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This post is for the people out there who have an internet connection that isn't very good, and have to play with a 'yellow bar' latency. For anyone who doesn't know what this is, when you are in matchmaking check the scores. See that little tower of bars next to your name? Most likely they will be green, meaning your connection is decent. For some people, however, they will be yellow or even red.
This represents latency, and while green bars are around 150 ms or less, yellow bars can be over 300. And this has a major effect on your Halo experience, making it EXTREMELY unfair for you.
You may think I'm over dramatizing it a bit, and yes I DO have terrible internet and therefore must put up with a yellow bar connection in 90 percent of my games. But it's not my fault, I am soon to enter the army and therefore will be shipped around, so I can't have a fixed landline connection.
If you've never had to pkay with yellow bar, or only rarely, you probably don't know how much this affects gameplay. Let me point out the biggest flaws.
1. Using a battle rifle. Because your shots take a few moments to register, your opponent can fire off a few rounds in the gap when he is supposed to be dead, and if he kills you, those bullets are invalid and he survives. If you are good with the BR you can still win in low ranked BR matches, but get past 20 and it is incredibly frustrating. And rounds where everybody uses assault rifles are just dumb. You have a major disadvantage.
2. Beat downs. I hit him with my gun, I hear the crunch of it connecting, but I die because it hasn't registered yet and he beats me down instead. I know there is a small gap between the melee and the death even for green bar connections, but yellow bar is far larger. This makes close range combat frustrating because even if you get the kill the enemy will almost always melee you back and your shields will be down to zero, making you an easy kill for any enemies nearby. And playing Swords in Lone wolves is horrible, if you are going head on with your opponent you are almost always screwed. Your sword will connect, but he will kill you instead.
3. Throwing grenades. Almost every Halo player will tell you that grenades are one of the most important parts of Halo. They can change thebattle in a second.Yet yellow bar connection players have lag when they toss a grenade, meaning that you pull the left trigger your charcters hand does the throwing movement, but your grenade will not get thrown until a few moments later. This makes it incredibly difficult to place your grenades in the right place. Say an enemy is chasing you. You go around a corner and throw a grenade on the ground. Usually it will take down his shields, but because the grenade has not left your hand yet it will hit the ground late and the opponent will have walked past it, thus no damage is done. This may sound like something that doesnt happen often but it happens a LOT. Timing grenades is stressful. And because your movement has not completely registered over the servers, you may be closer to a thrown grenade than you seem to be on your screen, and therefore take damage.
This stuff is the reason yellow bar connections are so frustrating. Not to mention being shot when you run around a corner to evade enemy fire but the game has not registered that you have rounded the corner yet, and you die. Yellow bar players really do have it tough, and lose a lot of battles that they actually deserved to win. If there are any 50s out there that are yellow bars, my hat goes off to you. I am a 30 in lone wolves and its tough to rank up. Halo 3 online competitive is flawed. It is less about skill and more about who has the latest fibre optic internet speeds.