Black Ops 2: Network issues

Cause all is not well in Call of Duty land

Does this mean my network issues are gone?

Anyone who has played Black Ops II in the past week, with us or online with others, has had to deal with the litany of bitching and complaining about the new networking behind the Black Ops II multi-player engine. It's a world where everyone sounds like Hardwood and SeanMCR. No one is winning battles they should, deaths are prolific, and kills that should be aren't.

During the first day my kill ratio was solid. I was winning more than I was losing. After Day 1 though... not so much. I was never one to rage quit until Black Ops II where some games it was impossible to buy a kill. Emptying a clip into someone from behind only to have them turn and kill you with one bullet was getting old. Stabbing kills became no existent.

So yesterday I decided to look it up and check if others had solutions. Obviously it was working for some people. People on the other team but still.

Time to see if my network could be adjusted.

I started with the The Elagaphant at charlieINTEL.com. Reading his article lead me to changing two things:

1. The DNS on my Xbox 350 to Google DNS – something I had already done on my desktops
2. change the MTU setting on my router

I changed my MTU to a TekSavvy forum recommended setting and not the one he listed but still.

This is where things diverged slightly. While his recommended changes may have helped they led me to discover something else.

As some of you know I have a D-Link DGL-4300 gaming router – highly recommended by Coxxorz and HoC – which has made a big difference for my gaming and for my network.

It has a gaming rule feature that prioritizes Xbox Live traffic through your network connection. Awesome I know.

But, and this is a pretty big but I had properly configured it to prioritize for a specific, fixed IP address.

At some point in the past I had set my Xbox 360 back to DHCP for a lan party and I had forgotten to set it back. So my router was prioritizing for an IP address that was not being used.

I discovered this while changing its DNS settings and decided that it might be worth putting it back to the fixed IP address I had reserved for it.

Things seem better.

While not every game has improved and I still finish below .500 occasionally, I generally finish above .500 as demonstrated in the starting image. 37-17 is rare but at least now it can happen. Previous to these changes I was happy to break even.

While I have no idea which network change made the most difference there definitely is a difference. My scores are much more consistent with previous Call of Duty's and now the frustration deaths are fewer and my screams of "no way" and "I had him" are no longer ringing through the basement ever two minutes.

Since the changes, all seems right in Call of Duty land. Until the next update anyway.