After a week long disappearence from Live, I come back to new swag on the marketplace for Gears of War, including a map pack, a new theme, and even a new patch. While the theme and the new maps are pretty sweet, the patch is somewhat of a burn.
Improvements have been made such as shortening the chainsaw and sticky grenade distance, making them "less cheap" as some players I know would say, and removing the popular glitches, such as the Sprint and Run. However, the rub comes in the fact that they've actually removed the Host name from ranked matches. That's right, boys and girls; if you wanna play with your friends, you have to play a player match, or set up a ranked room with VERY specific parameters and hope that your friends can find the room using very narrow search options, and even then, it's a crap shoot.
While its understandable why this is done, to prevent boosting and stop acheivement whores from getting acheivements just by offing their friends, it's a pretty disturbing considering Gears is best played with people you know, trust, and work well with, rather than having to risk being thrown into room full of mutes who don't care if you get downed, and aren't working together.
My question is: Why go to such great lengths to create such an awesome team based game, only to go to equally great lengths to make sure gamers can't play as a team?
Contest:
11:39 AM on 01.12.2007
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Until they come up with some sort of clan system, I don't see why people are upset by this.
shortening distance with chainsaw, melee's, grenade tags is very understandable, i am still adjusting because i was spoiled by the 20 feet away abilities.
VOICE CHAT FIXED YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
don't play ranked matches often casue i like playing with friends nonstop, but i kinda understand why they locked it down...
as far as glitches, still chocked full of them, I CAN still run and shoot and look around while running, and well all the other annoying glitches and just problems with A being the do all button and maps overfilled with cover....
still in the end a fun game to kill time till another game on teh system worth playing comes around
It wouldn't be so bad if non-ranked games had the same competitive feel of and start-to-finish track record of ranked, but that is not the case.
I can't imagine that more than 5-10% of people that play online video games care about ranks/achievements/etc. and it sucks that the rest of us have to suffer to validate something that is insignificant.
I also believe that for Xbox Live games they need to set it up like a pc game. For example in CoD you start up the game and log in and it shows you a list of servers and you pick which one you want to join. Now I do not understand why they cannot do this on Xbox live? Any explanations please tell me why because I still think the way you join games on XboX live is Like a caveman trying to figure out how fire works.
Microsoft needs to institute a "Live" wide clan system, then it'll be all good
It's especially frustrating to pick up a game like Gears, after having become accustomed to Halo 2's matchmaking (say what you want about the quality of the game, but they did the online and party system right) and having the online service be so clunky.
Not only is it difficult to play a fun competitive game with your friends, after each match, you start two menu screens too far back (why do I have to keep selecting online multiplayer and Xbox Live ranked match over and over again? Can't I just change it when I want to play something else) and I've yet to see enough proof that the TrueSkill system works well enough to make the game more fun than playing with my friends. Furthermore, if TrueSkill is so smart, insert an algorithm that calculates a combination of players TrueSkill.
As for halo2 and skill selection and such, I do not really believe in the entire matching skill with skil sort of thing halo 2 did. I believe in playing against people that are way better than me so I can learn tactics and strategies, although getting wrecked every 5 minutes can suck but it just makes me try harder and want to learn so I can return the favor. But thats just me.
Dtoid GoW match tonight! You game, Snaileb?
Personally, I find no flaws with the patch.
I dont understand why all you crying about this,issue?
You dont need to create names for Matches to play whit your friends! Im from Israel, so i prefer to play whit Israeli's (lower Lag), so i just start the game, and INVITE ppl that you want to play whit, thats all, no need for a password, nothing. You can play whit your friends only.
This is the reson we have Invite options in X-Box!