Kill Valve in 360 TF2 News
Xbox 360 News by Tom Bramwell
You might imagine they fancy a night off after ten years making it, but the boys and girls at Valve are actually quite happy playing Team Fortress 2 - and now they want to take you on.
With this in mind, they will be celebrating the launch of The Orange Box on Xbox 360 this Friday by going online to make you cry some more. So if you're a Gold subscriber, make a note of the 12 gamertags below. Between 3 and 7pm PDT (11pm to 2am in the UK unless my maths sucks) you should be able to invite or be invited by any one of them.
Beware though that some people are experiencing a fair bit of lag playing TF2 on Xbox Live ahead of launch (EGTV's own Johnny Minkley reckons it's diabolical), and that a patch (sorry, Title Update) is racing its way through certification to sort out the problems.
They reportedly arise when attempting to join six-versus-six or eight-versus-eight matches where "connection to host lost" messages pop up often and games become impossible to play due to lag. 1UP reports that Valve expects that the patch designed to sort this out will be released as soon as the weekend or early next week, so if you do suffer, hang in there. You can always use the time to play Half-Life 2: Episode Two or Portal, after all.
If you fancy braving it anyway, the 12 Valve gamertags you need to note down can be found by reading beyond the end of this sentence.
- gamewithdev1 (Matt W.- Level Designer)
- ValveArtist1 (Matthew S. - Artist)
- ValveAnim (Matthew R. - Animator)
- ValveProg1 (Vitaliy - Programmer)
- ValveProg2 (Adrian - Programmer)
- ValveProg3 (Kerry - Programmer)
- ValveProg4 (Robin - Programmer)
- ValveProg5 (Jim - Programmer)
- ValveLevelDes2 (Dave - Level Designer)
- ValveArtist2 (Nick - Artist)
- ValveLevelDes3 (Scott - Level Designer)
- ValveProg6 (David - Programmer)
- ValveWriter (Chet - Writer)
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Comments: 1-43 of 43 in total
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GamesConnoisseur
17/10/07 @ 09:42
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Lag?!! Should have sorted it before release. I think Steam platform have spoilt it for Value as they can just update (patch) willynilly but need to be more careful for console versions.
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I've been hearing a lot about lag in Team Fortress 2. Why is it that so many Xbox 360 games suffer from lag? I don't play 360 games online much but I remember Call of Duty 2, Saints Row, DOA4, Prey and The Darkness being absolute lag-fests to the point of being near unplayable yet I've never encountered any lag in any PS3 games I've played online (Warhawk, Ridge Racer 7, Resistance, MotorStorm, etc.).
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It's not a very good advert for Xbox Live, a paid subscription service, if a free one on another console does the job better, is it? Xbox Live might have Friends Lists and ease of use but it means zilch if the online experience is laggy as it just spoils the whole thing. Microsoft really need to address this as every other game on the 360 seems prone to some online issue or other, usually lag, and it's not good enough that a game has to be patched on or shortly after its release to address it. I think they should have open betas for all major online releases so they can fix it prior to release. Halo 3 didn't seem too bad for lag when I tried it briefly and I doubt (or rather hope) that Call of Duty 4 will either.
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Lag happens sometimes in any online game - its inevitable given the nature of the internet. A well-coded game will insulate you from this as much as possible (Halo2 and 3 being very good examples of this). I once played Halo2 over a mobile phone connection with a rubbish bitrate and it was still playable. The PS3 being so much better in this respect smells like hearsay and coincidence - since they can't remove the underlying problem - the internet!
Let's see how well it performs when there are actually a lot of online games (and gamers for that matter since there aren't exactly tens of millions of PS3s out there). |
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"At least they are patching it and not ignoring the problem like Halo 3. Several of us are having horrendous problems and can;t party up with each other.
And we've never had probs before. " Sounds like a port-forwarding problem. I had this problem too but once I configured my router correctly I have not had any problems since. And just so you know - that is not something they can patch, since its a hardware and not a software problem.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/10/07 @ 10:58
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I've been playin on Live for years and with the exception of early Pro Evo games everything else has been fine.
Actually I do remember some lag popping up in Return to Castle Woflenstein....oh no hold on that was me running Napster on my PC at the time.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/10/07 @ 11:17
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I have played over 150 xbox live games in halo 3and there has been 2 instances of games playing badly due to lag in that time.
I dont think you can blame live especially and its certainly not something that other networks dont suffer from. Ive had one or two laggy games in Warhawk as well.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/10/07 @ 11:22
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GamesConnoisseur
17/10/07 @ 10:25
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8mb, 4mb or even bog standard 1 mb do no good if upload speed is paltry 150 kb or worse during peak time!
UK is terrible, terrible place for uploading compared to other countries. The country is conned into believe bigger downloading is the just thing. Sure for films, music etc but gaming need damn good upload as well. So the problem would affect PS3 as well but dedicated servers would help to minimise the internet upload bottle factor. I do see Darren point about paying up but yet in practice our own X360 is providing the server workload! Most of time online on X360 is reasonably good, yet to encounter any prob with Halo 3 which is to be expected. All online gaming (any platform) will benefit from upload being upped to 0.5 mb as a standard. Call your ISP/broadband provider and give them hell! |
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To be fair most 360 releases run their online games off central servers these days. The host simply picks the settings. For eg. if the host in a Halo match drops out the game continues.
Also on the ADSL front, yes upload speed is important, but there are other factors. Latency is the single most important thing for a good gaming connection. This varies with ISP as well as with a million other factors. I know BT use interleaving on their DSL lines and this doesnt help latency one bit (tho it does help overall thoughput). |
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People need to stop blaming Xbox Live. The servers are only responsible for matchmaking. Once you in a game, all Xbox Live games are all Peer-Peer with a Host/Clients setup. This is exactly the same way steam works (unless u use a dedicated server) so any difference in lag between the PC and the Xbox 360 versions is down to their own network code, not the live servers.
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krokomkiller
17/10/07 @ 15:01
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"With this in mind, they will be celebrating the launch of The Orange Box on Xbox 360 this Friday"
I got my copy yesterday:)
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/10/07 @ 16:01
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Laserbream
17/10/07 @ 15:34
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If you've got a spare couple of grand, sort yourself out with an SDSL line. Also, lend me a tenner.
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GamesConnoisseur
17/10/07 @ 18:52
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The worse crime for lagging is not internet as there are people with good ISP and set up who still get lags, this is due to NAT via router as mentioned above. This is because the router is not being configured properly then it will interfere with gaming.
http://www.portforward.com is a good starting point, find your router (make/provider) then look for Xbox Live setting info to config your router to allow for free access (no interferences from router) which will help prevent the worse of lags. EDIT: There are other reasons as well, but NAT is usually overlooked and something that can be quickly resolved.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/10/07 @ 19:53
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You think UK has it bad? Try Belgium.
Here's the ELITE DSL offer from a major Belgian provider: 17Mbps down 400Kbps up Monthly volume limit: 35Gb That's about the best it can get in the land of chips. And all this for the low, low price of 62,15 Euros a month, a mere pittance wouldn't you say? Don't know whether to laugh or to cry...
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 18/10/07 @ 01:23
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YourMessageHere
19/10/07 @ 01:47
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How about EG doing some sort of feature on simple optimising of router settings, NAT stuff, port forwarding and that sort of thing for XBox Live/Playstation Network/Wii Whateveritisthattheycallit?
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Comments: 1-43 of 43 in total
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