more enemy players who for whatever reason cannot be killed - I see them first, shoot first, hit first and then I'm dead
+ There are times when I'll get a ridiculous numbers of hit markers from close range - sometimes I'll even stop shooting the guy because in my head I've hit him plenty enough times to kill, only for him to still be alive and my looking like a plank in the kill cam
+ Getting shot when I'm a good 10feet round a corner
+ Insta death / no red screen when getting hit by opponent
+ Oppositing players ice-skating around the map
+ Stuttering
+ Foreigners
+We notice quite a lot that the two of who have the Virgin Media 100meg set up are 2-3bar whilst Sky's 1meg guy is 4. This tends to happen later at night.
These are problems I encounter in probably well over half of the games I play. I know that I get host more than my fair share and I also know that these problems are massively exacerbated when I am host. The amount of host migrations in MW3 shows me something isn't right. If I don't get host its generally one of mates who does due to their decent connections and then they're the one getting upset and quitting the game forcing another host migration. I used to get annoyed with people quitting or dashboarding but having played this game for a 200-300 hours now I completely understand why hosts quit - I do it myself often enough.
I see it regularly where there's a lobby with nobody on a 4bar connection - how does that even happen?
I assume that some of the connection problems I've been having are related to the match-making system. I'd suggest that around 60-70% of the games I'm put into there will be 2-3 (minimum) Europeans - French and Spanish seem to be most common. That said, sometimes there is literally my party, a couple of UK players and then French, Spanish, Germans and Dutch making up the rest.
I appreciate that when it gets late UK time we'll be more likely to be matched with Americans. But it seems to go the same way with the Euros - yet they're further ahead than we are here. I've even had the pleasure of playing against Indians, Aussies and NZ'ers. Crazy. I would've thought that there would be enough UK players to stick in our lobby for the most part.
I have no problem with playing with the Europeans at all, but they generally seem to be 3-bar immortals. I've lost count of how many times a player on a 3-bar has gone to town on us whilst seemingly a second ahead, with BulletSpongePro equipped, InstaKillPro and calling in killstreaks for fun, only for me to check his location and he's in Switzerland or somewhere 1000's of miles away.
I'm by no means a great player and I don't expect to be dropping triple MOABs in every game. I'll happily go negative on KDR in order to get a win. But, I do know through experience when I've been outplayed and when I've been robbed. The latter seems to happen more and more recently.
We've tried different game types and note no obvious difference in quality of connection.
General consensus of opinion from my friends seems to be that since Terminal was released our already testing experience has become a hell of a lot worse.
Those are my experiences to date.
I've read that we can expect a patch to address the Lag Comp and match making several times through this articly, but am yet to see a confirmed date for this. Does anyone have any light which the could shed on this?
One last thing, a couple of my mates are considering upgrading from free Elite to premium. Will the 12month subscription to Elite continue through to Black Ops 2 to cover until July/August 2013?
Sorry for this wall of text. I've added as much information as possible in hope that Ghandi/Teenah (or anybody!!) can offer any advice or assistance.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Stu
