The Halo 3 aftermath thread

[Guest alisdair]

Smith told me that he played Alisdair and ZOK last night. How were the games, guys?

I was absolutely terrible, so I'd love to blame lag, but in reality it seemed totally latency-free to me. We were even playing some Mexicans for one game on Isolation, and there were no problems. Except me being rubbish.

[Meers]

Atarian, I've got Versatel Corporate, provided by my work. I used to be with Planet before I moved house 2 years ago. Speedtests at home indicate I've got around 10 down, 4 up.

[will2097]

This is whats really confusing me about your situation. I've played a couple of games with you and other forumites, lots of people in the UK as well as various games with Yanks in. Basically a good range of people from all over the show. I only have a 3mb Broadband connection and have had lag issues twice and both on the same night. So God knows whats up

Peering agreements? Some UK ISPs have to make peering agreements with IPSs in the US. Some don't. Some have good bandwidth, some don't. Contention ratios? Many-a-packet can be lost between the UK and the states and the bandwidth on the service you buy, I believe, only covers the connection between your house and the nearest telephone exchange. (I haven't really looked into it since modems went out of fashion - I might be wrong) At the end of the day, just because you have an 8mb service from your ISP, doesn't mean you have 8Mb to the states or anywhere else. In many respects, you pay for what you get. Of cause, you may get great connectivity to the states, but awful connectivity to another UK user because they are on a different ISP. The answer of cause as you so rightly pointed out, would be to put servers in London Telehouse (or whatever the modern equivalent is)

[Meers]

Peering agreements? Some UK ISPs have to make peering agreements with IPSs in the US. Some don't. Some have good bandwidth, some don't. Contention ratios? Many-a-packet can be lost between the UK and the states and the bandwidth on the service you buy, I believe, only covers the connection between your house and the nearest telephone exchange. (I haven't really looked into it since modems went out of fashion - I might be wrong) At the end of the day, just because you have an 8mb service from your ISP, doesn't mean you have 8Mb to the states or anywhere else. In many respects, you pay for what you get. Of cause, you may get great connectivity to the states, but awful connectivity to another UK user because they are on a different ISP. The answer of cause as you so rightly pointed out, would be to put servers in London Telehouse (or whatever the modern equivalent is)

Makes sense.

[Lorfarius]

Makes sense.

Yes. Move to the UK Problem solved.

[Meers]

Yes. Move to the UK Problem solved.

UK = Europe. I'm sure it's the same here in Clogland.

[Timmo]

I'm willing my skill to go down in Team slayer but it won't. Late twenties and I'm in over my head.

[kerraig UK]

I'm willing my skill to go down in Team slayer but it won't. Late twenties and I'm in over my head.

And yet we cant seem to level up in tem slayer at all no matter how many games we win

Played about 10 games yesterday almost all completely latency free. it made such a refreshing change and I really enjoyed it.

[Petrousgyre]

That's custom games, right? With friends who you know that have decent connections. Playing randoms is a whole different ball game. They could have 512kBit connections for all I know. Matchmaking is a connections lottery, even with the 'look for best connections' option ticked. I don't like it.

Oddly I had the reverse problem last night, playing custom games with a bunch of UK based forum chimps and found myself lagging horribly all night. Switched to lone matchmaking and it was all fine and dandy. I'm on a 24Mb line so never normally have issues. Curious.

[Soi]

Sorry for the long post. In summary, upload bandwidth is often not the most important factor in determining who is the best host.

There are two factors that contribute to whether you make a good Live host. The first is upload bandwidth. Upload bandwidth is important as the host needs to be able to send the every player the data of every other player. If the host doesn't have enough bandwidth, then everyone lags like hell and players tend to be dropped by the game. But if the host has enough upload bandwidth, having more doesn’t help.

So for a Team Doubles game, with only 4 players, upload bandwidth is not going to be the most important factor in determining the "best" host, as everyone is likely to have enough upload to cope. Upload bandwidth will come into play with a 8v8 game though.

The second, and in many cases most important, factor that contributes to whether you make a good Live host or not is latency (or packet delay). This is often misunderstood, because lots of people confuse bandwidth with "speed". So they think a "24meg" connection is fast. Leaving aside that a "24meg" connection refers to your download rather than upload, more bandwidth does not mean lower latency.

Latency is how long each packet takes to get to you, and is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). You might have a huge bandwidth (the amount of data you can receive per second) but a high latency (how long an individual piece of data takes to get to you).

An easy way to think of this is to consider the postal service as the Internet. The amount of letters your postman can carry is your bandwidth, and how long it takes him to get from the depot to your house is the latency. You might have a postman that can carry lots of letters but travels to your house via a long route (high bandwidth, but poor latency), or your might have a postman that can only carry a few letters but runs to your door (low bandwidth, but good latency).

For a small Halo game, it isn’t the amount of letters the postman can carry at once that is that important, but how fast he can get them to you is. For large games (8v8), the amount of data being transmitted at once becomes most important. High latency may be the fault of your ISP (some are simply faster than others at routing stuff) or it may be that you are physically far away from the other players. Electricity takes time to travel around the place. For example, your data will always take longer to get to the US than it will to get to someone in the same city.

I made a thread for this will people posting their results over at NTSC-UK. Thread can be found here:

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?t=71173

The interesting thing about those results is that there are quite large variations in latency. In fact the person with the highest upload bandwidth, has quite a poor latency to both the UK and the US as he is based in Norway. Conversely, a bloke with an upload of only 188kb/s has great latency to both the UK and the US. For a small Halo game with other UK players, the guy with the much lower upload will make the best host.

[Pob]

that's excellent Soi, I'll run those tests later. I think most people understand that it's the physical distance that causes the most lag-based problems rather than the width of the pipe.

So what's the maximum download/upload speed you should need for a smooth game of Halo? Was the old broadband standard of 512K connections back in the Halo 2 days actually more than enough? Is the upload speed that most UK ISPs offer more than enough if you're not hosting?

Presumably the voice-chat takes up a lot of the 'pipe'. Are 4v4 games, with their open voice-chat, likely to be more laggy than 5v5 (press-to-speak) because of the voice-chat? Or does it really all come down to physical distance?

One thing I can't understand is why, when I play co-op with my mate down the road, it's fairly sluggish, and pauses frequently. Surely we both have good enough connections to handle all the data going back and forth?

[Straps]

Ok, the new melee system really can go fuck itself. In Halo 2, I'd take a few 'it looked as though I melee'd first but I guess latency says otherwise' situations as a given; even though I've had enough practice with leading, they're still going to happen. But now they're happening several times a game, and for a different reason. The melee attack is supposed to be your get-out clause for close range combat where timing is key, not 'who can take the extra pixel of shield off the other guy then melee after the other guy has hit you'. Hmmm. And what's going on with the ranking system? Other people have said it, but we've won fuckloads of games on the trot and barely ranked up. I don't care about the number, I just want to play evenly matched, er, matches.

Though I should probably counterbalance all that by saying that some of the maps I previously thought were duffers (Narrows, Guardian and Isolation) I now realise are actually all quality maps.

[Phelan]

I was wondering why I was getting killed when I obviously attacked and melee'd first and now i know. Makes sense but it fucking annoying and I'll have to change my fighting style to make up for it now. Once I got them down I would rush in and melee but now it seems to be better to keep shooting and only go for it at the last minute.

As for hosting Meerman I'm in Aus and find that I have only had lag once or twice when playing against people in the UK or the US. I have a 24megabit connection with a 1megabit upload speed.

As far as ranking seems to go it seems quite fair as I keep meeting people who are on par with my skill level. I have 26 on lone wolves and am ranked Captain. Most of the people I'm playing against are the same and there have only been a few games where I have played either amazing players or terrible ones.

I like the fact that you can rank up either by having a high number AND X amount of XP or the fact that some people just play so many games that they end up with loads of XP but it takes them longer to rank.

[Meers]

Well veloS witnessed the latency horror along with me this weekend, so I am not going crazy it seems.

Halo 3 will be traded in for CoD4 in due time.

[A Hen]

The melee attack is supposed to be your get-out clause for close range combat where timing is key, not 'who can take the extra pixel of shield off the other guy then melee after the other guy has hit you'. Hmmm.

Yes. Since it's based on whoever has the lowest shields, in a one-on-one when you close the range between you there may as well be no melee button, as you could just keep shooting each other and there would be the same outcome. The only difference is when one of you melees and the other doesn't. But nearly everyone does, so that's a moot point.

[Timmo]

that's excellent Soi, I'll run those tests later. I think most people understand that it's the physical distance that causes the most lag-based problems rather than the width of the pipe.

So it's length that matters and not width, after all?

[Guest]

so what can you do to improve latency, after checking mine looks pretty bad.

[A Hen]

so what can you do to improve latency, after checking mine looks pretty bad.

How did you find out what your latency was? Or do you just mean it seemed bad when you played the game?

[Guest alisdair]

so what can you do to improve latency, after checking mine looks pretty bad.

It depends on what the cause of the problem is. What do your results look like?

If your pings to UK sites are low, but your US ones are high, then it's almost definitely your ISP's fault. If your pings to UK sites are high or inconsistent, it could be something in your house -- torrents, poor telephone extensions, wireless router on the wrong channel.

[Meers]

Right, I've got the videos to prove my latency problem now. To be posted tomorrow, because I forgot to upload them to my share last night.

[therearerules]

That melee info makes a lot of things clear to me now. Cheers.

[Jumble Jumble]

Hang on a minute, what did the melee button do before then?

[Straps]

It dealt out a definite amount of damage at the exact iinstance that it connected. Now the damage dealt can vary depending on your opponent's shields, and it's not necessarily at the point you press the button, they give your opponent a window to get one in as well.

Which is clearly a great system.

[Jumble Jumble]

What do you mean, the damage can depend on your opponent's shields?

[Kryptonian]

He's described it badly.

What he means is that it's not necessarily the first person to melee who will win. If the 2nd person melees afterwards but has more health, they will survive and kill the other dude.

[Puck]

He's described it badly.

What he means is that it's not necessarily the first person to melee who will win. If the 2nd person melees afterwards but has more health, they will survive and kill the other dude.

Why do people think this is wrong? Sounds fair enough to me, but as I never really got in to the first two games I have nothing to compare it with.

[Tangent]

When I was cycling through thte different types of armour I saw that one was particularly good for close range combat. I took this to mean melee, and since I switched to that I *think* I've won more melee battles. Maybe I've just convinced myself of that, but worth a shot...

[Guest alisdair]

Why do people think this is wrong?

Because it's different from Halo 2, basically. Previously you could normally judge how much damage you had done, and when it was enough for a melee, you would win if your "melee" instruction reached the host before the other guy's. Now you can't win by meleeing as quickly as possible when you have no shields, and some skilled Halo 2 players don't like that.

When I was cycling through thte different types of armour I saw that one was particularly good for close range combat.

Armour permutations are entirely cosmetic, they don't affect the gameplay.

[MalevolentPanda]

Armour changes are purely cosmetic.

EDIT: yeah, slow.

[Puck]

Because it's different from Halo 2, basically. Previously you could normally judge how much damage you had done, and when it was enough for a melee, you would win if your "melee" instruction reached the host before the other guy's. Now you can't win by meleeing as quickly as possible when you have no shields, and some skilled Halo 2 players don't like that.

I can see how, having mastered one system, the new rules could be a bit of a pisser. Is it not the case then that should two people, who's shields have both been depleted to the point that a melee would be fatal, won't both die if they melee at the same time?