Half-Arsed XBL Matchmaking:

Developers, Please Just Get It Right!

by GrathiusXR

©2009 Arthur Kotsopoulos:- CE (Community Editor)

We may live at the “arse end of the world“, as former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating infamously said, but we deserve better than half-arsed matchmaking.

Multiplayer is one of the main reasons that many gamers purchase Gold Xbox Live membership; to gain the ability to face off against their friends and many other gamers around the world in the game of their choice.

Many games have come and gone, all featuring different methods in handling multiplayer, but so far none have come close to perfecting it so that everyone is happy.

Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Gears of War 2, just to name a few, feature what seems to now be the norm for online multiplayer on the Xbox 360: matchmaking.

Gears of War 2 has moved away from what many fans of Gears War loved, which is the ability to host your own game and allow people to search for it then join.

Matchmaking is what Gears 2 now features and promotes yet many would argue that in doing so it fails.

Not only does searching for games by yourself take ages, but there is no Local Search option?!! No ability to locate Best Connection option?!! Just what the hell were Epic thinking? Certainly not about gamers outside of the North American continent, that’s for sure.

Thankfully we now finally see Epic Games adding a Country Preference, as they call it, but it took until their third update? Just a little too late to sweeten the sour taste we got.  Even then this isn’t a Country Filter like Halo 3 has.  It’s pretty much a preference of search by your country first then everyone else.

And if you thought waiting till TU3 ( Title Update 3) will at least fix these problems then have a read of this thread over at the EPIC Forums and try not to get your knickers in a knot..

Here’s a snippet from the thread where joeGraf (obviously someone high up in multiplayer department at EPIC) has answered some questions, in case you want to get straight to the point…

Question:
Sadly I cannot get into a public online match without encountering a horrible amount of lag as 99.9% of the time I am pushed together with an American host.

Quote joeGraf:

Unfortunately for you Australians, there are not enough people playing concurrently in the same playlists for us to restrict you only to your local area.

That to me comes off as arrogance and plain “Who cares about Australia or other areas of the world with smaller numbers of players”. Perhaps if Gears of War 2 featured the Country Preference Filter right off the bat at launch there would be many more Australians continually playing the game.  However, five months on and three title updates later many Aussies got fed up with the lag and horrid support for outside America and have either traded the game back or sold it on Ebay…exactly what they didn’t want.

Many have now moved on to better online multiplayer experiences since the game’s release (CoD:World at War *cough cough*). Other game studios seem to know that features like matchmaking filters from launch make everyone much happier and that goes to show every night when you play CoD:WaW almost 99% of the time the room you get matched with are Aussies.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was and still is the biggest threat/contender for that Number #1 slot each week for most played game on Xbox Live. But many Australians moved away from the game the moment Infinity Ward introduced that update which gave American hosts better chances more often, leaving nothing for us Aussies to do but either put up with the horrid lag or move on.

For many, COD: Modern Warfare was the best Xbox Live multiplayer game out there, but that one title update pretty much ruined the experience.

Halo 3 may well be over a year old now, but features these types of matchmaking options. The thing is, while many would not consider it the best game out there, gamers seem to be continually playing the multiplayer section of the game in the thousands every day.

Sure they have heaps of games modes, have reduced costs of map packs on the marketplace, and continue to support the community but I can tell you now, that if there was no local search ability or best connection option many Australians would simply not be playing it.

Forget the huge fan base behind it and imagine for a second or two no matchmaking filters what-so-ever, so that each game you play you’re stuck with gamers from around the world and a lag issue beyond belief.

It would have been a disaster for Halo 3 on Xbox Live.  But they got it right.

It’s a mystery why Epic decided to move to matchmaking without those filters for Gears 2 when Gears 1 multiplayer was such a huge success and widely renown for being great for gamers in every country.

There was always the certainty you would get a lag-free game as you knew what you were joining and if your connection to it was good enough.

Far Cry 2 features multiplayer where you can either quickly jump into a match that has the best connection or choose from a list with the connection icon on the far right. The connection is displayed via bars; of course 1 red bar being the worst and 3 green bars being the best. Exactly what Gears 1 featured. 1-2 red bars were the worst, 3 yellow bars was minimal lag and 4 silver bars were best connection.

It’s a mystery why many developers don’t get it right from the start, waiting until the complaining gets strident enough to put out update after update, only to continually stuff something else up.

Gamers don’t want to buy a game then wait months for it to be fixed; it should be all good to go the moment it is released.

If Gears 2 featured the same Gears 1 multiplayer it would now be one of the biggest threats for No #1 spot on the Top 10 played 360 games on Live.  Only adding a Country Preference Filter (mind you it is not a fully fledged Country of Choice filter like in Halo 3) on the 3rd title update is just lazy in my opinion.

I know that along with myself, many other Australian gamers want the glory days back of when Gears 1 was king in multiplayer and every night was a bang with fellow gamers from Australia.

Please, I beg all game studios making a 360 game that features multiplayer: don’t do matchmaking unless you are 100% sure that you know how to at least perfect it to CoD:World at War status or better. There are so many games that could have been great multiplayer experiences but were ruined by latency issues each match or getting stuck with gamers who don’t even speak the same language as you.

Or if  you’re unsure about matchmaking then do the traditional Gears of War 1 Multiplayer, allowing a gamer to host a match which that allows other Australians to search and join an almost lag free match and have a good time. Without any hassles, no horrid latency issues, no non-English speaking gamers. There’s only so much fun you can have with Private Matches with friends day in day out.

©2009 Arthur Kotsopoulos:- CE (C0mmunity Editor)

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Filed under: 1st Party Titles, Console gaming, Editorial, Microsoft Games, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News, XboxLive Marketplace Tagged: | COD 4, COd 4 modern warfare, Epic Games, GEars Of War, Gears of War 2, Infinity Ward, Modern Warfare, TU3, Xblox Live Gold, xbox 360 matchmaking