mangatron's bad luck: my Titanfall Beta experience

Ever wondered why I wasn't too happy about the month of February? This was the one time I wanted to forget my leg and enjoy myself, but my beta experience in Titanfall was anything but fun. (I blotted out my username because I wasn't thinking straight when I created my Origin account last year during those humble bundle sales, and it's not mangatron or einsteinecker, names I should have used >__> well I didn't have that much faith in Origin...) So my Titanfall experience was a little rough signing up for the beta, as I actually forgot my email used on Origin  (I really didn't have much faith in Origin). A couple of days later, I get the wonderful email:

WHAT. I don't have an Xbox One, and I clearly remember selecting "PC" as my platform of choice. Nice start to my Titanfall experience, eh? Yeah I didn't blot the code, doubt it still works anyways...

Look at that message. Did every PC user get that? Was there ever a "congratulations, you've been selected for the PC beta of Titanfall"? Looks to me this mishap happened more often to warrant a special email itself. Took them 6 hours to figure that out. Well, I was rather joyful about being selected, though I heard practically everyone who signed up got to participate. This was my first beta experience since 2004, when I was selected on a more not-so-easy-to-join beta. Best year of my life so far, that 2004. Anyways, I then remembered I still had to install Origin first, so I get on it and... oh, it needs to dl 170MB. Okay, not bad. That'll be quick on my HSDPA connection. Once that was installed, I insert my beta key and.... wtf, 12gb? For a beta? I thought it'd be around 2GB or something. It's a multiplayer game only, I thought... oh, hi res textures and all that HD hubbub. Clearly my connection wasn't meant for that large of a file. I take the risk anyway, and subscribe to a different mobile plan just for this game. Much to my amazement, it installs like Steam, which meant it wasn't downloading the full 12GB, it only cost my bandwidth somewhere close to 4GB. Nice, I thought, until I realized the damn thing installed to the default directory, my already small SSD. I was supposed to redirect to my other HDD, and Origin kindly tells me existing installs won't move to the new directory. Ha.... So all this was done by the 17th. I fire up the game, set my visuals to low (uh huh), and when I try to load the lobby,...... the servers are dead.  They're bleeding dead man. No matter what, its stuck at that rotating icon thing. I thought it's my connection. It seems to be bad all the time. Yet every site works, for the lols I try my 3DS and the Nintendo Network actually works. So I search online and apparently this problem happened a few days prior, yet for me it was still down. They must not have cared for their east asia data server...and I played no Titanfall for 2 days. On the 19th, I was browsing on Chrome, had Opera open as well, and matter-of-factly said "let's fire up that Titanfall, maybe it works" and without closing my browsers, I fire it up and it works! Thinking the server might never connect if I exit and close my browsers, I proceed to play with half my RAM being used >__<

So, thanks to MSI Afterburner not working (I still don't know why), I fired up fraps after leveling up to level 2, so my Titanfall diary starts from there. So, there I go starting a game amongst a bunch of higher leveled players...

This was the first time I found out Titans can drop their weapons. Would have been funny if pilots can use them just once...

Yeah, that was fun alright. No kills, highest ping in the house.

New game, yay! I got a kill. And... I'm reloading, while a pilot is in the top window in front of me. It's because I poured so much laggy rounds into roflstomper!

Here's an interesting kill: an auto-titan. Which means I don't get credit for a titan kill...

I of course failed to reach the drop ship. My lag is network lag btw. My graphics were fine, playing the game at 60 fps. It's just people hopping around like ghosts...

Alright, 5 kills.... and 9 deaths. With the highest ping in the house. I hated how alt-tabbing was a nightmare with all the windows I had open, I wished it was like some games that go into a windowed mode when you alt-tab, but Titanfall blacks out and only 1 window in whatever I was multi-tasking could be clicked on >__>

So after the MSI and 2 Fraps games, those be my stats. As you can clearly see, I killed way more AI enemies than pilots. Is it because I suck? Naw, I'm at level 2 while everyone else is higher level with more unlocks. And I'm new at this whole thing. I haven't played an FPS online since 2007!

As you can see, I am very new at this whole thing. I got Nuclear killed after being all giddy about my first Attrition kill.

And there we go. No pilot kills, not the highest ping, not the lowest level and I still sucked. That's my first time playing Attrition! I really really thought I got at least 1 pilot kill, but alas.

This death was very frustrating. See that burned out car? I was hiding behind it, ready to do some guerrilla warfare, and that guy comes lagging along, and I jump out! Guns blazing! And I could see it in my hud, he's desperately trying to get that damn auto pistol to fire at me, and all while I'm spraying and praying, and then he finally kills me. The lag really hurts. 3G is definitely not for online multiplayer.

That was the only time in my short Titanfall experience that I reached the dropship.

That was the last match I ever played. I quit since it was getting late, and I had to check my network stats (since this was my first time playing online with 3G, I needed to know data usage, total speed, etc). This occurred on the 19th. The next day, incredibly bored, (Thursdays are slow days) I fired up Titanfall and much to my dismay: no servers. It's over! And I didn't bleeding know about it! I don't hang around gaming sites that cover console games, and Origin didn't warn me, heck the in game messages didn't warn me, what turned out to be my only day of Titanfall turned out to be my last. If that's not bad luck, I don't know what that is.

I know for a fact my FPS skills didn't suck. Well, my leg certainly didn't help. But I've played all the COD games except for Blackops2 and Ghosts, I played BF3,  all single player of course. I killed way more AI enemies than human players, for some reason every team I was on always lost, and there was of course plenty of higher level players. What ever happened to match making. Leveling up is rather important in this game, as you get better unlocks for pilots as well as when you call in a Titan. Which of course I never got to experience because the damn beta ended the next day.

And of course the lag. And Company of Heroes 2. Seriously, I played way more CoH than FPS games, I really don't think I'd do that well in online FPS games. Maybe it's because all the things that could go wrong did. One thing is for sure: unless I get a better internet connection, Titanfall is not for me. It was fun, yes. First time in a long time I play an FPS online. I like how quick the gameplay was, though I could never figure out why enemy titans had more health than I did. I did hate how the guy on the radio was mocking me, saying "not a bad kill pilot, but I'd have wanted 2", as if I was supposed to get more kills lol. He said it a lot! In the end, I did enjoy my time, and if given a chance, I'd like to prepare for Titanfall someday ;)