- gamertag: lli1
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Be honest ... not just now ... be HONEST!
I can't believe that Bungie has not come up with a way to fairly match players. This is very long, so, if you are not passionate about the subject, or don't just like to read a bunch of words, stop now. Go play a game or something. I only write this because Reach seems to be a continuation of a serious flaw, but Halo 3 is the ultimate example.
Here's the problem; a casual, social player decides they want to have some fun playing Halo 3 online. They start a match, and immediately get raped by a bunch of spawn camping MLG. So, they pick themselves up, start a new match, and what happens? A new group of rapists ruin that experience for them as well. There is no place they can go be placed with players of their skill level, so they decide instead to no longer enter the cages with those monsters, and further decide that is the last Bungie product they'll ever own because of the bad experience.
ARE YOU LISTENING BUNGIE? You are losing customers because you refuse to control the animals. You need to lock those animals up in cages with each other, and away from casual players that they can so easily -blam!-, and see how they like it.
Fact is, when a player sets up their user ID on XBL, they have to choose a gamer category. USE IT, Bungie! There is Family, Recreation, Pro, and, (for whatever reason I can not fathom), Underground. If Bungie would just keep those simple classifications separate, it would help a great deal. There will still be those anti-social sadists who will create a new ID, and place themselves in "Family". You have the answer for that, too, IF YOU'D USE IT PROPERLY, Bungie.
The most useless facet of match making in Halo 3 is Rank. Players are forced up in the ranks even if their skills don't improve. Ironically, this is somehow supposed to keep the animals away from the tourists. Instead it raises the tourists to the rank of animal, even if they don't have a taste for -blam!-. Quit promoting bad players to Generals, and you'll have a lot more bad players getting together to play against other bad players, and therefore a lot more players liking the game, instead of hiding from it.
How does that happen, though? The Ranking idea has merit, it's just not based on really accomplishing anything. If you happen to be on a winning team, even if you were the guy with a -30 K/D, you're going to get rated toward a promotion. A promotion you don't deserve, a promotion you probably don't want, but eventually, just by being a very bad player on a winning team enough times, you become a General. Get off of that idea, Bungie! It simply DOES NOT WORK.
What does work is the fact that you are keeping stats on almost anything stats can be kept on. I wouldn't be surprised if you could tell how many projectiles an given player has fired over their career. So why can't you figure out which players are bad, and which deserve promotions. A promotion should be something desired, not feared.
You keep scores, for sure. Why is that not useful in match making? It's what players are looking at to determine who is good and who is bad on their team while waiting for the match to start. How can the players be so good at it, but you, Bungie, are so bad at it?
One idea I had is to only give rating toward a promotion to the top 50% of the winning teams players, (which in Lone Wolf would give only one player per game rating toward a promotion), and likewise move the lowest 50% of the losing team toward a demotion. Social Big Team is why I decided that method does not go far enough. I don't know how many times I've seen a team carried by just one or two rapists on their team. I can tell you it is far more times than I've seen a match end with everyone close to each other in score, and that should be Bungie's goal in match making for every match.
So I realized the answer might be far more simple than 50%. The answer might be ONE. Only one player per match should be given rating toward a promotion, and one player per match should be given rating toward a demotion. That will work out in any scenario, including the objective oriented matches, such as Capture The Flag. If you don't perform the objective and just run around trying for the highest K/D, you should get demoted. The team has a job to do, and you weren't doing it. The problem with that is; it could take a long time to get promoted and demoted. What exactly is that a problem? The way I see it, it's not a problem, but desired. It should take a long time to get promoted or demoted, and not just forced in a whirl wind because you got to play a bunch of games on one day when you happened to have nothing to do. Still, there's better ways.
Bungie, when you have matches end with a score of 100 to 6, YOU FAILED BIG TIME, and it's your loss. Remember, as a game vendor, your goal is enthused players, not players scared away by sadistic, animal, rapists. Players are not going to magically become as good some players have managed to become, yet you seem to expect and demand it of players, and, worse, essentially say, "Go away and die. We don't want casual players like you here." So, many of us go away, but we don't die ... the game does due to lack of players. We don't buy your next big release, because we know you don't know how to do match making, and we want to be on a fair field. We buy a product from another vendor, and forget about your little company. We won't come back to a company that tries to force us to be top notch players. Some of us don't have the time to just sit in front of our XBox honing our skills to become as good as you want us to be. The ones that do are the real losers ... I mean in real life. Some of us don't have the Internet bandwidth to be "Host", (another subject all together). Some of us just want to be able to sit down now and then and have a little entertainment without feeling like our colon has been turned inside out.
However, Bungie, you don't seem to use score toward match making. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting you guy's had to determine how match making would go. Only I would have fallen off the wall many times in laughter. I know that someone stood up and said, "By making them play with better players they will be happy to become better themselves". You Bungie people that were at that meeting know who it was that said it, but, my question to you is; why were you sheepish or foolish enough to agree with them?
That leaves us users with only one single tool given to us to try to avoid those rapists, but it seems to be one of the weakest features we have, security-wise. I say that because it seems that so many have somehow found the ability to hack that. It's not provided by Bungie, but by XBL. It's the Avoid/Prefer Player function. It's all us casual players have to try to get a fair match, and the rapists abilities to hack that makes it all but useless, too.
I'm going to name names here. These are just a few of the players that are hacking player Reps, or have had their Rep cleansed for them by some friend hacker. This is just a partial list, as there are some others I suspect, but I have not kept the proper stats on, yet. System Tampering is supposed to result in the player losing their account, but these people seem to get away with it scott free:
Maple Gunman
Steezy Gunman
VISIO
DominizZzle
NuttY OnE
zzZCallMEGodZzz
Z05412491156987
BrosBumpinBalls
Big Dro Hit
DeviousDeeds
two Ds and an F
VIOLENTINE
FEA5T
wi IMPULSE iw
Visibilities
ll Fierce lI
yippykayay44
soglob
AirDaddynator
haha ur easy
haha u are easy
x FACADE x
As I said, some of these people may be having their Rep tampered with by other players, but only in collusion, as they are often seen together in pairs or worse. In other words, it is likely not all of the people above deserve to have their account removed, because they might not even be aware that a fellow rapist tampered with the system to clear their Rep, as it may have been done by someone on their team while they were tampering with their own Rep. I DON'T KNOW. What I do know is; all of the people above have been set to "Avoid" by me, and I have had to do it to them repeatedly ... sometimes twice in the same day.
So, the "Avoid Player" function alone can not keep casual players online to the game. It could if it was not so easy to tamper with, as proven by the individuals named above. It could if Bungie kept track of it and helped XBL enforce it.
BTW, I'm sure to get hate mail from the people above or their friends. Know in advance, that's okay. I don't care. I hate you all. It's only fair for you to hate me back. If I had my way, you'd all lose your accounts and have to buy a new Xbox with a new MAC address to ever get on again. I have the justifications, yet you have no justification for any retribution against me. I've done nothing to you but exposed here one of your many inequities and lack of noble or moral integrity. Not one of you can dispute that what I have said happened has happened. You have cheated me and many others.
THANKS, BUNGIE!