- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Personally, I would've rather had a leaderboard that wasn't edited than no leaderboard at all. The ONLY things that you did by removing the leaderboards is take away the point of boosting (yank yank), piss people like me off who actually earned their rank, and show the world that you guys are beaten by cheaters. All you had to do was tweak your MM system a little to get rid of boosting, because modders and standbyers will (eventually) get banned and therefore automatically removed from the leaderboards.
Granted that I'm not an experienced programmer yet, but is it really that hard to make a big red flag pop up whenever one person/clan wins against the SAME person/clan 40 times in a row!?
Leaderboards gave me a realative idea of how I compared to people that were not on my friends list. That was a good thing since it isn't very likely that someone is going to add you to their list if they were WAY better than you, it just wouldn't make sense. Your friends list is a narrow list of people (100 out of hundreds of thousands) that you either know in real life, were of similar skill and were not jerks, or met through another friend. Now what? I guess the only place to be known or know who anyone is at those MLG tourneys, which are all over the country, cost money(i think), and take a lot of time. Sweet, that's much better than showing how i can win on my own time, in a wide array of situations, in the comfort of my own home for a small amount monthly.
(If all you can say to me is "stop caring" please don't reply)
Checklist for a better XBL:
Two month free cards:
I've noticed that XBL has finally gotten smart and GREATLY reduced the number of 2 month free cards that are available. It took XBL a year to do it, but they finally figured the fuel source from which cheaters drew from. Why worry about getting banned when I can just reach into my pile of free trials and start another. You hooked people, you did your job, now stop being so generous : )
Partying up:
Why do you guys let new accounts party up with much higher levels? If you make a new account, you should have to prove yourself all over again by slowly moving up the ranks with people around your level. Only let a party of people that are within X levels (5 or 6?) of the HIGHEST person in the room. If someone in the room wasn't within X levels than the party would get angry at the lowest level or the highest level for not being in the right range; Viola! Maybe acceptions for MM types like BTB since the more people in the party, the bigger difference in level will likely be. If someone wants to go through the trouble of making 3-4 accounts with their buddies to "pwn some N00b$", more power to them, because thats 3-4 less 2 month free cards out there to be abused.
Dedicated servers:
I firmly believe that if Bungie had spent the extra dollar to make dedicated servers in the begining or somewhere around there, that it would've cost them about the same as all of the research for anti-cheating, steps for banning, complaint handling, and money lost from people playing other things because of cheating. At least they'd have way fewer headaches to worry about and a happier community. You can't tell me that if the games were played on your servers (hell, your xboxes) that you couldn't monitor things better and immediately respond.
Also, the "advantage" of host would be equal for teams so one guy wouldn't be able to snipe/BR across a large map, use shotgun better, and win every melee battle.
Penalties:
You should definately be doing more about banning credit card #s rather than just accounts. AT LEAST do not let other accounts with the same cred # play Halo 2 MM, because even though 2 months are getting rarer they still do exist. I've read a lot about this subject and found that MAC addresses and IP addresses wouldn't work because of the off chance that the person sells their Xbox or moves to have someone else be banned wrongly.
People say that you will never do this strictly for $$$$$ reasons, because "a cheaters money is still money." Please say it isn't so.
DO NOT REMOVE ALL RANKS:
Though it maybe true that cheaters will greatly decrease if ranks are removed, it is also true that players in general will greatly decrease. It is not a valid argument to make ranks invisible, because ranks are one of the things that made Halo 2 so popular in the first place. Have you played training or multi-team? The chances of getting a "good" game are slim to none, because no one takes them seriously. Part of Halo 2's success is the quality of legit games in MM, so taking away the ability to see improvement would be a downward spiral of games. Cheaters don't ALL cheat to rank up, some do it for the hell of it or because they can. There are bad people in the world, but you shouldn't punish everyone because the bad ones exist. If that were true we should just nuke the human race because some people in the world are rapists and killers.
Rated M:
The game is rated mature, so why do I have to put up with 12 year olds? You can't expect impatient, ignorant, children to know exactly what is right and wrong or what the hell respect is, so why must the rest of us have to teach them these lessons. Plus it's not like we can do this easily as they scream at us with preteen high pitched voices about how they had sex with our mothers (fathers?), how they hate minorities, or just scream/sing anything that comes to their underdeveloped, sick, one tracked, little minds. I really do wonder what percent of cheaters on Halo 2 are below the age of 17, becaues I'm sure it would be a very large number. This is more of a complaint at parents for buying them these programs/ games and stores for selling to minors (yes they are minors.)
At least make the mute option easier to use, as temporarily taking up the whole screen to mute someone is a free kill usually.
If anyone has anything intellegent to say I'd recommend msging me as this post will likely die out because of it's length. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. : )