343 Industries has detailed its plans to fix latency and desync issues in Halo Infinite and it's putting a stop to geofiltering done by some players.
Halo Infinite multiplayer has been out for a good few weeks now. It's been a lot of fun, but there have also been some problems with desync, quick resume, and Big Team Battles (among others). 343 Industries has been working behind the scenes to tackle these issues one by one; now, it's detailed its plans going forward along with some immediate fixes for one particularly severe problem.
343 Combats Halo Infinite Geofiltering
Halo Infinite geofiltering is something you might not know about, but 343 says that it's an issue can make the game worse for everyone -- and that's exactly why it's combatting this issue immediately.
When you try to connect to a multiplayer match, the matchmaking servers will try to average out the locations of all players and find a server that will give everyone a relatively even experience in terms of latency. This means that some players might be connecting to servers that can't provide them the absolute best possible ping.
Some players decided to get around this problem by using geofiltering. Essentially, they blocked the game from connecting to any regions outside of their own, forcing Halo Infinite matchmaking to put them on the closest server to them (and therefore, the one with the best possible ping). While this nets the geofiltering player a slightly better ping, it also can screw up the matchmaking pool for everyone else.
As a result, 343 has revealed that it will now prevent players using geofiltering from connecting to the game's multiplayer at all. Going forward, any players using geofiltering will see the following message:
No ping to our datacenters detected.
The only way to remove this error message and get back to playing online is to disable whatever geofiltering method is being used. And as the game's Senior Community Manager explains, it's a necessity to preserve the experience for everyone.
"[...] one geofiltering player can degrade the experience of between 7 (Arena) to 23 (BTB) other people per match, meaning they could impact hundreds of people in one gaming session," read a post on the Halo forums from Halo Infinite Senior Community Manager John "Unyshek" Junyszek. "Then, take those hundreds of lower-quality experiences and multiply that by the total number of players geofiltering around the world, and you can start to see why this practice is harmful to the game and your fellow Halo players."
Halo Infinite Desync and Latency
Aside from an immediate fix for the geofiltering problem, 343's Lead Engineer of the Sandbox Team Richard Watson has detailed what the company is doing to fix issues with Halo Infinite's desync and latency in a lengthy blog post.
First and foremost, 343 aims to reduce many of the issues by giving low latency a higher priority for matchmaking. Combine that with the removal of geofiltering players from the matchmaking pool and you should ultimately get lower pings overall (and therefore, fewer ping-related issues).
Having lower latency to servers will help mitigate some of these problems, but your ping is just one element of a larger problem. Mitigation efforts are in the works to improve shot hit registration, melee hit registration, and player collisions. Unfortunately, we won't know about specific fixes for each of these issues until they're detailed in future patch notes.
While Halo Infinite hasn't had the smoothest launch, it's clear that 343 Industries is committed to improving the experience in every way it can. You can play Halo Infinite multiplayer for free right now on PC and Xbox.
What do you think of 343 Industries' stance on geofiltering? Do you think the company is working fast enough to resolve problems? Let us know in the comments below!
