- whoppersandwich
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- Exalted Legendary Member
Posted by: LIME31
I got his sarcasm...one person has to implement sarcasm and then you get a pile of terrorist chipmunks crashing your party, not fun at all..
200k? Thats how many players are on in Halo 3 nowadays. Sit down children and let us reminisce. Although this a story about me - this one goes for many of us (give or take a few months)
It begins on that fateful day. November 11th 2004. I was 14, finishing school that day(many had decided to take the day off) to get H2. Mum surprised me by getting it for me. So I was ready to roll as soon as I got home. Campaign was awesome (even with the ending). And after awhile I got XBL. It started slow for me, I generally stuck to LAN parties as many of my friends didn't even have Xbox's or broadband.
The glory days of Halo 2 were easily in the year 2005 - it was common to have about 500 000 players on Halo 2 for most of the time. It was rare to see anyone in anything apart from H2 when the friends list was opened.More and more succumbed to Xbox Live and Halo 2, at first me and my friends played without giving much thought to what we were doing. Trying to see what the party system could do and just having fun. Of course it didn't take long for us to realise that higher ranks were out there and that we could achieve with a bit of careful thinking. So we began aiming for that, but it proved challenging to win game that were filled with lag (we live in Australia). As we looked for ways to combat this we found the power of the host. We strived to keep this power, playing with those with better internet connection who lived in our city (perth), getting jobs to pay for said connections and hoping we wouldn't get hit by the wave of cheating we all new as standbying. The blue screen was feared and adored at the same time. As we ranked higher and higher it was all we got. The host was slipping for our grasp. Of course when Bungie looked down upon her creation she saw something had gone wrong - something had to be done.
The new age had arrived. Ranks were reset, the game retuned and standbyers were persecuted and stoned (well, they may as well have been). As we begun to climb the ranks again it all seemed to calm and easy. Then the new maps came out - to just about all of us, the new maps were a warm addition to the already wonderful ones we had. A bit of extra fun, thats all we thought of it - but we thought wrong. Modding now proliferated the playlists. We played hard in a game that was now all to hard to play. The mysterious 2 month men were in and out and offered their services for a nominal fee which we declined. Many of those I'd met had fallen and tried it out. In good time this second wave of cheating would be destroyed by Bungie. We just held out until help arrived.
During the hey-day of modding the Halo 2 forums were a complete blamfight. Even though everyone knew the point of contact email address. It seemed necessary to rave and rant on the forums. The n00b combo was also a massive thing, the PP and BR combo could decimate and many wanted it to stop. I personally had no objections and if it came my way I used it. The big craze that went along with it was superjumps. A way to jump incredibly high (often into inaccessible vantage points) that caused a massive uproar in the community because it couldnt be fixed. The big fanfics had also reached their pinnacle, and breathed hope on a people waiting for the crush of modders. Then we started to see more standbyers, and more laggy games. How could this happen, we asked ourselves. We almost thought the auto-update had stopped working - or perhaps it had a quota. But no one saw what was coming next.
By 3rd quarter 2005 many had come crying to the forums with strange stories of brutal lag and being removed from games, stories we tended to ignore. BF2 had come out on the console and a fair few flocked to play that (while still maintaining rank of H2). Didn't have the same effect as COD4. BF2 being a side-game that many played once in awhile to get away from what was now stress in H2(somehow it was a stress everyone desired - we kept coming back). Modders were being taken down, but the 2 month men still came to boost others up once a while. We were still on rank hitting the high 20's. The word 'bridger' now jumped into forums now and then, a term I didn't particularly bother about as the amount of crybabies had caused me to stop reading many posts on Bungie. The leaderboards had been removed due to cheaters but we still new there were legit 30's, 40's and 50's out there. And we attempted to match and beat them. Once again the host was slipping out of our grasp in very strongly into Americas. Games became impossible to win and few ventured into team slayer out of fear of losing their precious 26. The school holidays had arrived, as 15 year olds there seemed nothing better to do than play Halo 2. But MM had been tainted - somehow getting host (or simply just a decent connection was impossible). The banned modders provided services however, custom games on crazily modded maps were absolutely awesome. Games like banshee ball (40min oddball on gemini where plasma pistols created banshees that could fly way outside the invisible walls) were awesome fun. And MM became a distant friend we came into once in awhile (playing non TS games). It was all fun and games once again.... until we realised the power of the host.
In the Christmas holidays a good friend of mine told me of this 'bridging'. And how it could grant host to people. We researched and tried it out. After a few bad attempts it was on. We didn't team standby, we were gonna play this smart and fly under the radar. The majority of players out there were american. All we needed was host to be able to win. We punched through the ranks skyrocketing into the high 30's. It was just win after win after win. The modder/bridger combo became more common (a modder who had host had more modding power) although we didnt particularly entertain modders. We sorta wanted modders to come verse us. They gave us an excuse to abuse our newfound power. Lagging people out and team standbying those who had tormented us before gave us great satisfaction.
By 1st quarter 2006 we decided we had now reached terminal rank. Everyone else there was a bridger - games were just plain impossible to find. My friends hungry for power couldn't stand the lack of rank, they wanted to climb into 50. They began to boost. As they climbed away from me we all began to find comfort in customs once again. Team SWAT and hardcore had also been introduced and we began to get into those as well (bridging for host there too).
Most of these friends had their account permabanned from MM - they were fine with that however and became the 2 month man. Obtaining 2 month trial codes for their services. Many of the friend in my friends list were the same people.
2006 also brought the 360 (yes thats when it was released in Australia) and me being an early adopter played H2 still on it. Halo 2 was still massive, a few had moved on - but came back in the end. Having more than 50% of your online friends playing a different game was rare. Time went by and H2 slipped down but still maintaining number 1 on Major Nelson's popularity list. Gears of War came, and slowly but surely - H2 fell back to second. Then as we know September 25th 2007 came and a new era of retards and -blam!-s joined the fray. We began bridging (a lot harder to bridge in H3) got to 20 and realised it was quite pointless with the 'good connection'. And so we went from there.
EDIT:Wow, thats 20 minutes ill never get back...
[Edited on 04.06.2008 9:18 PM PDT]