I am late in the game coming to Xbox Live, but figured I'd give it a shot since I had some gift cards to buy a subscription and the wireless stuff. I am a grumpy old gamer closing on my 40's, so I don't have a lot of patience for idiots, but Halo 2 online was calling my name.
I've played for a couple of hours a few night last week, and it's been fun in spurts, but it's also been raising my blood pressure.
I can't help but think that Xbox Live would be about 5x as fun without the communicator. Well, that's probably not true, since many games depend on it, but certainly very few people use it effectively for Halo 2. It mostly seems to be used for the sake of being obnoxious. Probably 1 out of 3 games I've played is filled with things like racial slurs or moronic trash talk or some idiot who has a ranking of about 3 critisizing everyone else on the team.
I mostly play the team-based stuff. Things get better late at night. I've had some good games where people behave like human beings and actually work together. It can be a heck of lot of fun.
THen there are times like a game I played last night, where 3 guys spent the game berating everyone else on the team for not doing the right thing to get instant flag captures via some cheat they had figured out. Maybe we could just play the damn game instead?
I just figured out last night that it's possible to mute specific players, so maybe that will help
<sigh> Anyway, I am undecided at this point as to whether to keep the subscription. I'd love to find a regular group of mature players that I can jump from game to game with. If anyone's involved with such a group that plays fairly late at night (somewhere around 9PM - 2AM PST), please give me a friend invite. I am currently ranked 8 on team battles, but it's going up little by little. I have a couple of other games that are Live-enabled (Burnout 3 and Crimson Skies), and I'd certainly be willing to buy any other game if I could find a good group.
My gamertag is MST3000.
