- TheCyberFreak
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- Intrepid Mythic Member
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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
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XBox Live party chat creates lag.
The volume and type of data being sent over the internet between Host and Guest consoles is carefully designed by programming Engineers. If your lucky the Engineer doing the work has specialized experience in balancing network traffic. To do this effectively and eek out the best performance possible, certain tradeoffs are going to made in the game. We all know that Push-to-Talk in BTB games is one of these tradeoffs. Proximity voice could be considered another example because it reduces the amount of network traffic by not sending voice data for people beyond a certain range.
The problem here is that XBox Live Party Chat circumvents these design parameters and the result is added lag in the game. With every heavy breath, background noise and pointless comment being transmitted across the internet all the time the available bandwidth for game play data is being restricted.
A secondary problem is that the game dynamics are being circumvented creating imbalance. As one example, there's a period immediately after dying in which you cannot communicate directly with your teammates. This is an intentional feature designed to increase tactical awareness and to prevent a team from having omniscient awareness of the movements of the other team during a critical moment. Party Chat scews up this game element, allowing all people to communicate all the time. While it's advantageous to the team using Party Chat, it's not what the game designers intended.
Is it possible to disable Party Chat during online gameplay in Halo: Reach?
I don't see any reason not to allow it in pregame and postgame lobbies but once the game begins party chatters should be shunted to the regular game chanel for communication.
What do you think? Does this seem fair? Do you think it's possible for Bungie to implement?
[Edited on 07.11.2009 10:02 AM PDT]