This thread isabout my life. Except it's not. It's about me releasing my fury about life's annoyances, written in a way that suits me, the blog.
I'm almost forced to start off with the phenomenon of 'online multiplayer gaming'. As might be expected, I'm not a multiplayer kind of person. I texture, I code, I have a life at school and one at home, so I have better things to spend my time on. Also, I don't use the silly abbreviations that characterise multiplayer types. When I laugh, I either smile or chuckle. I hardly ever laugh out loud, and the only situation in which I'd roll over any floor would be when on fire, in which case I probably wouldn't be laughing.
I don't have any problem with multiplayer gaming, don't get me wrong. I enjoy LAN parties as much as anyone, and the idea of social activities on the internet is not something I abhor, as I'm not yet 50. I would be 50 if I had ever played any type of online multiplayer game though. The idea is simple and likeable: you login, the server selects a match for you against other people with roughly the same skill as you, then you play a game. Along the way you improve your skill and meet other players. The thing with this three-point process is that it is massively out of balance. The logging in bit is done with pretty quickly, and I have yet to encounter the first game where the actual playing takes much more than half an hour. No, the problem is the waiting.
I'll illustrate it. Yesterday night I was playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and thought I'd try out multiplayer. I won't complain about the needlessly long tutorial, but the long and the short of it is that one hour after I started, the server had yet to come up with a match. It's not like it should take long either, this whole affair took place between 0:00 and 1:00 AM, GMT+1. That's between 16:00 and 20:00 in North America, and still pretty acceptable in Europe. Combine that with the fact that Brotherhood is a bit of a blockbuster, and common sense would suggest that plenty of matches should be available. Not so.
It went so far that by the end of the hour I waited, I started to think I'd be more enjoying a game of volleyball. Now I should explain that this sport, consisting mainly of bruising and breaking any bones that happen to be located vaguely near either wrist, is my least favourite pasttime by a lot. At that point I decided the 'fun' aspect of online multiplayer gaming had proven to be non-existant, so I stopped waiting.
This has been my experience with every game I've tried in online mode so far. That is including Age of Empires 3, in case anybody wonders. What then is the fun of online gaming? I sure haven't been able to find any fun in it. I really haven't. I don't enjoy waiting until judgement day for anything except judgement day itself, and I certainly don't want to spend my time waiting for a server to pick an opponent. Online gaming isn't online dating, I don't have to wait for 'the one'. Just give me an opponent, and make it quick.
