I have been playing Halo3 online multiplayer since the first couple of hours they officially opened it. In my first few days of games I didn't do too bad and ended up being in the top half practically every game. At the start if I shot someone they went down and the same went for me. Fast forward to now and even if I get the drop on someone and they are using the same gun there is a chance that I'm going down first. How is that? I now can come into a room blasting away at someone, see his shields react to my shots, get beat down as I throw my last ditch grenade, watch as the grenade blows up underneath that player after which he walks away from it and kills someone else coming into the room on his way out. I've shot and shot someone with the battle rifle, I see their shields react to being hit and after 3 - 5 burst they go down. On the other hand I've also had people shoot one burst at me and watch as my guy went down like a ton of bricks. This has happened quite a few times in the last week and in most of the instances I didn't have any damage or very minimal damage and either way I go down the same way. Lastly, I've been playing doubles with a guy who is a ranked higher than I and is somewhere near level 30 or so. A few games we had were very weird to say the least. One guy on the other team was kicking our butts and neither of us could kill him. He would walk all over us and was having an easy time doing it. Now, I know there are some players who play this game night and day and they are very, very good. His rank and level was a little higher than mine (at the time I believe I was a Lieutenant Grade 1) This guy ended up with around 85% of the kills while his partner ended up with the rest. He also had only 2 or 3 deaths and this was in no way a fast game.

I heard a rumor that on the first Sunday after Halo 3 was released, the Sunday that everyone was having problems connecting, Bungie and Microsoft were checking the system for cheaters because people were getting caught cheating like in Halo 2. Again, I only heard this as a rumor and only saw an article about that Sunday and the article said nothing about cheaters.

So what gives? Am I a bad player? Are the people that I play just that good? Am I doing something wrong? Is anyone else seeing the same things that I see? I have played this week a little more than most weeks and I have been getting aggravated. Any comments would be great.