Halo 2 Bug/Request Submission Thread

[UXB]

I got a question.
Would you guys paid for LIVE had the editor been more "open" and the dedicated server like CE's?

Now admittedly I am old school so my comments on the subject will most likely not originate from the same experience as others here. When I purchase a video game I expect to pay for the game and nothing more. I do not expect to pay extra for an on-line multiplayer shooter experience when the game has that option.

If the Live system was just an anonymous server browser I would have no problems with it. But it is not. It is a community and retail sales system. I am not the least bit interested in achievements, chatting with others or being marketed to. I have a free account.

I understand the potential of the Live system to create a community and the cost involved in maintaining it, hence the fee. But from where I sit on the sidelines it looks as if Microsoft is trying to create and to a large extent control a single gamer community with Live, whereas I feel that communities of this type should not be centrally controlled but scattered, smaller and self organized. The primary benefit for MS that I see for a single gamer community is so that it can be marketed too efficiently whereas many scattered groups are harder to reach. There are also benefits for the gamer but to me they pall by comparison to the influence the central system can wield.

I am not even going to get into the loss of privacy involved. Just to say that now that my Live account is also for Halo 2 where before it was only for my MS partner program, Microsoft now has access to the exact times I play Halo 2 and can know by name and address.

As for the server I haven’t yet run tests on it directly but I can tell from just monitoring my connection that near T1 bidirectional speeds are required to run a full server. I deduce this because my downlink bandwidth was 10% higher than my uplink bandwidth. There are technical limitations imposed by the requirements. Since Live is not just a server browser, I am making a wild guess that MS's thoughts were that since they will have to field the Live complaints of the self hosted servers on low uplink connections they should at least get paid for it. Central control of the game once again.

I can not address the map editor specifically except to say that if there was any fault it was that it was never made clear that it was only a map editor and not an SDK like the Halo CE tools.

To sum up my thoughts: So far no company has enticed me enough to pay a reoccurring fee for ANY game and I expect none ever will. The games do not hold that much importance for me as they may for people more in the target market.