When I join a multplayer game, the server seems to keep making me the host. This is a terrible mistake, as my crappy DSL connection has an amazing upload speed of ONE mbps (the two matches I played where I wasn't the host went perfectly, by the way - I can keep up fine, as long as I'm not hosting). As a result, at least one person is disconnected from the game every time this happens. The game balancing responds very poorly to this player-dropping... which is to say, it doesn't respond at all. In my most recent match, we made it to the reactor core, before being completely swamped by an ever-increasing enemy population, because the reinforcement timer and output continued to assume a full four-man team. This black comedy of a match presents a series of problems:
1- If I can't tell the game to not make me the host, or volunteer to migrate host status, several people are getting screwed over, at once. I got a nice little message at the beginning telling me that the others are reliant on my connection and behavior, which, while I understand the intent, just seems like a Kafka-esque "remember, this is going to be YOUR fault," in context.
2- Disconnected players still count as being in-game, for purposes of enemy strength and numbers. If even one guy drops, be it due to connection issues or rage quitting, the game seems to have no way of compensating, and everybody has a bad time.
3- By a similar token, I suspect that an absentee Antagonist just creates an Easy Mode for the Raiders. If this is true, people will find a way to abuse it.
All in all, I think the matchmaking system suffers greatly from its inflexibility. Four or five players are locked in a room, and just about any adjustment or reorganization requires aborting the entire session.
