Bandwidth Test before choosing a lobby host

Most multi player games are initially plagued with lag. Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, etc.

Gears of War 2 started testing connections before lobbies were created and the games got way better. It'll never be perfect for any game. There will always be lag for different reasons. The host could be on a good home WiFi and then suddenly their 4 siblings jump on YouTube or iTunes with their laptops.

I know some people don't like the idea of bandwidth testing to weed out the slower connections but I think it makes the game WAY more enjoyable for the other 11 people who don't get host. This is one of the first games I've played where host doesn't have a seem to have a noticeable damage increase at all. It's nice.

On the flip side, if I join a match and my player jumps backwards in place several times or if I shoot at a pro and he doesn't take damage, I quit. My team of 4-5 always leaves with me. I have no tolerance for a host on Walmart internet. No one on my team does.

Add a bandwidth test (FTW) and you'll see a lot fewer quits during the beginning of a match.

I also think you should add a monetary penalty for rage quitters but make the penalty take effect after 2-3 minutes of joining which should be long enough to determine if a players connection is garbage.

Just my two cents.

EDIT: I just realized this post might be better in the Wishlist Forum.

This sounds like a good idea. If you don't have sufficient bandwidth, you shouldn't host. Even bandwidth testing people once a week to see if they qualify to host would be plenty.

What's bugging me is how do you even get to be a host?

It's not like Halo or CoD where you create a game. As far as I can see you just select "quickmatch" and that's that. I didn't think people could host by choice. I assumed it was first in the lobby was the host. You could hardly penalise people for that? :?

From what I gather, host is selected by necessity. Here's what else I noticed. Host priority SEEMS to be given to "the lone wolf". Whenever I have 2 or more people in a lobby, we never get host. We almost always join some loner who's been sitting in a lobby waiting for joins. Then the game starts, it lags, we leave and the host remains....alone....waiting for more unsuspecting people to fall into his web because he knows he has host and doesn't want to give up or else he's too dense to realize that people are leaving faster than they join because his connection is too awesome for them to handle (sarcasm).

A test would be great. I would also like to see the ability to host a public game right on the menu. I have a 14mbp connection that is bulletproof.

When running games like Modern Warfare when I was the host, every player would have 3-4 bars. I never hear anyone complain about lag.

I would love to be able to just select "Host a public match" and play more then 3-4 matches before getting kicked back to the main menu.

Host always goes to someone on the Hotshots. I've been playing games with a full complement of 6 people, and for some strange reason, we are always the Icemen. There is some fishy coding going on in there.... :?

Could someone from Uber explain the technical details behind the host selection process?

I played all three Halos and TF2 on their respective launch days, and I don't remember lag being a serious issue with any of them. MNC seems to have a bit more of an issue with this than other similar games...

Both of those games have servers. MNC is peer to peer. Lag is caused by the host possibly on a slower connection than yours.

I understand why MNC has lag issues, but understanding it doesn't help my enjoyment of the game at all.

The problem here is that a gamer can pick up a copy of The Orange Box at Electronics Boutique for $20 and have no lag at all, while MNC costs $18 (cndn), and is extremely laggy.

I love the MNC concept, but the lag makes a great many games unenjoyable.

I don't see as many games with dedicated servers anymore which is a shame but I can speculate that it's a cost issue or perhaps they didn't think MNC would get this popular. Since it is a peer-to-peer game, I still think bandwidth test is the way to go. Wouldn't you say so?

I completely agree something needs to be done about the lag, it is borderline ruining the game. Grapples work like crap in pretty much every game. About 50% of the games are so laggy they are downright unplayable on weekends. The game doesn't even indicate the host and connection quality in the lobby so you can bail on the game or vote for a new host. On top of that host migration fails pretty much 100% of the time.

I don't know why they shy away from dedicated servers these days, but it is a stupid move. Really negatively impacts the quality of games. Something seriously needs to be done about bad hosts though.

I think Microsoft needs to man up and add "dedicated servers" to the requirements of any shooter.

If it chooses the host randomly, I'd love if there was an opt out of being a host option. Not that my 8MB connection is slow but I know there's faster out there and would probably be better games if someone with higher speeds was hosting. I chose my ISP for PING but wouldnt bet my life they were consistantly good. That said, I can't recall ever being the host.

Today (Sunday) was horrible. Every game had someone with either a horrible connection as host, a blatant standby user or a Pro using some type of exploit. Looks like it is back to MW2 for me.

As far as I can tell it does what Cod 4 did back in the day before they mixed it up.
MNC gives host to the party leader or single player who creates a new lobby.

Which is actually awesome if you have a community of players who know this and have the person with the best connection form the party and then get a lobby.

Of course in reality land... you get some tosser who hosts for eight hours straight on his 56k connection based in Nigeria simply because he lucked out and got a new lobby.

Whom it's guaranteed you will be put back with for the next five attempts at finding a game.

Sadly enough it is back to MW2 for me as well, being from NZ and playing Americans for seven hours yesterday getting one good game in which the host promptly quit after I 26-5ed them = last straw. My last game last night I ended up going 13-8 and my bullets couldn't physically cause damage if a player was moving even tho you could see the impact, this happens for probably around 75% of my games because I always end up on American host.

Gaming like it's 1998, I honestly don't know why I use live anymore, if you live outside the US it's worthless, where's the god damn "Local only" toggle. Actually why is it even an option for me to be paired up to a US host when I'm playing an FPS, do the devs or MS think this is what anyone wants?

I totally understand the frustration. We literally spent an hour either trying to find a match or playing on someones lousy dial-up/DSL internet connection only to have them quit out before we could get paid. I can navigate the menus with my eyes CLOSED, I have the quit, start lobby, invite party actions memorized.

I usually host the lobby for all of my friends because I have a direct fiber connection and it's faster than anything else most others can get. They know this, I know this. Two of my friends are in the UK, one is in Boston, I'm in Texas and the 2 times I've been fortunate to get host, it was awesome.

I'm going to place my faith in the devs that this next title update will improve things. If you quit in the middle of a match, you should get host banned for at least a day or two. I'd prefer a week but that's just because I never quit in the middle of a match if I'm host.