Repeat this cycle for hours, and welcome to my world. I love Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. The problem is, I’m not the greatest at it. The initial reaction I expect from people to be is either, “You suck!” or, “Stick to playing with friends,” but I don’t think either is wholly fair (the latter being less fair than the former).
In any case, I’m sure that everyone that has ever played any online game has been owned to the point of not wanting to play the game online anymore. It’s is probably the oldest problem plaguing competitive online gaming. Regardless of the systems put in place by developers, online games always boil down to the cream of the crop destroying the newbies until the community only consists of the best players. Realistically, when a brand new game comes out and everyone is at parity, you need to jump in on day one and get very good within a few weeks or you will get decimated. Even if you decided to dedicate yourself to getting better, there will always be others out there who literally do nothing in life but train to be the best in this one game, and those people will destroy you regardless of how hard you try. In a game like Modern Warfare 2, where millions of people have logged in hundreds of hours into the first one, newbies like me are already D.O.A.
Various matchmaking systems have been put in place in a number of games to keep the good players separate from the inexperienced players, but those for the most part fail horribly. Every match in Modern Warfare 2 I’ve been in consisted of mostly players level 60 and up. Does the game not match me up with similarly rated players because the matchmaking doesn’t work? Or is it because everyone that likes this game has leveled up and the newbies have already given up on trying?
The main game I play online is Street Fighter IV, and it has its quirks in online play, too. Championship mode is where most players go, because unlike ranked matches, you can’t lose rating points when you’re defeated. There are also tiers, which attempt to separate people based on their skill. However, as you progress through the mode, odds are you will hit a brick wall where your skill plateaus and everyone you face is better than you. Also, the difference in skill levels within tiers is also apparent, as someone within the same tier could still be light years better than you. At this point, I go 50/50 in a Championship match, but they end up with me either barely winning, or getting helplessly massacred.
Instead, I end up resorting to ranked matches and exploiting the game’s lack of matchmaking. It just turns out that when I randomly select a person from the three choices the game gives me, 80% of the time that person is way worse than me. I know it sucks for the person on the other end when I exploit their inability to block a cross-up, but I’m technically not breaking any rules and I’ll never truly know till the match starts if one of us is in over our head.
Even with certain systems in place to keep similarly-skilled players together, there are those who practice the art of “Smurfing”, which means to use another screen name to trick people into thinking you’re someone else. Some people will go as far as to start over just to obliterate newbies. I’ve never played Halo online, but I’ve heard there are people who will intentionally kill themselves repeatedly to lower their rank so that they can go back to facing off against fresh meat.
I wish there were better ways to keep similarly skilled players together, but if they haven’t figured it out in the last 15 years, maybe they never will. Maybe the fault isn’t so much in the games, but the people who play them. I don’t have the answer to this problem, so I’m not really contributing anything to this topic. I just wanted to say that it sucks.
In Third Person 