Live and dodgy netcode...

[Yoshimax]

Yeah I wasn't trying to say it was sorry - Just that cable tends to provide better results in my experience. I hardly ever suffer downtime and my line is always solid - As a result I normally host and don't get many complaints !!!

Live will only improve & evolve over time and hopefully we'll soon be enjoying the larger player battles - I believe Lost Planet is aspiring to 32 players !

[SubparMario]

Nobody ever claimed Live was a 'level playing field' with PCs. They're different systems. The advantage of Live is voice comms, friends lists, cross game invites, no need to seek out servers, etc. It's ideal for when a group of eight or so friends want to spend a night jumping from game to game and having a blast.

By level playing field I meant no XBL player having an unfair advantage over the other when playing games competitively.

I agree it's not a concern when playing casually or with friends. But if most games require a player hosted server, giving the host a zero ping, (latency obviously has a large affect on how well you can perform in certain game types) then a closed platform with the potential to be a very level playing field when it comes to serious competitive gaming has a fundamental flaw.

[Psyduck]

Yes Wush, but the 360 is not used for serious competitive gaming. And if it was, it'd be at LANs, just like with PC's.
Online PC gaming isn't level either, a higher spec PC will give you a better framerate, higher resolution, better draw distance, among other advantages. A "pro" mouse will cost ?50+, which not everyone can afford, and pings to a server can vary drastically, meaning some players still have a huge advantage over others. hence pro stuff going on at LAN events...or at least it was last time I was aware of it (which was a bit ago I admit)

[SubparMario]

Yes Wush, but the 360 is not used for serious competitive gaming. And if it was, it'd be at LANs, just like with PC's.

Surely it should be up to the players and how serious they want to get. Maybe you use the excellent community features to build up a rivalry with some dude in a different country and want to have an ultimate showdown. Or a website or forum have an online tournament. I can assure you that there is plenty of serious competitive gaming online with the PC.

Online PC gaming isn't level either, a higher spec PC will give you a better framerate, higher resolution, better draw distance, among other advantages. A "pro" mouse will cost ?50+, which not everyone can afford, and pings to a server can vary drastically, meaning some players still have a huge advantage over others.

I know >_< There are so many factors that play a part on the PC, that's why I thought it would be refreshing to see a truly (within reason) level environment for the 360.

[Yoshimax]

By level playing field I meant no XBL player having an unfair advantage over the other when playing games competitively..

The funny thing is I can host games with a 0 ping and still be royally shafted by better players - It's all about adjustment >_<

[Psyduck]

Yoshi - yeah you'll get shafted by better players, but you'd beat an equal player, hence it not being level.

Wush - I played a quake 2 mod called action quake pretty seriously many years ago on PC, and we had a game england vs canada. We played one match on an english server and one on a canadian server, that's the only way to make it fair. If you wanted to do a similar thing on live you could, just take it in turns to host to balance things out. The relative advantages for "home" and "away" would be different, but it's still the same thing. Doesn't matter if it's on live or on PC. The only way to make it truly level is to be on a LAN.

That said, live has brought out a new set of games to live play, things like top spin tennis, rockstar table tennis, all the fighters - doa, sf2, etc. where there is no host, just a peer to peer game, so each player has equal lag, and it is about as level as you can get.

[Yoshimax]

Psyduck you'd go bonkers mental playing Halo2 on live Lag-me-do.

[SubparMario]

Didn't know the fighters worked that way. I agree that online can often be a compromise but, regardless, I don't think they're making the most of it.

It would be cool if MS had big banks of dedicated servers in suitable locations that could host any game on demand. I'm not sure if they even make any profit from Live subs but they don't seem adverse to losing money.

[Psyduck]

I think it's the opposite Yoshi, I'm not all that bothered about lag. Before I took Action quake seriously it was Jedi Knight for me, and I was playing americans over dial up (and with a horrible ISP) with pings of 800ms - 1 second...

Wush, it would be cool, but I think they'll pretty much make nothing but profit on live subs, they don't actually provide that much that costs money for your sub, so they'll want to keep it that way. Plus, that creates problems about servers for aging games, less popular ones, non-microsoft games etc. It would have required a huge investment for say the launch of halo 2, but now those servers would all be sat doing nothing...

[SubparMario]

Yeah, I suppose. All I can think of is the money for the bandwidth used for demo/movie downloads, but I bet that's virtually free to a company like MS.

Each server could have the capability to dynamically host any game on demand, so you wouldn't have to worry about servers for old games sitting empty. I think Telewest/blueyonder did this a while back for the PC. You could buy time on a server and have it host any combination of games you wanted over that period.

[Psyduck]

there certainly used to be quite a few companies doing that back when I was into PC gaming - bout '98, my clan used to pay ?10 a month for an action quake server.

[EvilBoris]

A couple of the ubisoft games actually had an option to set up your console as a dedicated server, so if you had a good connection and you weren't using the console you could do the gaming community a favour.

I don't think dedicated servers providedby the developers is really an option, take a REALLY popular game like Halo 2, as I type their are 60 thousand people playing it.
It would cost an insane amount of money/upload/download you would need to run servers that would let everyone play.
I guess the subscription should cover that, but hey whatya gonna do?

MS are taking steps to integrate dedicated server systems into it's LIVE sdk so developers can more easily create MMORPG
In its prime H2 would have 200k people playing on it.