I’ve noticed this a few times when playing online on Xbox Live to reassert my stance that I hate people. Not every one, just the win at all cost people. I am of course talking about ranked matches. I do understand the ethos behind friendly competition and I do encourage it, but it seems that in the medium of online gaming, it just creates a new breed of wankers. Personally I’ve always preferred to do al encounters online in co-operative gameplay. It’s more fun and a lot more rewarding. Player matches aren’t as bad but you still harbour the people who must win at all cost, and for me that’s the fastest way to kill a decent online experience.

It’s just that about 90% of my experience with randoms if you will, during my online experiences have been complete and utter twats. It’s not just the competitive nature of it, it’s the fact that people will do anything to win. Now before I get accused of having a defeatist attitude or simply just being “crap” at games like that c**t did in my Rock Band 3 review, I am merely commenting on people who have to resort to cheating online. I personally condemn cheating because I’m a gamer with a conscience, I can’t possibly feel any sense of achievement knowing full well I used under hand tactics to get there when everyone else got there through perserverence and hard work.

My main gripe is the way that game developers claim to input a player weighting system into online matches. The sort of games I’m talking about are ones like FIFA games, beat’em ups like Tekken 6 and Call of Duty games.

Tekken 6 has one of the worst "weighting" systems imaginable

In particular I was playing Tekken 6 for the first time last weekend. I played Tekken 3 a bit on the Playstation about 13 years ago and I’m a bit rusty to say the least (I had Tekken 4 on the PS2 but didn’t play it much!) and I was still getting a hang of the controls. It displays your battle data, clearly mine said Won: 0 Lost: 0, and I set the search criteria for nearby rank. In truth, I could have set it to play against Macedonian Halibuts only because it doesn’t do anything. I was matched up against some guy who had won over 250 games. Now clearly he’s played that a lot with that one character (stats are only for that character) so straight from the off I didn’t stand a chance! Who the hell thought that people will continue to play the game online if they’re only ever matched up against an army of pros/virgins who know all the moves/combos. Why the fuck would you put a search criteria in for searching for similar rank if you’re just going to be matched up against someone who has played over 300+ hours on the game? Tekken 6 is literally tekken the piss when it comes to the online matches (It took me about 18 games to get my first win without someone rage quitting) and I can’t understand why they would put the option in if they weren’t going to bother making it work.

CoD4 is also responsible for awful matchmaking too

Similarly Call of Duty 4 was hugely guilty of this. I thought I’d dabble with the online multiplayer just to see what all the fuss about. I was obviously level 1, Rabit was on level 6 and Tribal was on level 12, all playing together in a team deathmatch. First match we came across three guys all level 53, prestige level whatever and all had some kind of moniker encapsulated in [square brackets]. I’m assuming that’s what you would refer to as a “clan” but if you ask me its just a bright beacon indicating that these three guys all slept in the same bed. And that was obvious. They also had memorised all the spawning points so death was within milliseconds of starting each time. But my point is, what is the benefit of having a level 1 guy who getting to know the game, matched up with a level 53. There’s no sense in that because you won’t persevere in the game if you spend the entire session watching a respawn counter. I’m not asking to be put into matches with people who actually have friends outside their front door, jobs, family, or ever been kissed.

FIFA has the worst matchmaking of all, and the worst losers. It's a festival of rage quits online!

FIFA games are probably the worst for matchmaking because you always get matched up with someone who spends every waking hour on it. All the times I’ve played online on FIFA, I’ve never played against someone who played as team worse than 4 stars. That’s because everyone only plays as the top teams and someone like me who has an interest in football, I like to experiment with different teams from around the world, that’s the beauty of variety. But take the world cup edition for example, every team I came across was either Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Holland or Germany. I never saw a Ghana, Morocco, or Tajikistan. That’s because people don’t play for fun anymore, they play to win, and if they start losing, they quit early. I was playing as China PR by the way, (2.5 stars) because I fancied the challenge, playing as the World All Stars isn’t a challenge.

So that’s it, ranked matches are a surefire way of ruining your online experience because it is populated by the most odious of gamers, the ones who’s sole focus is to win all the time, and prioritise it over actually eating or maintaining a level of hygiene.