What are you doing to please the competitive gaming community? Things the competitive Halo fans are in favor of.....
*Matchmaking system which gives a representation of player skill - NOT how much you play. A poorly skilled player should not be able to achieve a higher rank/level than a skilled one. You've stated you aren't going to use TrueSkill - so is this new system you're implementing going to appropriatly rate people based on how good they are? Or does it just reward you with rank ups for playing, and the max level can be acheived regardless of how often you win?
*First of all I'd like to state my disappointment in no longer being able to enjoy vanilla halo. With that being said, if armor abilities are a must - there has to be playlists without them, enabling the classic halo gameplay feel. I'm sorry, but it's hard to take MLG seriously when there's people flying around the map on jetpacks, it just damages the core gameplay feel of halo that we've come to love.
*Enabling joining games in progress literally renders win/loss ratio worthless. This is because you will almost always be put on the losing team, the game is likely to be too far in to possibly turn around, and you just pick up the loss for joining. I can already see the following scenereo happening: "oh sweet I found a match" , joins, and the player is put on the losing team with only a kill left until the other team wins, "game over? i didn't even get to play - and now I pick up the loss for joining".
There are other features mentioned which I'm not entirely thrilled about but am willing to give a chance.
343i - do not ignore the competitive gaming community. They are the fans that will stick with your game, buy all the dlc, and play it for years. One of Halo's distinctions from games like COD is that it was an extremely competitive and level-playing-field shooter; halo is becoming more of a casual, and I especially feel this vibe based on the released information.