How To Become The Host in MW2

For some people this clever little trick will probably make them game host almost every time. I found the description in a longer and more technical post on website BASHandSlash.

Requirements For Being The Host

• A powerful pc with something like at leat 2 GHz dual-core and 3 GB of RAM.
• Upload speed at least 384 kbps, preferable a 4 Mbps ADSL connection.

Advantages of Being The Host

The best ping in the game.

If you are unsure how to track your ping, read my post MW2 Online Ping Monitoring.

How To Become The Host?

1. Start game.

2. From multiplayer menu, select play.

3. Select find game.

4. Select ANY game mode you wish to play.

5. As soon as you get in the lobby, hit ESC and be ready to select yes. Wait until it does its search for < 50 ms, when it goes to < 60 ms select yes.

6. Repeat step 3,4 and 5 (roughly about 3-4 times normally).

7. You’ll get to a stage where it will come up with matched player, do NOT leave the lobby at this stage. The lobby will fill fairly fast and it will say it is waiting / searching for the best host at this point.

8. Play game.

Does it work then?

If you wanna to see how it is done, follow the link to watch the video How to force hosting on IWnet on XFire:

 It works for me about 75 % og the time, and when I’m not the host I still got a fairly low ping.

 

If you try this, let me know what the outcome is:

MW2 Online Ping Monitoring

BASHandSlash has an interesting post about how to tweak your online ping monitoring in Modern Warfare 2.

Wonder why everybody always have 3-4 green bars in multiplayer? Because in regular cfg settings, 4 bars means up to 0-100 ping, 3 bars 101-200, 2 bars 201-300, 1 bar is 301+.

If you want a more actually picture you can do the following:

• Open folder steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players.
• Find the file config_mp.cfg and open it.
• Change seta cg_scoresping_interval from 100 to 20.
• Change seta cg_scoresping_maxbars from 4 to 10 (10 is the max).
• Save and close the file.

By doing that each of the 10 bars represents 20 ping, with full green being 20 ping or lower, and 1 red being 200 ping or higher. Here is an example of how it could look:

This is how you read the ping bars: Player Donny is the only one with a full green bar which means he is the host of the game and has a ping below 20. Player konzok_tony has only one single red dot, which means he has a ping above 200! The rest of the players is somewhere between 20 and 200, most og them with a ping at 60-100.

Why Bother about The Ping?

Ping tells you how fast data is traveling between your computer and the game server. 20 ping is the same as 20 milliseconds of data transportation. 200 ping is ten times as slow. So say your ping is 170 and your opponents is just 30 ping, and you shot at each other a the exact same time. Chances are you will die because the game server register your opponents hits on you before it register your hits on him. So if you have a high ping you better be extra fast on that trigger.

You get the best ping by being the game host since the game server is your own computer. If you wanna increase your chances for being selected as the host by IWNet, try the nifty trick explained in my post How To Become The Host in MW2.