[Wii] Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Ver. 214. Gobble Gobble Gobble, Slurp Slurp Slurp

My limited experience playing Brawl online has been strange. I've honestly had very little lag for a number of matches and then one player will leave, another joins, and all of the sudden it feels like the characters are moving underwater. I'm no internet wizard but it seems to me that online play was designed based on the assumption that everyone has fast internet which is obviously not the case.

Originally Posted by NovaX

Also bringing up one example of a well netcoded game, VF 5, is pretty much grabbing at straws. I don't even know if it's an accurate claim or not, I haven't played it. Although it is a fact that many fighting games have horrible lag, few have got it right. And opposed to more traditional fighting games, Smash Brothers is far more complex and I'd assume harder to get running smoothly in an online setting.

I'd imagine that trying to make a fighting game work online is way more of a pain in the ass than a Racing game or even a FPS. The sheer amount of action in a fighting game is really blistering fast by comparison.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

NovaX: Skills and I were just discussing this online. The thing about a racing game is that a bit of lag really doesn't have an impact on the gameplay because the specific position of other racers in relation to yours doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on your success or failure in a race. (at least in a majority of instances) By contrast, in a fighting game, almost frame specific accuracy is necessary to maintain the integrity of the gameplay so if your character's moves are registering even a millisecond too slowly, it can mean defeat where victory should have taken place. Unfortunately, there is little to no room for error in this genre.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Iwata

I've only played brawl online doing 1 v 1 matches and it was plagued with horrific lag. So i think my comparison is valid. I don't even want to fathom how bad it is with up to 4 people.

Well, it can be fine with four players but the minute you get one person who's connection is slow, it bungs everything up. At any rate, it seems that my personal experience is the exception, not the norm; so for most people, online Smash is super frustrating to play, especially with all the beginners spamming smash attacks with Ike. It seems to me that Nintendo overlooked the fact that not everyone has super fast internet like Japan does. While that is an oversight, it is still a problem. They screwed up.

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First off. brawl isn't worth the 50 bucks if the online is broken to many many people, myself included. Also can you stop talking about the ISP crap, it is very little of the problem going on with Brawl. I play about 10-20 games online consistently and I never experience any form of lag and some of these games support 64 people online at once and their is no lag.

For the sake of being pedantic, there is no such thing as 'no lag' online. What you are saying is that the lag doesn't affect gameplay.

I agree that some people bought the game for the online play (maybe they have no friends or something) and it is damn annoying when it doesn't work right.

For those of you who bought the game because you like the game physics and you have nerd friends willing to come over to game at their leisure, that's great. I am also quite pleased the game physics work well and the game is damn enjoyable to play with three other people in my living room. Just be aware that some people wanted the game solely for the online component and for them, this is a major disappointment. If you buy a game that promises a feature you expect that feature to work correctly. If a game requires near frame specific accuracy to play correctly, then a developer better ensure that this problem is solved before they send the product to market. Perhaps the argument can be made that they needed more development time? I guess you can't ever win.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Iwata

I played with skills. Someone i know who has a decent connection. Can you people stop trying to justify the shitty netcode with banal excuses such as " it must be your connection ". There is also a little thing called localization that basically nulls the whole " but japan is faster " argument. Hell, when i was living in Japan just a couple of months ago. I actually had slower internet then i do now and i was living in one of the major metropolitan areas of Japan. Japan may have the fastest connections in the world, but the vast majority of the citizens don't have access to them.

Well this 'ere is the biggest Strawman I ever dun see.

You know what the real problem with this thread is? People like you and these other assholes who would rather look for any stupid excuse to hop up on your soapboxes and bitch away instead of actually perusing a post. I'm speaking about both sides right now. If you had taken the time to consider what I was saying instead of bellowing away like an angry elephant, you would have been surprised to find out that I was actually agreeing with you and I was trying to tell these other idiots to quit being such fanboys.

All this blathering about bad netcode vs connection speed is a pile of semantic BS and you know it. So you had trouble playing against Skills. If the bottleneck isn't at either of your ISPs then it is possibly occuring at the servers that are being used. I figured you of all people would actually have been intelligent enough to realize that 'having slow connection speed create lag while playing over the internet' is an obvious symptom of poor code. Most people are smart enough to know that if the packets of information are too big for the information pipeline available, the transfer of information is slowed down creating lag. Simple, right?

Also, everyone including you must be aware that statistics are averages. You have to think that Nintendo may have looked at a graph similar to what Skills posted and designed the netcode for Brawl based on the average connection speeds available in Japan. They said they had little to no lag during their trial runs. Perhaps the testing conditions were not representative of the real world? Who knows what they were thinking? Perhaps another problem is that Nintendo does not have enough servers to deal with the online traffic created by Brawl? Yes, this also can be a problem with netcode because the information flow will be affected by whatever bottleneck occurs in the pipeline. Of course, there is also the possibility that their servers simply can't handle the demand placed on them by all the nerds wanting to 'smash it up' online. While I doubt the problem is this simple, it would be pretty funny if it was.

So ya, I really am at a loss to how you conclude that speculation about the cause of lag equates to an attempt to defend Nintendo. I did imply that they are responsible for doing a crap job designing their online service in my last post.

Originally Posted by rat

While that is an oversight, it is still a problem. They screwed up.

No matter how you slice it, the bottom line is that the online portion of Brawl is broken and it doesn't look like it is getting fixed anytime soon. There are many other titles available so gamers might be best to move along and play something else. I hear Xbox 360 has some good games. Anyway, based on conversations we've had in the past, I know you are not stupid, so don't act like it, dude.

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It's called people having better things to do then play videogames when friends are over.

I'm not even going to dignify this one with a response.

[Edit] Geez, Mo0 and Garr just said in a few words what took me three paragraphs to articulate. I guess I am using poor code for communication.

Originally Posted by Iwata

I also have a 30% completion ratio and 58k outta a possible 140K. I've put no more time into my 360 then any other one of us in the xblive crew. GS is no indication of one's playtime on a system unless they're getting achievements such as Gear's "seriously..."

I wasn't aware that XBLive crew reflects the gaming habits of the average North American. I think it is a safe assumption that those guys are all pretty hardcore.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?