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Bungie has stated that they are in
the final stages of their auto-update, which will release
later this month. They have made some adjustments to Halo
3's melee and fixed many glitches and bugs.
Tyson Green
Explains a detailed explanation on how melee works in both
Halo 3 and Halo 2. Halo 3 Melee contests will only produce
a winner if he has a sizeable health advantage over the loser.
Otherwise, both players may die in the clash. but simply,
in Halo 2, whoever threw the first melee won. Sounds perfect,
right? Not quite.
- The Halo 3 Fix
- In Halo 3, there is explicit special
treatment for what is called a “melee contest”,
which occurs when two melee attacks occur almost simultaneously.
Specifically, when the host starts to throw a melee attack,
there is a short window after that (three frames, or approximately
100ms) during which the host will watch for a retaliatory
melee attack. If one arrives inside that window, it is a
contest. Besides smoothing out the latency differences between
clients (it works the same way when one client melees another),
this allows a client with a ping as high as 100ms to compete
with the host on a far more even footing than Halo 2 allowed.
- In Halo 3, there is explicit special treatment for what
is called a “melee contest”, which
occurs when two melee attacks occur almost simultaneously.
Specifically, when the host starts to throw a melee attack,
there is a short window after that (three frames, or approximately
100ms) during which the host will watch for a retaliatory
melee attack. If one arrives inside that window, it is a
contest. Besides smoothing out the latency differences between
clients (it works the same way when one client melees another),
this allows a client with a ping as high as 100ms to compete
with the host on a far more even footing than Halo 2 allowed.
So now we have the contests, but how are they resolved?
Having determined that we cannot trust timing in an environment
with latency, we instead use the remaining health (including
shields) of the contestants as the tie-breaker. This is
about as fair as you can get, within the conventions of
Halo—the guy who did more damage comes out on top.
Specifically, the winner of the contest still takes melee
damage from the loser, but is protected from death and
lives to fight another day.
On paper, this method addresses
the host advantage (among others) and is scrupulously
fair. There’s just one problem Fatal
Flaw. If their is no way of determing who would
of won the battle, such as a single assault rifle round
determing the outcome. then it might as well be random.
And randomness is a poor substitute for tactics and skillful
execution.
- Addressing the Flaw
Ultimately, the change is targeted at the unpredictable
outcome of a contest. Simply stated, it works like this:
when a melee contest occurs, and both players are close
to the same health (including shields), no special protection
is given to either player. This means the outcome of a close
melee contest can be death for both participants, but that
a player who decisively injures his opponent prior to closing
for a melee will continue to enjoy the victorious outcome.For
those of you uninterested in the precise details, the upshot
is this: if you close for a melee attack and are at a clear
advantage (or disadvantage), the outcome will be clear.
If the outcome is unclear, too close to call, you will likely
trade kills with your victim. But you should no longer watch
your opponent saunter away for no clear reason (and if you
do, check the film—it tells all.)
The
moral: when in doubt, check the host’s
film, because latency still matters. Just a whole lot less
than Halo 2.
BXB-style Glitch has been
excised: Also,
while we were in there, we excised a BXB-style glitch before
it gathered popularity, and fixed that strangeness where bodies
would be hurled with unearthly force by a mid-melee death.
We sincerely apologize to people who enjoyed the latter bug—it
was pretty funny."
Cheaters :.
While there haven’t
been nearly as many Whambulance-related mails for Halo 3 as
there were for Halo 2 – the enthusiasm for cheating
has been curbed pretty well by our auto-detection system,
that doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels,
either. We’ve seen pretty frequent abuse of the EXP
system and attempts at gaming the Rank system and AU1 will
introduce even more preventative measures to further reduce
attempts to find glitches in the system.
Additionally, cheatery that involves
network manipulation will see some firmer restrictions and
swifter punishments. As is always the case with discussing
cheating, we’re sorry for being even more obtuse and
confusing than usual, but we can’t really let on to
what we’re doing, because then the Internet’s
industrious youth will try and find ways to circumvent those
measures and the cycle’s inevitable continuation is
accelerated. We have a variety of different bans ranging from
account-level bans from matchmaking to negating players’
abilities to host games, when we discover host manipulation
attempts or frequent network issues for other players in the
game. In addition to the copious amount of statistics taken
by Bungie.net from your game, we have pretty detailed information
about game conditions and network data as well. Culling through
that data has allowed us to continue to make improvements
to the system.
Bennett, I thought
you were dead
The longstanding “Elite
Commando Shoulders aren’t unlocking with the achievement”
bug is being resolved in the auto update. The shoulders weren’t
unlocking when the Steppin’ Razor achievement was acquired.
In the post-auto update era, the Commando Shoulders will be
unlocked for everyone, regardless of the status of the corresponding
achievement.
A Host Migrated
Our playerbase across the sea has oft
leveled a completely reasonable and sound complaint about
the performance of peer to peer hosting in Halo 3: when entering
Matchmaking, often times, they are matched up with U.S. players
and their game quality may suffer depending on the strength
of the U.S. players’ host, resulting in higher pings
and latency. In the auto update, we’ve retooled the
Matchmaking option “Prefer Good Connection” to
cast a wider net to find better hosts for players in Halo
3, and will also improve host conditions for players outside
of America.
In order to access “Prefer Good
Connection,” the host for a matchmaking game needs to
press X once at the Matchmaking Menu to adjust “Matchmaking
Options.” This will bring up a menu that includes “Quickest,”
“Good Connection,” and “My Language.”
Scroll down to the option you want to use in Matchmaking and
Press A. Each time you enter a new hopper, the setting will
clear, so make sure to reselect it.
Hammered and Nailed
With the vast volume of maps and gametypes
being created by our Community, a natural evolution of Matchmaking
Playlists would be to create a hopper dedicated to Forge creations
– user maps like The Great Wall, Anvil and Cell Block
71 – and highlight Community-created gametypes on those
maps, or on existing Bungie-built maps.
The auto update will streamline and
solidify the back end and allow us to pull Community-generated
content into our Matchmaking Playlist. No, this doesn’t
mean that Your Favorite Playlist is going to go away; in fact,
it just means that in the foreseeable future there will be
a playlist dedicated to your creations.
Decorators Love Center
The next batch of Halo 3 maps continue
to chug along in various stages along their development cycle.
Cotton Balls skybox continues to fill out, now giving players
who paid attention in Halo 3 some pretty exhilarating context
in regards to “where” they are. Frankie says “the
skybox has been there all along, you’re just too blind
and stupid to see it – abres los ojos.” I wanted
to include a really, REALLY small screenshot, but PR would
react as though the brown note had been sounded from the Apocalypse
Trumpet.
Additionally, there have been some
large, guarding, ominous and natural structures added to the
background, stretching upwards into the heavenly skybox. The
towering natural spires are foreboding and moody. They are
correct.
OK Corral is getting slathered with
layer upon layer of polish, just this week while playing another
of our near-daily “Battles for Ultimate Destiny”
Frankie and I noticed a ton of new visual highlights and decorators
being added. What began as an abandoned shed in the middle
of a partially overgrown thicket has progressed into something
quite different.
Walls are marked with scoring from
explosions, cement slabs have been blown apart by fierce explosions,
one room in particular, with its God-rays streaming in from
a plant-covered dome has been the site of some terrible carnage.
An explosion ripped a hole in the floor, stripped part of
the walls and blew out an entire wall. Another explosion shelled
parts of wall off, displaying wooden struts and heavily water-damaged
cement underneath. Outside, more blast scoring and water damage
stains the cement and foliage growth will give players an
idea of just how abandoned OK Corral has become.
Again, I really wanted to include a
small image, especially of this particular area, but Frank
said no.
Time of the Season
Next week, folks all over the world
over will celebrate their love for one another with diamonds,
chocolates, baguettes, romantic nights out and then wives
and girlfriends will then proceed to get headaches and go
straight to bed after dinner, so what will the husbands do?
Hopefully log in to Halo 3 and check out another one of those
seasonal treats we’re putting together.
This Valentine's Day Massacre Hopper
will launch next week and is testing a variety of things for
us. First, we're planning on rolling out a number of hoppers
that will appear in regular, short intervals, generally over
a weekend period, and this hopper, which will begin on next
Wednesday and conclude at 2 a.m. pacific the following Monday,
is designed to test that.
The secondary purpose of the Valentine's
Day Massacre is to look at the tournament system and our ability
to collect leaderboard information for a series of online
tournaments we'll be holding next month. The Valentine's Day
Massacre hopper will be a Ranked, lean, Team Slayer-focused
version (it will have a Team BRs variant, as well) of Team
Doubles.
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