Console Online Setup - Farce or Genius

Rb

I was reading on another forum recently about peoples opinions of the online setup of COD4, in particularly on PSN but Xbox was included.

Some argued that it was genius, given that there was no servers to be maintained and that by hosting it on a players console it meant there was a much better spread of games for the players.

Others argued that it was a farce given that
-There's no Ping information, or where the game is being hosted, so you could be playing on someones console in the US and therefore those playing in the US would have an advantage due to lag.
-The fact that if a player is on a losing team and happens to be hosting, as soon as he quits the game is killed
-The fact that if anything goes wrong with the host(players) connection, everyone suffers the consequences and it can kill the game
-There's no ability to vote players out, be it for team killing in hardcore, screaming down the mic/being abusive towards other players etc.
-It throws you into games that are already running and you're stuck onto a losing team
-No choice in what map is played

Tbh, I'm in the latter camp. I really feel like IW/Activision could have done a better job when designing the online setup for the game.
The host leaving the game has to be one of the most annoying things I've came across as it happens so often, surely by now they could have came up with some way of fixing this?
I've seen on the Xbox that it will sometimes rehost games, which is pretty cool but I don't know how often it does this.


I like the fact that, given that there's no fixed servers which need to be maintained, there's so many games running but I really think we should be given some sort of lobby to choose which game we want to jump into, along with the information on the host (i.e location/ping times/etc).

We really shouldn't be being thrown into games that are about 30 seconds from completion (and you're always on the losing side) also imo.

Also, how is it that the game has been out for so long, yet there's still no way to mute people in lobby? As is, you've to mute them every time a new game starts, which is a bit shít considering theres always good reason to mute them in the first place.

So what do you think? Happy with the way things are or...?

silvine

I'd argue that Halo online is run a lot better than COD4. You can do many of things you mentioned above (mute other players, transfer hosts etc). And you don't get booted when the host quites.

However, for COD4 has some unique multiplayer aspects such as detailed weapons challenges and a great ranking system.

Both developers could learn from each other.

Cuddlesworth

I think its a matter of cost, given that there are about 150k+ players online at any time, creating and maintaining servers to Cater for that would require something along the lines of a extra subscription.

The current system although flawed it a good way to accommodate that many players at once without incurring a extra cost.