The Art of Hosting in Burnout Paradise

This guide will give some tips on how to make the online experience in Burnout Paradise more fun and less frustrating for everyone. After playing Burnout Paradise for more than 120 hours and doing lots of online play I’ve noticed that hosting in Burnout Paradise can sometimes be a challenge on its own. To me it is important that people have a good time and don’t get frustrated with the game. I’ve written this multipart guide to try and explain how to host a good game in Burnout Paradise that will keep most people happy.

Part 1: Hosting challenges

Hosting in a open room:

Hosting challenges in a open room can be a very difficult task since you never know what skill level the players have. You might be facing mic and camera less noobs that use 5 minutes to press the boost button for one of the boost challenges. By the time he or she finished the challenge most of the players will be in a bad mood and most likely leave the game.

I recommend doing a really easy challenge first. You will then have an idea about who is paying attention. I call this the screening process. If someone is not doing the challenge talk to them and tell them what to do. If they don’t respond you know who to "get rid" of . If someone is having trouble doing one of the harder challenges you should not "get rid" of them if they are actually trying. When you feel that it is taking too long just cancel the challenge and try a different one. It is important the players feel that they are progressing and they will be unhappy if a challenge is taking too long.

When you feel that you have a stable crowd set the access to invite only. By doing this you avoid having to redo the screening process all the time and it is also vital to keep the game play smooth as the challenges change with different numbers of players.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen when doing challenges is if the host selects challenges at random and does not plan ahead. The nightmare scenario is doing one challenge in the quarry, then one at the beach, then one in Uphill drive, Meeting up at the Baseball Stadium… <insert random challenge here>! For me to have a good experience with challenges it is important that I don’t feel like I’m wasting time. Driving all over the map is a waste of time when doing challenges so the host must plan ahead to make the experience as smooth as possible.

When selecting challenges make sure that you select challenges that are in the same area as the last one. If you have done all challenges in one area select a new area and make sure that everyone gets to that area doing something. You could tell people that the next challenge will be in <insert area here> and tell them to drive there. By doing this people can do road rules or set today’s best as they drive there. Another way of getting to the next area is doing one of the general drift/oncoming/near miss/boosting challenges. You could also do one of the meet up challenges (meet at the Country Club, Baseball Stadium and so on).

Hosting a room for friends:

I think you can pretty much forget about he screening process here… apart from that everything else applies :-)

Summary

Does all this sound like hard work? Well it can be. When I host I want to give people a good experience and I know that some people will be happy doing pretty much anything… even my nightmare scenario above. But after playing lots of random people online and reading the forums seeing the frustration the challenges can cause I felt it was necessary to share my experiences and ideas with you.

To sum this up you need to know the map, know the challenges and plan ahead to host a good game of challenges!

To be continued...