Quote by WhiteRain7:
i dont remember who rowte it but have an admin join and run straight to a granade and kill themself singnifiying the start of the round and that admin is the host the whole game
Ok, I am going to use an analogy to explain why a non-playing host will not work in my opinion.
You see a beautiful girl, and you are interested in her, you want to make out with her, but when you reach over to kiss her, her cross-eyed, bucktoothed, pimpled-face, autistic, smelly, and hairy, half-sister says you gotta kiss HER first before you can kiss her gorgeous sister. Would you kiss the ugly duckling to get a chance at the babe? I wouldn't.
Well, same with latency, you do not want a middle man when trying to get the least lag possible in a game. Granted lag in GoW from my experience is minimal, but there are times, that people don't seem to go down when you shoot them at point blank range, or you seem to down too quickly, all of these issues could be lag related.
Also, assuming the host has a great connection, and can handle the 6 players without a hitch, anyone of those 6 players' internet connection may have an issue with the host's connection, and the team who has one or more of their players with a bad connection to the host is now handicapped, what if the player having issues with the host, is you or someone in your team, and you lose and get eliminated, wouldn't you be upset? At least with one player from one team or the other hosting, your connection and the host's connection communicate directly to each other, without the additional latency from having to take extra steps through a middle-man host.
In the interest of helping to resolve this issue, here are all of the possible solutions everyone has mentioned to counter the host advantage problem. In case of a 1-1 tie.
1. Award host to the team with the player with the most points combined in the two previous matches with the team they are tied up with.<-- I like this one, because it encourages players to do their best to EARN host in the tie-breaker if it comes down to it.
2. Award host to the team with the most rounds won in the previous two matches with the team they are tied up with.<-- just suggested, but this won't work, because it has the possibility of ending up at a stalemate, whether the match is set to First to 5, or First to 3:
Team 1 wins:
Match 1 - 4 Rounds
Match 2 - 5 Rounds
Team 2 wins:
Match 1 - 5 Rounds
Match 2 - 4 Rounds
That's 9 rounds for each team, now what? You'll need a tie-breaker to determine the tie-breaker.
3. Have a non-playing host, host the game, and stay at spawn unmoving.<-- I'm ok with this, except that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not ALL players will have a good connection to the host.
The idea to have him kill himself is not good, because he would be picking up and using a weapon/grenade that one of the people actually playing in the game could have probably used. So right off the bat, the team the host is on, can't pick up and use the weapon the host is using to kill himself. It's an immediate, and unfair advantage for the other team. Having him killing himself to signal the start of the match won't work neither as there would be no way to see if anyone of the players moved before he killed himself.
I will open a thread with a Poll, to see if people want to have the chance to Earn Host, or to have an admin host. That should give the administrators of the site, a good idea of what almost everyone is leaning toward.
Poll is up, go vote.
http://www.xboxamerica.com/thread.php?t=1118&p=8642#8642
