The Trueskill system and ranked games are judging you based on your ability to play with your teammates. Those that communicate and work well with their teammates will generally score higher. What Epic is doing by forcing everyone to play with random people is equalizing the playing field. Some people have many friends on Live and can create a clan quite easily. Others do not have that luxury. Pre-patch, those with friends had an unfair advantage on the scoreboards. Now, things should be more fair for everyone.

This is not to say that Epic shouldn't also have a 3rd option for ranked clan play. In fact, I'm sure they're working on it now. It just involves more work and wasn't ready to be included in this initial patch.

As for the Halo 2 system, I agree. It's the best online matchmaking system yet devised for a console game. I really hope Bungie allows Microsoft to implement their system into the Xbox Live Dev Tools so other developers can make use of it. That's most likely the reason why you haven't seen others use it yet. Developers probably have a hard time justifying the extra work involved in implementing a similar system when they can just plug in the already existing Xbox Live Matchmaking code and spend the time saved on some other feature for their game.

Is there actually a new achievement? The way this was worded in post 41 it
sounded like you weren't able to get an existing one by using the troika but they
fixed it so you could.

No.. it is the same achievement. I guess it was broken if you killed him with the Troika. You wouldn't get the achievement. They fixed it so now you will.

About the new maps:
Raven Down sucks. It's so damn small. It gets old after about 5 matches.

Old Bones is great, huge map with lots of weapons and lots of places to hide.

Is anyone else getting that connection is establishing screen come up every few games?

Yeah I made the mistake of joining a match on the map where about 4 guys had apparently been playing for a while. I noticed there were triple digit scores and they were just taking out me and 2 other players within seconds of the matches starting. They seemed to have learned that map already. :lol:

Plus that map's colors looked weird and it seemed like something was off. Or was it just me?

Giantrobo, we should play!

Sure why not. I love helping others improve their scores. :( :lol:

Raam chases me around the Gun position. :(

I started a game on Insane the other day, and it seemed to me the only real difference was that I took less damage before death. Bleh.

This game was made for co-op, though. I had a ton of fun going through it on hardcore with a buddy.

for some strange reason, I only NOW learned that I can mute annoying jerks that play this game

I thought "Mute" was on all LIVE enabled games?

It is indeed and they remain muted across all games. I mute someone in Halo and then play them in Gears and they are still muted.

I <3 Live

it only really becomes an issue for me while playing this game, or I should say, shooter-type games.

and by "issue" i mean loud, annoying jerks that really don't deserve headsets in the first place

Amen to that. Unfortunately Live seems to be plagued by quite a few that fit this category.

It seriously turned me off of the game for quite some time. I mean, I sold Saints Row for that very reason. I will never play Halo 2 online again for that reason as well.

O WOW, you got 10 kills a match.....I guess that makes you better at life or something :lol:

Not only can you mute people but you can send negative feedback as well. That way you won't get paired up with those jerks again. That's the reason why I try to only play games with the folks on this board and the 8BB board. Makes the gaming experience so much better.

ooo

im definitely going to have to use rep for that purpose in the future.

I just muted the guy, and persisted to pick on him until he eventually left from getting his arse handed to him. It could only have been better if i would have neg rep'd him in the process :lol:

8BB represent! :lol:

I finally finished it on Hardcore the other night. Chapter 5 seemed a lot shorter then the previous chapters.

Now, I have to work at it to beat Insane mode. A few COG tags to get those two remaining awards. Then I doubt I'll get any of the matchmaking achievements because I don't play ranked matches because it always seems you get matched up with jerks.

got together with friends last night to play this online for the first time online.
I couldn't figure out how to play with friends. It's a team game right? 4 on 4?
I couldn't create a party. The only thing I could think of was creating a custom game and inviting them all in and waiting for opponents to show up, but the game wouldn't let us be all on the same team, and no-one would show up after 15 minutes or so. Matchmaking for this game is lame.

:lol:


you just have to learn how to do it. It will make you keep the teams even, so you cant have 3 people join, and all be on the same team, and await for the other team to fill up.

If you create a match, you can invite anyone on your friends list into your game. Its really not that hard

Making a specific number of private slots is the key. If you have 4 friends that are going to play and you don't mind playing against random people to even out the room then you set 4 slots as private and your friends will be able to join. Once the room fills up you can explain to the other people that certain people are your friends and you want them to be on your team. Get a dude in the room that refuses to switch teams? Boot the fkr. :)

its a small learning curve. Its much better now than it was when the game originally came out

Hmmm. playing with random people on my team defeates the purpose of a team game.