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The Official Halo 3 Thread

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EazyB said:
I'm going to be busy tomorrow so I won't be able to make customs (for the third straight week). Still looking for Atlas films for Ber Ber Creek (2 flag, team BRs/slayer, neutral assault) if you guys feel up for it. I also have a fresh version of Brouhaha and would love to know how it plays (one flag/bomb, use grav lifts to get into base). Anyways, hope y'all have a good 4th.
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I'm always willing to help out in customs. Personally I favor 4v4/5v5 style maps in Sandbox more anyways, since they usually get the most usage out of creating unique and well rounded bases/work.
 
Sai-kun said:
I second this. I think what you mean is that it's more like Relic, Dax. :lol
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No, it's "backwards." Not in difficulty (easy to get the flag, hard to capture it) but in layout and the structure of the map. In Relic, you had to walk past the flag spawn and go all the way to the end of the map and then go back in order to get the flag. In Utah Mambo, you reach the flag spawn last instead of having to pass by it in order to get it.
 
Smokey said:
As much as I play Halo I should probably know this....but how do you know exactly if you have host, or if somebody else does (and who that person is)?
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You check to see who has the most kills at the end of the game. :D

but seriously, umm I know on Construct and Guardian only host can destroy da flying thingers... I believe. Theres a bunch of ways to figure it out, I just don't know them all. I know host can't do a beatdown ball/flag glitch but offhost players can. H2 was a lot easier to tell because only grenade reloads worked offhost, if they didn't work you had host.
 
Got work late tomorrow so I'll probably miss customs. I haven't done custom games in a while too :(

Hopefully some of you will still be on for some BTB or something, like around 11pm CST.

I'm off on Bungie Day so that should be fun.
 
Smokey said:
As much as I play Halo I should probably know this....but how do you know exactly if you have host, or if somebody else does (and who that person is)?
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You can kinda find out by throwing nades. Off host nades come out a split second late.
 
xxjuicesxx said:
You check to see who has the most kills at the end of the game. :D

but seriously, umm I know on Construct and Guardian only host can destroy da flying thingers... I believe. Theres a bunch of ways to figure it out, I just don't know them all. I know host can't do a beatdown ball/flag glitch but offhost players can. H2 was a lot easier to tell because only grenade reloads worked offhost, if they didn't work you had host.
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In H2 all you had to do was hold down back as the match started and whichever name didn't have an X was host. In H3 you just can kinda tell.

Also, an update on the base to base flag thing on Valhalla. I tried it today, and I couldn't get the flag to drop in the fusion core. It would always go left or right of it. I assume it was because I wasn't host.
 
GM Bullfrog said:
In H2 all you had to do was hold down back as the match started and whichever name didn't have an X was host. In H3 you just can kinda tell.

Also, an update on the base to base flag thing on Valhalla. I tried it today, and I couldn't get the flag to drop in the fusion core. It would always go left or right of it. I assume it was because I wasn't host.
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Hmm, not sure about the host thing, but it does work. Not sure if I was host, but I joined a friend's game and tried it out. I was able to shoot the explosive and knock the flag right beneath secondary man-cannon's door and in front of the base directly.

A team tried it today against me and Backflip.
 
xxjuicesxx said:
You check to see who has the most kills at the end of the game. :D

but seriously, umm I know on Construct and Guardian only host can destroy da flying thingers... I believe. Theres a bunch of ways to figure it out, I just don't know them all. I know host can't do a beatdown ball/flag glitch but offhost players can. H2 was a lot easier to tell because only grenade reloads worked offhost, if they didn't work you had host.
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Well in Halo 2, couldn't you just hold back and whoever spawned first was host?
 
You can tell by the way the shots hit the players. Also, in the pit, the cameras in green box and sword will follow you as you walk by them if you're host.
 
i must say juices, from the BWU wording it looks like they... beat you???

anyways, i've already taken the necessary precautions to get the best probable chance of meeting up with any bungie employees in matchmaking for the 7th. i've looked up all their recent gamertags that they could possibly use and i've set them to 'prefer'
this is a joke. dont take it serious
. i'm also contemplating a GT change to 'ImAlwaysEpic'. Unlike juices, i'm always epic.

i'm gunning for you bungie. watch out, i'm out for blood.
 
Hurrah, I am no longer banned.

I am 35% Bungle, by the way.

I would also like to add that Team Flag is the only Double EXP weekend I ever play, and I too would welcome it as a permanent playlist.
 
Long-ass post about Bungie's shitty netcode:

I have read many, many complaints in this thread about "Bungie's netcode", "host" and "off-host", "shots not registering", etc. while banned over the last four weeks. All I can say is some of you are in desperate need of a crash-course in networking and latency. If you understood how these things work, and why most of the problems you experience are absolutely unavoidable and not at all Bungie's fault, then a lot of your rage and blather could be avoided.

For example: juices declaring everyone in New Zealand has bad connections. They don't have bad connections, dude, they're just further away from you (both geographically, and in terms of hops) and so the round-trip time of your packets increases. Hot tip: so does theirs. There is nothing Bungie can do about this. Bitching about it is like complaining to your airline that it's 4,000 miles from Detroit to Paris, and then going on to blame them for any turbulence or bad weather you experience on the flight.

I do wish XBL games were more transparent in how they display latency. I would guess a full green bar in Halo means a ping of, oh, say, <25ms and a single red bar is maybe >250ms, but that's just speculation. The general idea of hiding how networking works from the casual user is all well and good until the casual user throws his toys out of the pram because his shots aren't registering and its Bungie's "fault".
 
About host:
GM Bullfrog said:
In H3 you just can kinda tell.
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Tashi0106 said:
You can tell by the way the shots hit the players.
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This is all well and good, except...

Okay, so 95% of the games I play, nobody mentions host or who has it. (98%. Whatever.)

The remainder always has AT LEAST TWO GUYS BITCHING ABOUT SOMEONE HAVING HOST - BUT THEY'RE ALWAYS BITCHING ABOUT DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

I'm pretty sure that whether 'you can kinda tell', or whether the shots hitting the players changes or not, MOST PLAYERS HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

(At least at MY crappy level of play. :lol :lol :lol )
 
Shake Appeal said:
wow really? did your really take the time to type this out???
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That's kinda funny because I remember play halo(a game not designed to be played over the interwebs) leading with my pistol off-host on XBC with a ping over 150 ms and still having my shots register. But, on halo3 I can shoot my BR and light up his shield yet not one of the 3 round burst would register.

If you've ever used the sniper rifle on halo3 you would know that this issue has already been settled. Halo3 netcode = garbage.
 
Louis Wu said:
About host:

This is all well and good, except...

Okay, so 95% of the games I play, nobody mentions host or who has it. (98%. Whatever.)

The remainder always has AT LEAST TWO GUYS BITCHING ABOUT SOMEONE HAVING HOST - BUT THEY'RE ALWAYS BITCHING ABOUT DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

I'm pretty sure that whether 'you can kinda tell', or whether the shots hitting the players changes or not, MOST PLAYERS HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

(At least at MY crappy level of play. :lol :lol :lol )
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I guess I should clarify that I can tell if I have host (or a good ping to the host) or not by how my shots are landing. I can't tell who specifically (if not me) would have it though.
 
Louis Wu said:
About host:

This is all well and good, except...

Okay, so 95% of the games I play, nobody mentions host or who has it. (98%. Whatever.)

The remainder always has AT LEAST TWO GUYS BITCHING ABOUT SOMEONE HAVING HOST - BUT THEY'RE ALWAYS BITCHING ABOUT DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

I'm pretty sure that whether 'you can kinda tell', or whether the shots hitting the players changes or not, MOST PLAYERS HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

(At least at MY crappy level of play. :lol :lol :lol )
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I'm far from a good player or even a MLG fan but sometimes, not always, you can tell who the host is if one guy on a team manages to survive in a way that suggests he's either the luckiest son of a bitch alive or he's host.

I'll give one example that I can remember (it's been too long). I remember throwing a grenade at this dude, at the same time one of my team mates did. The grenades exploded, capturing him in the blast radius whilst he was trying to escape, but from both me and my team mates screen, the explosion got him. The enemy was an american (obvious from his pre game "pep talk"), as was my team mate, so latency wouldn't explain how me and my team mate both seen this guy fry.

Others in my team reported numerous "lucky" escapes from this guy, from grenades, to headshots and scatter fire. Everyone in the game was showing full green bars the entire time too.

No one was screaming "host" or anything, just "Why won't this monkey die?", only after the game, and the recollection of full green bars did we note it down to him being host.

So there are times, for sure, when the host is obvious, the more games you play, the more you'd come against such telltale games with a clear host, also, smaller games like doubles, make these chances rise more.
 
KevinRo said:
That's kinda funny because I remember play halo(a game not designed to be played over the interwebs) leading with my pistol off-host on XBC with a ping over 150 ms and still having my shots register. But, on halo3 I can shoot my BR and light up his shield yet not one of the 3 round burst would register.

If you've ever used the sniper rifle on halo3 you would know that this issue has already been settled. Halo3 netcode = garbage.
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1. Your experience of Xbox Connect is vastly, vastly different to mine. I won't call you a liar, but I never, ever played a game via XBC that wasn't effectively unplayable by today's standards.
2. Halo 1 is a simpler game than 3, sending considerably less information between players (especially physics information). Fewer packets means less chance of one getting held up or even going astray entirely, and thus a smoother experience.
3. BR spread! Hey, that's something that you can legitimately blame on Bungie!
4. Most important of all, the games you play in, the players you face, and then general conditions of networking, are constantly changing, and are not easily comparable.

Here's an analogy. You're arguing: "My old car could drive to the store in 10 minutes, but my new car takes 15, it's a bad car!" But the fact is the city you live in has got bigger, and you drive to a different store every time, and some of the stores are further away, and even when you go to the same store you might take a different route, and the traffic might be better or worse on a particular route on a given trip, and you might hit more or less red lights along the way. That's not to say the car is perfect either, but it's only one factor among a host of others in how long your trips to the store take. Arguments to the contrary are inane and simplistic, and that's what I'm trying to counter here.
 
Dani said:
No one was screaming "host" or anything, just "Why won't this monkey die?"
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Heh - I say this a lot.

Well, except for the 'monkey' part. It's usually something a bit cruder. :D

(I SHOULD pull host a LOT of the time; I play on a pair of bonded T1s. It's only 3Mpbs - but it's 3Mbps in both directions, and at a latency that's WAY lower than most cable/dsl connections. I don't find myself extra lucky very often, though... so I'm guessing I DON'T pull host that much.)
 
Unfortunately there's no way to eradicate the advantage given to the player who is "hosting" completely without providing dedicated servers, and even then the servers are going to favour the players who are closest to them, and who have the best connections (Left 4 Dead has dedicated servers, but if a team of four Europeans play a team of four Americans, one side will have steady orange/red bar pings, depending on what side of the Atlantic the server is on).

Fact is if you play Halo 3 in North America you are going to get host at least your fair share of the time, and what's more, when you don't have host you're still more than likely sending your packets to somewhere in the US, so it's really not that bad. Complaining about those few times when the host is outside your country makes you look like a spoilt child, because for the rest of us, that's the default experience.
 
I've learned one thing from playing a bunch of Call of Duty and watching the kill cams. Lag affects things probably a lot more than you think. Now I don't know that one games netcode is unequivocally worse than another, but I have come to the conclusion that you should let people know clearly what their lag is, so they can make an effective decision on whether it's worth it to keep playing.

There's an odd trend moving away from that, both BF:BC and Red Faction do not have ping indicators of any sort, which is ridiculous. But even before that, we have moved away from actual numbers to using bars which is far more vague. I also never really got why the game just doesn't tell people who's host. It helps even things out, one team gets superman, the other team at least knows that one guy on the other team is extra dangerous.
 
You guys are moaning about ping over the internet now? :lol

It's P2P, there will always be a host and there will always be lag if you aren't host. It isn't a case of bad netcode (look to both Gears games for examples of that) it's just how the internet works. Bungie has done a pretty good job considering H3 isn't using dedicated servers.

One criticism I have is Halo not letting players set up their Xboxs as dedicated servers for custom play. That would be a step in the right direction.

PedroLumpy said:
There's an odd trend moving away from that, both BF:BC and Red Faction do not have ping indicators of any sort, which is ridiculous. But even before that, we have moved away from actual numbers to using bars which is far more vague. I also never really got why the game just doesn't tell people who's host. It helps even things out, one team gets superman, the other team at least knows that one guy on the other team is extra dangerous.
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Yup, I wish they switched back to numbers like the good old PC days.

backflip10019 said:
Troll.jpg
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Not me, just you guys.
 
FFChris said:
You guys are moaning about ping over the internet now? :lol

It's P2P, there will always be a host and there will always be lag if you aren't host. It isn't a case of bad netcode (look to both Gears games for examples of that) it's just how the internet works. Bungie has done a pretty good job considering H3 isn't using dedicated servers.

One criticism I have is Halo not letting players set up their Xboxs as dedicated servers for custom play. That would be a step in the right direction.
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Troll.jpg
 
Shake Appeal said:
This.

It's hilarious reading people blame the Internet on Bungie.
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You might be misunderstanding something. Obviously lag exists, period. Bungie can't fix that. But it is possible to give people the information they need to make an effective decision on whether the lag they will be subject to in a match is worth the trouble. Complaining about lag is (often rightly so) perceived as crybabies whining, so it's very very nice to actually know your connection is garbage instead just making an 'educated guess' where everyone thinks you're a fucking whiner.

Obviously Halo is already here, and is not likely to be changed, but discussing possibilities for the future isn't a bad thing.

As for Swat and things like that, there's a whole other discussion to be had over particular games and gametypes that seem to perform far worse than other games/gametypes with an equal amount of lag. Gears I think is a perfect example, but I won't get into that yet.
 
Shake Appeal said:
Hurrah, I am no longer banned.

I am 35% Bungle, by the way.

I would also like to add that Team Flag is the only Double EXP weekend I ever play, and I too would welcome it as a permanent playlist.
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Please to get banned again until after BioShock 2 has released. :D

Also, you're explaining how lag and latency work pretty well. Thanks for it.

GM Bullfrog said:
Also, an update on the base to base flag thing on Valhalla. I tried it today, and I couldn't get the flag to drop in the fusion core. It would always go left or right of it. I assume it was because I wasn't host.
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It has nothing to do with host. Make sure you place the flag int he middle of the fusion coil, and to get the maximum distance out of it, aim right above the "hazard" symbol.
 
PedroLumpy said:
But it is possible to give people the information they need to make an effective decision on whether the lag they will be subject to in a match is worth the trouble.
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Oh no, I agree with this. I said somewhere above that I don't like the 'bars' system that console games use. Show me the pings numerically, and at least provide the location (by country, if there are privacy concerns) of the server/host.
 
Shake Appeal said:
Oh no, I agree with this. I said somewhere above that I don't like the 'bars' system that console games use. Show me the pings numerically, and at least provide the location (by country, if there are privacy concerns) of the server/host.
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My mistake, sorry!
 
I'm pretty sure Bungie is considering a permanent flag playlist with all the flag dbl exps that have come up recently.

Also yes I did get beat by Bungie. Here comes the excuse train, I was drunk it was like 3-4am, I was going in alone in Social Big Team, my randoms SUCKED, one dude quit ebfore the game started it was 8vs7, one dude on my team DIDNT get a kill, I contend that means it was 8vs6. Objective gametypes become harder with less playears, I still had the best stats.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1217275385&player=SometimesImEpic

So pick which one you like best :lol

And to Shake Appeal I don't know how much things have changed with NZ internet in the last few years but its always been a common understanding that their internet sucks. You can goto speedtest.net and look at many things, While US stands at 28th in both UL and DL speeds (Not that great! 6.61Mbps down 1.44Mbps) Of which I personally have lower than that. I can't find NZ, So I know that they aren't in the top ten at the very least. Anyways when talking NZ you have to understand they build massive undersea cables, right? Basically bandwidth is scarce there, its a proprietary network and not as open as it should be and you need to pay huge fees to get anywhere near quality speeds. And in 2009 the far and wide away excuse is BS, theres no reason for the ping rates to be as high as they should between the countries.

But I do agree with the bars, I've said it before a bunch FUCK BARS, Give us the goddamn numbers, we're not five years old.
 
Dax01 said:
Also, you're explaining how lag and latency work pretty well. Thanks for it.
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What happens when juices first his BR at someone in New Zealand, as is my (pretty basic) understanding of how it works:

Input is registered by controller, sent to 360/Halo 3, Halo 3 starts to perform the action (animation, sound, background physics calculations). Simultaneously it sends information about this action to the host 360, which happens to be in New Zealand. The local 360 talks to its local router, the router talks to an ISP, and in turns the information is relayed toward New Zealand, travelling on copper wire, hope, and a prayer. Along the way it hits a series of gateways in different parts of the world. These gateways could be slow (experiencing heavy traffic), yet each one of them in turn has to process the information packet and pass it on as efficiently as possible toward the eventual destination.

(From the Start menu of your Windows PC, open 'Run...' , then enter "cmd" without the quotes. In the command prompt window, enter "tracert www.telstraclear.co.nz" again with the quotes, and hit enter. What pops up is a list of the gateways your computer is using to talk to the website of a popular ISP in New Zealand, and importantly the time it takes to get there, in milliseconds.)

The host 360 eventually gets the information about where juices fired, perhaps in 300ms or so (three-tenths of a second), or longer. It takes a look at the information packet from juices, checks it against its own account of what's happening, and fires back a reply. juices, meanwhile, is watching shields light up. Then word gets back from New Zealand that actually the host player had moved slightly in that split second that it took juices to tell him he was being shot, and so perhaps only one of the three bullets in the BR's spread could have hit. This information is incongruous with the image the client 360 has flashed on the television screen, but so be it. That representation is now outdated, and perhaps even as much as half a second old. juices has missed, and now he's going to die.

xxjuicesxx said:
one dude on my team DIDNT get a kill, I contend that means it was 8vs6.
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Unless he also died zero times, it's probably worse than that.
 
Shake Appeal said:
The host 360 eventually gets the information about where juices fired, perhaps in 300ms or so (three-tenths of a second), or longer. It takes a look at the information packet from juices, checks it against its own account of what's happening, and fires back a reply. juices, meanwhile, is watching shields light up. Then word gets back from New Zealand that actually the host player had moved slightly in that split second that it took juices to tell him he was being shot, and so perhaps only one of the three bullets in the BR's spread could have hit. This information is incongruous with the image the client 360 has flashed on the television screen, but so be it. That representation is now outdated, and perhaps even as much as half a second old. juices has missed, and now he's going to die.
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Matrix_reloaded_neovarchitect_600.gif
 
neoism said:
Fuck this shit!!!

Whoever designed the booting system in this game needs to die in a fire!
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You'll only get booted if you betray people excessively. This is persistent across all gametypes and playlists IIRC - so even if you're playing with a bunch of friends in matchmaking and are betraying to have fun because it doesn't matter, that meter is swinging further and further out of your favour, to the point where an accidental betrayal in something unrelated could well prompt your team-mate to boot.

The short answer is just not to be a dick.
 
"Team Flag" playlist with small moments of KotH, One Bomb, Neutral Assault, and Multi-Bomb?

No games on Valhalla, please. Stick to 4v4!
 
Willeth said:
You'll only get booted if you betray people excessively. This is persistent across all gametypes and playlists IIRC - so even if you're playing with a bunch of friends in matchmaking and are betraying to have fun because it doesn't matter, that meter is swinging further and further out of your favour, to the point where an accidental betrayal in something unrelated could well prompt your team-mate to boot.

The short answer is just not to be a dick.
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I hardly ever betray and there have been times where I will completely and obviously accidentally betray someone then get booted :( like if someone steps on a trip mine i put down a minute ago and dies, I could get booted.
 
xxjuicesxx said:
AR/BR starts and its a deal.
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I wouldn't expect BR starts on all the games, but for 1-CTF on Last Resort, Multi-CTF on Standoff, and certain Sandbox variants, a Battle Rifle start is needed, especially if the maps go untouched as they were in Team Objective (non-Sandbox).
 
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