/Rant - Online Multiplayer (Or How The Internet Destroyed Gaming)

I was having an extremely in depth thought about online gaming (actually it was 4am and i was thinking about it while completely zoned out from the game of Audiosurf i was playing) and i realised that i have a reputation for hating multiplayer games, when in actuality i only hate certain aspects that people probably haven't noticed went down the toilet around the same time online multiplayer took off. So i thought i'd write a rant about how being online has changed the dynamics of multiplayer gaming. As mentioned, i'm known to hate multiplayer, so you can expect this rant to be 100% unbiased and clearly show the evidence for both sides of the argument... but seriously, once you've finished reading, please direct your hate mail and death threats to the comments section at the bottom of the post.

So lets get the obvious out of the way... this rant is most likely going to reference such games as Halo, Call of Duty and Goldeneye, so if you hold any of those games sacred and can't accept people saying bad things about them, quit now. So... the internet and gaming... Once upon a time in a land much like our own, gaming consoles lacked the ability to connect to the internet. From the old arcade days onwards developers started to notice people would spend more money playing a game to try to beat others high scores and thus multiplayer gaming evolved. Rather than go through all of that, lets skip forward to the Playstation / Nintendo 64 era, when Multiplayer gaming meant 4 people sprawled out over the lounge room all yelling and screaming at each other. Goldeneye is widely considered the pinnacle of multiplayer FPS's on the N64 (I argue that this is because Goldeneye has developed a following of sheeple who want to appear like they've been serious gamers for years now, but that's a different rant for a different time) and many people will have memories of running around shooting their friends and talking shit to each other for hours on end. Then along comes the next generation of games, which brings us the likes of Halo 2 and would see an ever increasing amount of people take their battles against players from other parts of the world. How could this be a bad thing? Internet gaming DOES have it's advantages... Obviously, it's easier to find other people to play with and generally increased the skill level of gamers as there was suddenly more competition, but there were also a few things that went out the window... A few things that created the stable base that multiplayer games had relied on.

Firstly, Etiquette... Even people i know who love to trash talk online have said that things would be better without the anonymity provided by online gaming, and this never was a problem for gaming before we got online multiplayer. All the people you were playing with were in the same room as you and would have to be ready to back up the shit coming out of their mouth if someone showed them up. Meanwhile in the world of online multiplayer, you get thrown into games with people who feel the need to swear, talk trash and generally be disrespectful, regardless of what happens... I was in a game with a person on the other team who insisted on repeatedly calling everyone a noob for the entire game... despite the fact him and his team ended up getting absolutely destroyed. Did he stop? Only until he managed to get a kill again. When every person on the enemy team has a higher kill count than you, you don't really have the right to judge their skill because you just got one kill.

Problem number 2... Hardware. When everyone was playing on the same console, the biggest problem you could have was getting the controller with the loose joystick or a button that sticks, but with online gaming, you start dealing with an infinitely larger number of variables including each persons individual internet connection and hardware setup, server performance and most importantly, the physical distance between players. As an Australian gamer, lag is pretty much a certainty on any game and it's not because you have a bad connection, it's because even on a good connection, your signal has to travel halfway around the world on some of the worst and most overflowing lines. All of this can end up creating a gaming environment that just makes the first problem all the worse, because now you have players not willing to accept the outcome of a situation and instead choosing to blame it on lag or something else.

Problem 3... Updates. Would you like to know why people don't complain about the damage a weapon does on Goldeneye? It's because complaining won't fix anything. On the other hand, with online gaming anything and everything can be adjusted, tweaked and "fixed" to meet feedback. The problem here is that no game will ever be perfect. You can adjust one thing, but people will always find something else to bitch about and i've seen many games end up in a never-ending cycle of patches and updates as the developer bent and warped every setting imaginable to try to make players happy. If Goldeneye could be patched, people would have bitched about the Golden Gun being too overpowered. At some point developers have to just stop listening to everyone else and settle on what damage each weapon is going to do, and how fast its going to reload, because ultimately there are too many people playing with too many different opinions to actually get any form of unanimous feedback.

There are a billion other little things that have gone out the window because of online gaming, but those are my main points and i'll leave it there. Most people won't agree with me, and that's fine, this is my rant, not yours :P. Finally i would like to point out that although i referenced Goldeneye a heap in this, i do not in any way consider it to be the best FPS of all time, in fact i'm in the "Perfect Dark was an improvement" camp (Perfect Dark ironically being a game that proves half the points here, as it has already been patched multiple times since being released on Xbox LIVE to adjust weapon damage).