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Death of online multiplayer?

Some weeks I might get an hour or two of quality time with my Xbox 360. Other weeks I might not play at all.

Some weeks I might get an hour or two of quality time with my Xbox 360. Other weeks I might not play at all.

Imagine, then, my frustration when attempting to join an online game of Halo 3 or Battlefield 1943 against players who seem to be online every day for hours upon hours, who know each level and spawn point by heart, who work together in teams with other kids who spend a similar amount of time online.

If I'm lucky I can maintain a kill-death ratio of around 0, which means I only get killed once for every person I manage to kill. More often than not I wind up with a negative rating as I can't seem to stay alive long enough to figure out what I'm doing wrong or how I was killed.

Add online chat to the equation, where I'm taunted, insulted and jeered at for my ineptness, and I sometimes wonder why I bother...

Here's why. I like playing games, much more than I like watching television or surfing the web. It feels like I'm doing something rather than doing nothing, which is kind of ironic because nothing wastes more time than gaming.

I'm also pretty good at games. I've finished a lot of the top games out there for PS2 and Xbox 360, sometimes while playing them on the hardest mode.

But I would still classify myself as a casual player. I don't spend enough hours on any one game to master it, I'd much rather play a lot of different games than devote my limited spare time to one thing.

But that's just me. There are people out there that have been playing Starcraft for the past 11 years, and now play in tournaments where hundreds of thousands of dollars are up for grabs. People have actually died during Starcraft marathons after playing 30 hours or more without a break.

Check out Major League Gaming (www.mlgpro..com) or Fragapalooza (www.fragapalooza.com) if you want to know more about the world of professional gamers.

It's the guys that don't go pro but probably could that give me the most grief. I've played Halo 3 games against players that have played 5,000 or more multiplayer games, while I've personally played less than 200 in the past two years.

As a result, online play is where my enjoyment of games is sorely tested, and unfortunately that's where more and more games seem to be heading. Most games are being released with some kind of online multiplayer component, or are being released for online play only - such as Battlefield 1943, Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament, etc.

My problem isn't online multiplayer per se, it's the system that game servers use to set up matches. For example, EA's Battlefield 1943 doesn't seem to make any attempt to separate players based on skill, so some players will have 20 or more kills in a game while other players will have zero.

Those players that have zero (and after three weeks I'm up to a pitiful average of four or five) quickly tire of getting killed over and over and will inevitably quit the game because they're not having any fun.

When I first downloaded BF1943 every single game had 12 players per side. Now it's more like 10 against 10, or eight against eight, and it's rare that all the players will stick it out for the full 10 minutes or so it takes to play a round. To my mind that suggests that people are leaving the game because they're frustrated.

I'm not suggesting the better players are at fault, but it's a reasonable assumption that the maybe 10 per cent of experts out there are ruining the online experience for the other 90 per cent of casual players. Companies must get better at ranking and grouping players or they risk losing their multiplayer audience forever.

There needs to be some kind of standard graduation system for games. For example, if you get more than 10 kills in a game you should move up to another grade where you play against other players of your level until you hit the next milestone and can go up yet another grade.

That leaves lots of room for less skilled players to play against each other at the same low level for as long as it takes them to improve. Low levels could also be handicapped by a few tweaks - grenades could be more explosive, bullets more deadly, shields tougher or regeneration faster. Maybe targeting could be assisted a little bit, then stripped away as you advance through the ranks.

As it stands now, the pro players corner the online experience in every game within a matter of days, forcing the vast majority of casual players to move on to the next title. Eventually the casual gamers will run out of patience and will abandon the online experience altogether. Personally, I no longer see online multiplayer as a selling point for a game but rather as an opportunity to feel old, slow and out of touch.

It's too bad. Online multiplayer is fun because your opponents are unpredictable, because you don't know who's sneaking up behind you, because you can go it alone or fall in with a group of other people to work together. It's an experience that story modes in most games just can't duplicate.