I asked this question yesterday on Twitter and received an overwhelming response, so overwhelming in fact, that it crashed my Tweetdeck application! First things first, I do not believe that Pro Players from Gears of War 2 should retain their Pro status should the game be on the circuit during the 2012 season. I just wanted to gauge how the community would react to the question and by my estimates it’s an overwhelming “No it’s a new game, everyone should start fresh,” type of response. The discussion is continuing over on GoW Nation, sign up if you haven’t already.
NOTE: I did not include everyone’s tweets — just too many. Apologies.
The conversation kind of strayed into what would be the best solution for a preliminary “qualifier?” A large majority suggested that we move into Online Qualifiers, while a smaller group of players suggested that the MLG Providence stop serve as a Gears of War qualifier. Either way, based on the new structure, I think there will be quite a bit of online qualifier play for Gears of War next season — not really something I’m looking forward to, but there doesn’t seem to be a way around it. I think a lot of the Pro Players are concerned with IP flooding and rampant cheating, the former (ip flooding) seems to be increasing, specifically around some former Pro Players that frequently live stream.
My primary concern, cheating, is an issue that has no definitive solution when it comes to online console gaming. Every team becomes a suspect and no team can be trusted — look no further than the Infinity incident in 2009. That was a major blow to my confidence in the Pro teams with a lot of trickle down affect in terms of influence. Infinity is/was largely regarded as one of, if not the, most influential team for those heavily involved in competitive Gears of War. Any of the Pro Players and teams that remember the incident should do everything in their power to prevent it from happening again — at all costs. Cheating is not acceptable in any form or fashion and the teams with the most influence should NOT, under any circumstance, cheat. It sends a bad message to the rest of the community and if Gears of War 3 is going to have consistent online events, it’s not something we can afford to encourage.
Host advantage and peer-to-peer “lag” is another concern that was voiced by some of the former Pro Players, some folks I feel, probably those that didn’t play much GoW, don’t realize how big of a factor Host advantage can be in Gears of War. NSAN3Z was infamous for “Quad-hosting” on the original Gears of War, while my team later became notorious for the same thing during the 2009 season. It’s hard to determine whether or not Host advantage will play a major factor in Gears 3 because the Beta was not a great indicator and did not provide the option to host private matches. However I distinctly remember a few instances, when Epic turned off Dedicated servers, where the rooms were pretty darn laggy and there was one guy running through people (more than likely the host). It was hard to decipher if, in those instances, the room was hosted by someone from another country or just someone with a terrible connection.
Personally I feel like the host for a team planning to compete, in some form or fashion, should have a minimum of 1.5MB Upload to even be considered as the host player for the team. A terrible connection not only hurts the team you are playing, but it can also severely hamper your teammates performance. Overall it’s just a bad practice experience for everyone involved and isn’t a very good indicator for how your team will perform under better conditions. As an addendum to my connection rant, if you’re on the extreme East Coast (NY/NJ area), it’s all about Verizon FiOS! AT&T U-Verse has some nice packages in various areas around the US and Time Warner, I know we all hate them, is slowly rolling out Wideband (50MB Down, 5 MB Up). Research NOW and upgrade that crappy connection for the good of the community when Gears 3 drops!
I would definitely say, based on Sundance’s recent interview on the @Losersbracket podcast, that Gears of War 3 is coming to MLG in a very meaningful way, hopefully we will hear some definitive solutions shortly after the game releases.
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