I have been playing Halo 4 for quite some time now (I finally got the CIO armor today, which equals 4500 kills, which equals I know what I'm talking about here.) To be completely honest, I love it a lot, but their are a few hiccups with the system that I do want to point out. And don't get me wrong, for their first game, 343i did an amazing job, but there is room for improvement.
1. Host Migrations
This has always been a problem with Halo games, but I feel that host migrations in Halo 4 take much longer than it seems that it should take. If they could work on this system a little bit more, I'm sure I wouldn't be pouting so much when the host decides to quit.
2. Thruster Pack and Hardlight Shield
These two armor abilities seem severely under-powered.
A. When I first saw the Thruster Pack, I immediately assumed it was just like a different animation for Evade from Halo Reach. Sadly, that is not the case. I decided to do some tests with it, and even if it had unlimited uses with no cool-down, sprinting is still faster. Needless to say, this doesn't make any sense. A slight tweak to make its thrust more powerful should do the trick in my opinion.
B. The Hardlight Shield is almost a waste of an armor ability. Unless your opponent is very far away, it is an extremely easy ability to counter. When using the shield, your shield doesn't regenerate, you can't turn fast, and are extremely susceptible to explosives. Personally, I just want to get rid of the ability and would love to see a deployable Bubble Shield, like from Halo 3.
3. The DMR
I will admit I have seen problems posted about this gun many many many times before. At lower levels, I rarely even noticed anyone using the DMR, so I payed little attention to it. But now that I'm level 59, I now am seeing what everyone is talking about. The DMR is unusually powerful and, in the hands of a pro, is a slaughter machine. At higher levels I am meeting the people who go 20-3 per game because of it. Now don't get me wrong, these guys are amazingly good at the game, but I find that the DMR, when pitted against the BR, Carbine, and Light Rifle, will destroy all of them, which, in the name of balanced gameplay, isn't right. My suggestion would be a slight decrease in either the fire rate or damage of each bullet from the DMR.
4. Jumping
As I stated before, as I reach higher levels, I begin to fight against people who aren't necessarily good, but rather just use exploits and unfair advantages to win games. One of these would be people who abuse the jumping. Earlier today, in fact, I was in a game of Regicide where three of the players, no matter where I encountered them, would jump around as if the ground was on fire. Now in games like Call of Duty, we never saw this kind of problem, mainly because you never could jump very high in those games. But in Halo, where you are a super soldier, it is understandable how you can easily jump amazing heights. I do, however, disagree on how you can constantly maintain your jump height after doing so several times in succession. My suggestion would be to make your initial jump the normal height that it currently is, but then each jump afterwards would be less than the one before. For example, the initial jump would be the normal 100%. After landing, if you were to immediately jump again, you would only get a jump at 75% of the original power. Then the next one would be 50%, and all following jumps would only be at 25% of the original jump height.
Sorry for the long read, but this is what I feel can be done differently for the Matchmaking system to make it more enjoyable for everyone. Please let me know what you think. I'm not looking to start a flame war, so please don't try to drag those kind of topics into your posts.
Thanks for reading,
Daslaya333 (GT: APsychoticMoose)