Historically, connection issues have been frustrating. The current system of the defending army hosts the lobby is fair, but we should be prioritizing the experience of the majority over "fairness." Is it fair to degrade somebody else's experience in the community?
The host advantage is most notifiable when the connection is bad, if the connection is perfect (impossible) then there would be no advantage to being host. If we can attempt to make all lobbies as close to perfect connection as possible everybody would have a better time and hopefully we wouldn't have to worry about disconnections except in exceptional circumstances.
The rough idea of my suggestion is to have a roster of "certified" lobby hosts with demonstrated good connections for hosting lobbies. Then when matches are setup if there is somebody in the lobby on this "certified" host list, that person will be the connection host (regardless of army affiliation). If there are multiple people or no people on the "certified" host list, then the defending army could choose (probably choosing one of their people).
Requirements to be certified:
1. Demonstrated ability to host 12 members (6v6) or whatever the largest lobby size FC decides to host.
2. Has all gametypes and maps downloaded (BEFORE 6:00pm EST on Sundays)
Anti-Requirements:
3. Reported disconnections on Battle Night
Details:
1."Demonstrated" means that we actually test that persons host with a lobby of 12 people. There are a couple of options with this.
A. We could have a battle night designated as a "host tryout" ran like normal, and document who was the connection host and then have all players give a rating on the host. If the connection was good, that host is added to the "certified" host list.
B. We could designate a specific time during the week for community practice/activities where anybody who wants to join the "certified" host list can show up and do a test run hosting a lobby. This would be dependent on the number of people who want to join the host list plus the number of people who just want to play Halo and show up to test the connections. It might be worth having a scheduling system to make sure enough people show up so we can have a good test since it doesn't make sense to test a persons connection with only 3 people.
2. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it would be a responsibility of all certified hosts to be prepared to host the lobby (i.e. they should show up to battle night at least 5 minutes early to ensure that they have the maps downloaded)
3. If players report that a host wasn't good on battle night then that host would then be removed from the list of certified hosts. There is a possibility of this being abused, but I think overall people will be more interested in playing a stable game than trying to find an advantage by false reporting hosts. We could also implement an appeals system where false reports are dealt with if this ever becomes an issue.
This may sound complicated but it could be implemented almost seamlessly. Next week could be the host tryouts and the week after we would start implementing the host regulations.
A very positive side effect of this would be that the community would be able to come together to practice/play customs during the week for host tryouts which would hopefully increase community unity and foster a healthy inter-army relations.
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