network? could it be the networks? what about tools?

OK, this time i might give the publishers a break: The networks are for effective coop not the yet.
I have to agree with that. Living where i live, (in a country far away from any good pings and with lees bandwidth than a shoestring could hold) i have to accept that cooperating in an intensive game is, practically speaking, impossible. At the very least, not fun.

The networks aren't there to support good games that are usually dependant on good networks. Example: living in a Latin American country, except Chile, of course, all you get when you want to join in is LAG. Bad lag. And that's just to get together in the game.

BUT, there is a BUT, programmers can be pretty bad at netcoding: the programming that goes into the game to make it work on the network. Some games would not even run on LANs! Granted this doesn't happen anymore... or are those just memory leaks? (We’ll get on bugs' case at another opportunity). I will not go into detailing who did what wrong in which games, but players have suffered enough from this.

Now, coop requires more than just "being together" on the game field/map: It needs a lot of communication between players: people must give each other orders, make requests, report valuable information, get their action plans together. And this is only getting more and more complex: the virtual battlefields are increasing in sizes and possibilities: in some games (Battlefield 1942) you can have 2, 3, 4 or even more immediate goals to conquer/protect. And in Joint Operations, you can do that with very different vehicles, by land, air, sea... And effectiveness in the assaults or the defense can only be obtained by combining weapons and delivery of the assailants...

What we need, then, are games/tools that will support the enhanced requirements for active cooperation which includes, but is not limited to:
* typing stuff to each other (too cumbersome to be practical, but hey, if that's all you got...)
* pointing out stuff on maps that everybody can look at,
* Macros (special keys) that allow transmitting key/stereotypical information.
* talking to each other/being able to signal stuff vocally to other players,
* video feeding: showing stuff to other players in-game, such as what i currently see to others while the action is going on, sci-fi and fantasy settings allow easily for that possibility, and some well explained tech trick would do the same for most of the 20th Century, at least with a CCTV). At least transmit screenshots at quick speeds to allow good decision making.
* silenced movements that indicates stuff. (Commando stuff you see on most movies with those characters in them).

All these methods of communicating -linking people together- demand added bandwidth: It’s not just about the game anymore; it is an extra demand on the network to let that web of communication work on top of it. Therefore, we need networks and tools. In a LAN, all that stuff is usually possible, due to great network stability, physical closeness, and the good old “shout it out loud enough and people will hear you scream” backup methods. But to get to a good network cooperative experience, we will also need these other tools, and they have to be fully integrated to the game.

Of course, these tools have been integrated into different games to different extents and with different successes, and some other guys have actually created tool to supplement the need for them: Teamspeak being one of them.

My request to the game designers: get those tools aboard, and make them work with as small a netcode as you can. Taking bandwidth is not an option at this stage in the history of bandwidth, except for testing on LANs. But SOON, when the guys that wrote “Infinite bandwidth” turn out to be right, we can actually put the to “good use”.