As good as it gets (Part 1)
As a heavy Xbox Live player, I find myself interacting with the scum of society much more frequently than I would like. It would seem that giving random opponents on the internet a voice as it were, is comparable to giving a monkey poop to fling at your face. Yes, my face has been sullied by this poop, caked in it. I am the poop king. I’m sorry, I went off on a tangent there, it won’t happen again…What I am trying to say here is that multiplayer gaming has entered a new era, what was once an exploratory new world filled with useful and helpful people has been transformed into a veritable cave filled with orc’s and goblins, where is Legolas when you need him. This two part article will attempt to point out some of the up’s as well as the down’s of Xbox Live multiplayer gaming, and how I believe it can be improved. I want my chocolate milk!
Something is wrong with parents these days. I can’t even begin to blame the children. I would love to do a study on the effects of bad parenting. Something is really wrong with society when I can encounter a healthy sampling of young people aged between 8-18, sitting in their homes, calling everyone within earshot racial epithets, lewd cursing, and sexual vulgarities. I wouldn’t be so concerned if this was somewhat of a random occurrence. Unfortunately in my 3 years of gaming on Xbox Live I have only met a handful of people in this age group that do not follow the formula aforementioned. Forget
There is an option to enable voice chat to be limited to people on your friends list only, or blocked entirely. This feature is horrifically buggy and most times I can not hear anyone on my friends list and I have to disable to feature, just to hear my friends. Silly me, how dare I try to only hear my friends! There is also the option of unplugging the microphone, right? Wrong, the sound defaults to your TV speakers if no microphone is inserted in the controller. Who’s bright idea was that? When I click the option to have voice only come out of my headset, that does not mean I want you to instead route the idiocy through my TV speakers! Voice chat is not all around a bad idea it can be very enjoyable with a group of friends, but why not put in a filtering system, perhaps to limit the levels of volume in which people can scream “I WANT MY CHOCLATE MILK!”
I am Jack’s increased Rank
One of the widely touted feature of Xbox Live is Ranking systems in place for many of their multiplayer games. Ideally this will allow you to only play with people within your own skill level, ideally… The side effect to encouraging ranked games is the dissolution of casual gaming. Players have become so obsessed with ranking that many times if you don’t have a certain rank you will be kicked from the game, or as is the case in Ghost Recon the teams will be stacked in such a way that all the supposed newbie’s are on one team. This makes pick up and play an extremely frustrating affair. The other unwanted side effect of ranking is a lowered pool of opponents once you reach a certain level. It can take an eternity to find opponents once you reach a certain rank, and which point I’m not challenging everything, I am challenging no one!
Due to the highly competitive spirit that ranking’s foster, I believe this has also contributed to a surge of quitters. People are afraid to lose. The majority of my time spent in Halo 2, Fight Night 3, and Ghost Recon is spent staring at the disconnect screen, as people rapidly quit out of the game once the balance of power has shifted into your favor. Rarely do games go to the finish line, instead midway through the match everyone simply leaves. One way in which this could be countered is by creating a system that enables players to join and play in games which are already in progress ala pc games. This would serve as an effective counter balance to the inevitable quitters.
In the next article we will discuss some of the positives of Xbox Live gaming, and where we believe the future of multiplayer games is headed. Stay tuned, same bat channel, same bat time.
posted by Ian White at
6:05 AM
5 Comments:
Honestly, I think even if you did away with the ranking systems, you would still have a lot of quitters. The ranking systems don't really cause quitters, they merely make them more noticeable. People are, by nature, very competitive. No one likes to lose, and some people are fiercely driven to win or whine trying.
By
Anonymous, at 8:16 AM
Quitters... BTB Skirmish on Halo 2 comes to my mind when you say that. Starts off as an equal 8 v 8 battle. The enemy team scores a flag capture and one of your team quit, everyone is chucked into the infamous blue disconnect screen. This is boring for some people and they leave because of it. The game returns and you have 4 people left on your team. They are the ones that could have fought on and maybe won if they had a whole team, but no, with 8 v 4 it's pretty obvious who is going to win. Most of the remainder of the team quit out. All but maybe one or two people remain, these people will fight to the end even though they know they have already lost, sometimes even they leave half way through the game when it becomes too annoying for them. This challenge in BTB Skirmish makes my level 22 worth a lot more, you could think of it as a medal for my perservierance. Games with lots of people are ruined by quitters, the balance of power is tilted so much that it becomes worthless trying to fight on.
By
Anonymous, at 8:42 AM
[...]Ian over at Straight Up Gaming in the first of a two-part article on the pros and cons of Xbox Live talks about the effects that the ranking systems of Live have on casual play.[...]
By
Anonymous, at 8:53 AM
Good points demag0gue and hypergrunt. It is unfortunate that competiveness is getting in the way of having fun.
By
Ian White, at 11:49 AM
Isn't that like your favorite movie or something? Anyway, about the Live chat-I'll come over at talk trash to 9 year olds while you kick butt on the game ;-) Seriously, that video was hilarious! Where did he learn to talk to his mother like that? I would have burned his XBOX.
By
Anonymous, at 6:15 PM
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