- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I'm with the OP on this one.
I am tired of Bungie's online grief-making system.
I'm tired of dealing with 2nd accounters. Those who should be playing at a higher level due to greater skill deciding to play down, by way of a 2nd account, in order to beat up on lesser skilled players.
I once had trust in matchmaking's ability to find me a fair match based on the merits of TrueSkill. However, with little or no incentives for players to stick with and play upon their primary accounts, players, left and right, are starting over.
It is the rare game where I don't bump into a 2nd accounter. Again, I'm not trying to win every game. I'm in it to have fun. These days, such a thing (fun) is a difficult to quantify when I am being smacked down at every turn due to playing a supposedly evenly matched team of nothing but heavily skilled and experienced players.
So that, just like the OP, when I had seen that ODST will bring with it a new mode (Firefight) which allows me and my buds the ability to play online against AI in a constantly changing battlefield...
I can imagine playing ODST Firefight a whole heck of a lot. I can imagine playing this kind of mode more than matchmaking in general. That is, at least, until Bungie finds a way to provide incentives for players to stick with their primary account and not play down in order to grief the average gamer.
And to the issue regarding whether or not cheating exists in Halo 3 matchmaking... DDos, modders, IP hacks, EXP boosting... What are these if not forms of cheating? Though not as rampant as what you would expect to find on a PC game, there are still cheaters here in the console world... And Bungie, though they have made good by keeping the Banhammer tuned, has seen their fair share of such.