Imagine if Joe Newb has just bought the game, joins a server for the first time, joins the defending team, spawns, runs to where the action is (not far), dies, and then has to wait 20 - 30 seconds before he can play again, rinse - repeat a few times and he’s spent most of his first ‘x’ minutes in the game dead and waiting. I suspect he wouldn’t be too happy about that and might not be playing tomorrow.
Joe Newb would probably really hate CS then 
Also, I wouldn’t put much faith in SD’s alleged “competitive background”. It’s true that “some of them” “a long time ago” played some Q2 clanned, but they’ve never released a comp ready game, and never patched a game to be comp ready, both their previous efforts required community mods.
It’s not so much the competitive background of the developer as the unique style of competitive games that they make; namely: objective based gameplay, stopwatch mode, a heavy emphasis on medium range / SMG combat, high-health players with low-damage weapons, and fast movement. These are the characteristics that give SD its loyal following despite the issues with past games. As far as I’m aware, there are virtually no other developers that build this type of game.
It is sort of interesting to hear about the game from the point of view of a console player. I suspect that most of the people in this particular forum are PC players, although traditionally games often sell an order of magnitude more copies on consoles than on PC.
Lag is practically a non-issue on the PC. It has dedicated servers, but they are not run by SD (at least not most of them). Primarily the clans and really dedicated players pay for the server.
Splash Damage have proved to me that they are literally unable to make a game on their own merits, without second hand help in creating the engine, and therefor I will never buy a product of theirs again.
Very few developers create their own engines because it’s very time consuming and very expensive. It’s especially impractical for a small studio like SD.
They say they have, but I seriously doubt the ability of any developer whos response to crippling lagg is to cut down the maximum player count in games. This has to be the most pathetic attempt at sorting out a games problems I have ever heard in my many years of gaming.
On the PC at least the max player cap of 16 has nothing to do with limiting lag. This type of multiplayer game is designed for small team sizes of 5 or 6. With > 6 players you lose a lot of the tactical aspect of a stopwatch game because you can group up so heavily. With fewer players you have to be more careful about positioning your players and readjusting dynamically to changing situations in the game.
That is simply the main course, the desert is the way in which they have completely neglected the most simplest of console standards in creating a decent matchmaking system.
SD is really a PC developer at their core. If you tell a PC gamer that a game doesn’t have a matchmaking system their response will probably be “meh.” If you tell a PC gamer that the game only has a matching making system (MW2) their response will probably be “gtfo.” I’m not saying it’s acceptable for a console game to not have matchmaking, I’m just saying that it’s not something most PC players would see as missing from the game.
It truely is a shame, because as with all SDs products there are obviously some extremely good ideas laying at the core of the gameplay. Unfortunately what they don’t seem to realise is that ideas don’t make the game, it’s the way it is put together.
QFT In theory, SD has the best formula for competitive gaming. After three iterations of what is conceptually the same game you would think they would have the balance issues worked out.
