Sova

Again, the boltshot makes gameplay very linear. I am forced to use my promethean specialization to avoid getting boltshotted. I might even be forced to use the DMR for long range or vote for maps that aren't CQ maps. Seriously, this is a balancing problem and not the refusal by many to adjust to the gameplay.

Say you want a fresh start all you want, but when you deviate from the base play of Halo, you alienate those players who like to play that way. The huge difference between the real Halo games and the new, "improved" games is the class specialization which honestly ruins the point of matchmaking. In Halo 2 and 3 everyone started out on equal footing at the beginning of the game and basically raced to get the power weapons. Now 343i has implemented personal drop pods and specializations which provide for a wide variety of advantages and disadvantages. No longer do people need to use map control as a way to win the game. No longer to people rely so much on teamwork to get power weapons. And no longer are matchups fair and balanced. To me and most older Halo players this serves to undermine the point of playing online. It provides for a highly volatile style of gameplay immersed with unbalanced weapons. It's frustrating and very annoying.

LOL, i loved this, it was lighthearted and joyful.

Oh okay, haha, yeah I understand you now. It really doesn't give an aesthetic feel to your spartan when it says SR130 or whatever...RIP Halo 3 ranks

Yeah, i'd say those who played halo at its finest, halo CE and 2 and to an extent 3 are aging. There's a new composition of players in the gaming community and they like this halo reach and halo 4 format. Which I guess is fine for them if that's how they want to play a game but i guess people like me and Benchimus are just not too much concerned with gaming anymore. Hell, i've got to get a career next year after graduating college. Should I be worrying about Halo 4? Nah man.

Its about time the Halo Franchise got dedicated servers... ><

All the time and shots it takes you to kill someone is an indication that maybe your connection is the one thing giving you a bad exeperience. I wouldn't put the blame on 343i. Halo has always been a p2p hosting system so I wouldn't be surprised for some who have lag issues to be affected by it, but that's not the developers fault. That's the fault of the user.

There are some inherent flaws to the game that 343i has implemented but I wouldn't say that's the sole reason numbers are down. Black Ops 2 has a ranking system so that is drawing some of the competitive players and plus this is the time of year that people are taking finals and out and about. I'd say the holiday season has some impact on how much the game is played.

Halo Reach ranks NEVER showed how good someone looked or showed their talent, it merely showed how much they played. Unless you are talking about Arena ranks which were a godawful way of translating skill.

Just wait till next year with bungies new game. They'll probably have some breakout game of the year in Destiny and everyone will move on to that.

I also wanted to note on the frequency of multikills. Because of the lack of skill gap, its near impossible to win a 1v2 matchup with just a BR and grenades. You need to have some sort of tactical advantage that includes a power weapon of some sort and/or OS, Damage boost, or sprint. In halo 2 and 3 multikills were actually quite frequent across ranks because of the skill gap and the advantage a well placed nade gave you. A 50 would get a lot of doubles and triples if he were playing a bunch of 30s. But if he were to play 50s, those numbers would be down but they would still be there. In halo 4 however it doesn't matter what level you are, you will get destroyed if you go up against 2 guys at once. Hence the big reliance on teamwork. Basically Halo 4 is more of a team-oriented game than H2 or 3. Reach was caught inbetween and made it unbalanced. I think many players who were once very good at H2 and 3 are upset that Halo 4 is way too hard to be REALLY REALLY dominant. (my spelling errors are pretty bad right now, but its 3AM...IDGF)

Tornado I think you are hitting the nail on the head. This all leads back to average lifespan from the moment of enemy contact to the time one of you dies. If you notice the difference between halo 2 all the way to halo 4 the amount of time someone can stay alive while in combat is staggering. In halo 2, the moment a person shot first (the initiator), they had a clear advantage and more than half the time they usually killed the enemy. In halo 3 it was fairly the same however the took out hitscan for the BR thus players had to adjust to this by leading their shots which therefore led to prolonged enemy lifespan from the moment the initiator shot them. Halo Reach was even worse, with bloom the amount of time was extraordinarily obnoxious for the initiator; Bloom increased the amount of chance for the person the intiator would be shooting to actually live and kill the initiator. You could no longer say with confidence that if a person shot first that they would be the victor. Sprint and the addition of health also furthered this chance if you want to call it that Now in Halo 4 they lessened the bloom for the DMR, AR, Pistol, etc. and made it significantly harder for sprinters to get away from someone who was shooting them; HOWEVER, they increased the amount of chance that the initiator would die by the addition of the frequency of power weapons and the Boltshot. That's why I think many people complaining about the very small skill gap. When you increase the amount of chance in a game it really takes the fun out of it. How many of us can honestly say we like dying by an enemy we spent the last 3 seconds shooting with a br at mid range, thereby leading to no shields, only to get killed by one measly charge of the boltshot? I sure as heck don't. For those who might say, "just use promethean, easy counter to boltshot." Then what's the point in having all these other abilities? Seriously, the point of all the additional facets that War Games brought was to broaden the gameplay and make so many possibilities. However, when you go into a slayer game on adrift or even big maps to an extent, MOST players use the boltshot as a secondary because of the power it holds in getting them that 1 almost assured kill as long as they camp. So you are almost forced to use promethean out of respect for boltshots. That makes the game VERY unbalanced. I cannot use my other abilities because im stuck trying to use promethean to keep my self alive. If the boltshot was a secondary i wouldn't have such a huge problem with it. It's fair to use a 1 kill weapon, but the extent of how frequently it is used is absurd.

The Incinerator Cannon is fine. It serves its purpose as a power weapon and only rarely do people get it in slayer games. DMR and BR i think are pretty well balanced with the exception that the BR needs to have a little bit more range. Guns that seriously need tweaking are: Pistol- needs to be a more useful secondary AR- Needs to have more firepower as well, just too damn useless against any other CQ weapon. Boltshot- Way too powerful to be a secondary weapon. should be the equivalent of a scattershot ordinance, if you want to keep it as a secondary at least make it a lot harder to use or tone down the power of the charge to where it doesn't kill in one shot. I've found way too many people using this weapon which abuses the broad gameplay that 343i is trying to invoke into the game. Snipers and other scopable weapons- You shouldn't be able to be scoped in while someone is shooting you. It doesn't make sense that you can continue looking through the scope of a sniper or beamrifle when someone is putting shots in your head. Makes a sniper virtually impossible to outgun long range. Those are just some observations I feel make this game very unbalanced so far. I hope 343i can tweak it with the next update.

This gun is way too powerful to be a secondary. I'd be fine with it if it was just a drop weapon but the fact that more than half the players in a game use it as their secondary and can pretty much get an easy kill with it is frustrating to deal with.

Actually there's a huge difference between lag and stuttering and I am fully aware of what they both look like. When everyone else seems smooth in their movement and I am being hung up then that is called stuttering. In other news, it was actually my controller's left analog stick failing so problem solved.

Just bought the game tonight, and played a few games of multiplayer. Haven't tried campaign yet but for the most part everything runs fine with a little bit of lag in the lobby when flipping through pages and all. One thing that has really been annoying that just popped up the past 2 games i played was stuttering. Whenever i try to move forward, at some points i stutter and it slows down my progress. What is this? This usually only happens on computer games and never thought it would be a problem for the 360 but maybe the game is just that advanced that it's giving the RAM, GFX or whatever problems. I dunno if this has been asked before so I thought i'd just post it myself to get a quicker answer than scouring the forums for another thread. Has anyone else had this problem? And for the record, i'm playing on a first gen 360.

I'm good with this, it stays true to the Halo competitiveness. It is bringing it back from Halo 2 and 3 and scrubbin Reach of that Arena crap we were fed. The only difference is it is now on Waypoint as opposed to the game UI itself. This is fine with me. It's just like Halocharts (if any of you are aware). Which to me isn't a big deal to log on to my computer to see. I did that with Halo 2 and I can do it again with Halo 4. Thank you 343i.

Errr, I'm surprised this thread is still somewhat active. I thought we kind of beat the issue to a dead pulp. Guess not. Anyway, my way of seeing it: If Halo 4 doesn't have a visible ranking system like that of Halo 2 then I see many competitive players moving on to the next big thing. Halo multiplayer was always built around 4v4 gameplay and this is why it became so competitive. The difference in interest between 4v4 and something like Big Team is the atmosphere and the incentive to win a game. In BTB it really didn't matter all too much what you did so long as you were immersed in the combat. In contrast, 4v4 you had a huge role, it mattered what you did every step of the way. Visible rank made your actions all the more important because you knew that if you lost a game you would be matched up with terrible people over and over. Basically CoD and BF3 are games that have huge followings and are amazing to play because they simulate warfare on a grandscale (or at least try to) but Halo is different. It was always different and should always be different. Halo, in my own metaphor and perspective, seems to be more of a sport than a simulation of combat. It's who can react, who can outmaneuver, who can get the best of the person they are up against. This I think is what's at heart of the gameplay and is enhanced by a skill based ranking system. I know a lot of people just like to enjoy the game and I really do get that. Heck, that's why I play Battlefield 3 a lot. But for people who play MLG or gamebattles or even just people like me who want to play competitively at a very high and intense level, we want to be continually matched up against these people and have something to fight for. I like the nail biter games that come down to the 49-49 cliffhanger where the next kill matters THAT much more. In a skill-based system that 1 kill could determine your "rank". But in a progression only system that last kill doesn't hold the same weight. All I'm saying, as a highly competitive player, is that this skill-based system needs to resemble at least somewhat Halo 2's own system or else I'm going to hang the game up on a shelf come next Spring in place of something that offers me what I want. I'm not making an ultimatum and in no way will I judge the game completely on the ranking system itself, but I can guarantee me and countless others will lose interest in the game fast if they don't have something in place that appeases us. Best of luck come Nov. 6th. Btw, I hope while you all are out buying the game that some of you who are of legal age will be voting!

Well, they better make some concessions on skill...i want to be placed not progressing, i dont care about unlocks, i want to show how good i am.

Yeah it's definitely illegal to sell your account which is stupid because you personally paid for it by paying for the time to play on it. But that's Intellectual Property law for you... Stupid IP laws...ruin everything in marketplaces.

I just hope they HAVE a skill system. I dont think Arena would have been so bad if they had the BR and didn't have all the lucky kills. I think we can all agree, Reach gameplay destroyed Arena because it was really hard to go Pro in any game. Most kills were amount of who got the first shot and who could spam the best.

Is that they tweaked the physics back to how it was in Halo 2 and 3. Who's ready for some NINJA!?

Freedom of Speech is allowed, but if you recall, I was aggravated by the fact that Zuko came into this topic as well as my other just to say that its a redundant topic and that we need to stop talking about it. What he failed to realize was that I was making the case that there was no information on skill based ranking systems and that info needs to be given. I was also asking people if they heard anything about this. But when you have someone come in and act sarcastic...I think I have a right to say, "hey, stop it, its annoying, I don't want you to respond to me." The point I'm making about deranking/boosting is that you can't just eliminate an entire part of the game or reform the system so much that it becomes boring and pointless just because a "small" group of people abuse the system. That's called overreacting. They can tweak the Halo 2 system to prevent deranking (I laid this out before) and boosting (they can reform the Microsoft Points and crack down on illegal transition of accounts). Yes this can be done. If they are serious about it then they should do that, but don't be lazy and just change the ranking system completely. And you deflected my entire premise about maturity and pointed out an opinion that I was simply putting comic relief to what I said right prior to that. That's not sounding illegitimate sir... Boosters in what aspect? Halo 2 is VERY different from halo 3 in boosting. The only boosting you could do was derank to a lower level and play "easier" competition in order to hopefully help your friends rank up OR circle boost. But what's different from halo 2 and halo 3 is that Halo 3 using TruSkill. In halo 3 you actually get rewarded for beating easy competition in terms of experience- manipulating Truskill Halo 2 you simple gained a win towards the next rank which was weighed by how high the ranks were on the opposing team. Circle boosting was a problem but that is so easy to fix any person who knows how to program can do it. VERY different forms of boosting in my opinion with deranking being the legitimate root. Halo 3 was pure manipulation of the system and when you add in the selling of accounts and making new ones...yeah it was a no brainer it was going to become a big problem. Halo 2 though only had problems with deranking (and this wasn't a big problem). What stained halo 2's ranking system for most of the time was network manipulation, modding, and circle boosting. Circle boosting is an easy fix (Reach fixed it pretty well), modding became nonexistant in matchmaking (you got booted instantly if you modded after the update), and network manipulation continued to reach but became less of problem (they refused to go to dedicated servers but did clean up standbying and ip flooding). If they had cleaned up those three problems, halo 2 would be the reigning system right now. But no, Microsoft had to move to Truskill and implement experience and all that junk.

Hit me up after November 14th Force410. I'll hopefully be on XBL by then! (Currently out of the states).

Hit me up after November 14th. I'll hopefully be on by then! (Currently out of the states).