For those of you who don't know I'm a shooter fan. It hasn't always been that way, but maybe it is my maturing game tastes, or just the ammount of great shooter that have came out recently that have changed that. Anyway, one of the highest objectives for game developers working on shooters in Balance. When playing a multiplayer match a player needs to be skilled to win. That is different than say Run to the rocket launcher and whoever gets it first wins. Every weapon needs to have advantages and disadvatades so that a skilled player can deafeat any other player with the correct strategy. The same is true for game modes. No one wants to play on the losing side on an obviously one sided match. It is not any fun.

One of the most balanced FPS I have ever played is Halo 3. It has to be the best designed game when it comes to balances maps, weapons, and game modes. When I play, I normally stick to matchmaking because I like getting experience and rank, but I've noticed a lot of my friends switching to custom games. I'm not against custom games, and I'm very glad bungie gave players that ability, but for some reason every custom match I ever join sucks. Most are using custom map modes in custom game modes that favor one player or one team.

There are many ways that games can be tilted in favor of one side. One of the most common games modes that is set up one sided, on Halo 3, is infection. Players who spawn as the zombie by default are given an advantage as there is only one of them and the only weapon they have is a sword. The zombie player can only score points by infecting other players and turing them into zombies. Players who do not start infected have the ability to score an unlimited number of points by defending off powerful zombies until they are inevitably defeated. For too many players this is boring and the Zombie is not powerful enough so they do things like make them move 5x faster than other players or have 3-4 overshields while taking less damage and being invisible. The advatage is now given to whichever player is randomly selected to spawn infected. You can see how it is incredibly stupid.

Now the tendance to create totally unbalanced matches isn't exclusive to Halo and I find it is especially prevelent in almost all First-Person shooter, should you experiment with playing them online at all. It seems like people not only want to win, but they want to totally eliminate the possibility of losing. They will chage the settings for a match and if possible they will cheat to gain an advatage. These people are better of playing against bots, or better yet, playing a game like Spiderman Friend or Foe where the possibilty of losing is completely eliminated for them. Wanting to win is one thing and to players who are really great at a game a totally descimate their competition with skill, I commend you. To the people who purposly rig an online match, JUST QUIT PLAYING! The world would be a better place. Oh and definitly don't invite me to your custom games.