I don't either, and I believe the reason for it is to keep modded Xboxes from getting the update.

maybe the lag is being caused by all the people who are downloading the patch. perhaps after a few days or weeks, everyone will have downloaded the patch & lag will be less of a problem.

I thought that too, but I'm assuming that once the matchmaking is complete, we're off of bungies servers.

I think that they stopped looking for the best connection between players, and just matched us up with people who are decently connected.

I thought they could just switch the mod off and on. in other words just shut the mod off and update and play online etc then switch it back on when they wanted it. Of course they'd have to have a retail Halo 2 disc in so maybe borrow from a friend or rent it. I dunno though.

Actually, now they are checking the hard drive to see if it is the same one that was originally installed.

In any case, I think they realize that the mod community will find a way to make this update available to modded Xboxes; they just want to make it more difficult for the average user.

Here's your official answer direct from Bungie about why the patch initially caused some lag but should be back to normal soon:

From Bungie.net Weekly What's Update

Chris Butcher on the AutoUpdate...


Game Hydra writes: The patch made the matchmaking faster, one of the positives right? Wrong... This made the game lag... horribly, worse than UC or Rainbow 3 (the laggest of them all). It felt like the server was run on 28.8k, come on, I really couldn't care waiting an extra 20 secs for the matchmaking, but give me my lag free Halo back!!!

We were a little surprised when we saw all of the complaints about the patch causing lag in games since we didn’t change any code that would impact connectivity. A little detective work from our test team and engineers finally hit upon the cause of the problem. Halo 2’s knowledge of who is a good host is not solely dependent on connection speed. A host actually builds a record for himself over time so that the best hosts end up being more likely hosts in the future. We need to do this because there is no reliable way to detect how fast your Internet connection really is, other than just hosting games and recording how good the experience was for the other players in the game. This record was reset by the autoupdate, so immediately after applying the patch host elections were being made based on connection speed alone because there was no history available. This problem will disappear within a few days as the best hosts start to build up their records again. It’s interesting to note how big a positive impact this little historical record of host quality has had, as this is something you can only take advantage of if the game is able to select the best host automatically. If you also make note of how bad a little bit of lag can make the online experience you’ll begin to better understand our motivations for continuing to support and refine our existing matchmaking system.


So, there you go. Mystery solved...

That's actually a cool way of handling the multiplay. All this time I thought Bungie was hosting these games, but it just blindly uses the players.

To all the complainers about patches for console games. Would you rather see a game released with umteen number of bugs and glitches that ruin the experience and never get corrected. True they do have testing phases and QA, but until hundrerds of thousands of people play together, a company won't know all of the bugs the game might have. Take the 480p issue. It only got cut off on certain TVs. Not all HDTVs and not all widescreen tv's revealed this problem. So they find out and quickly update the game to correct the bug. Now people moan and complain about "patches".

We could have given them another 6 months to do more in-depth QA testing, but who wants to wait that long...seriously.

Also this game was made by the wonderful people at Bungie, not Microsoft. MS may own them, but they did not make the game..so your M$ comments do not apply here.

Hey I figure at least they are posting a patch.