I know it's only week one and the devs are probably working on Sparten Ops right now, but these are just some complaints - from me and others of the community - that could be addressed a little later down the line - hopefully soon.
The first and largest issue is about custom games. First, I'll explain what they are and why we need them. If you know both of those things then skip this next paragraph.
I'm not trying to sound nostalgic or be some elitist fan here, but an important part of the halo franchise is the ability for the player to create their own custom games - that means being able to create new gametypes using a variety of options given to the player. Giving the community this capability means the community can create content for itself. This increases the longevity of the game by years, since the there's more content to burn through, and it's purely community driven - the players make their own content. This is what made Halo 3 so good. It had forge mode AND a great many options to play with in creating their own gametypes. The game lasted years and years because of this. Then in Reach there weren't many improvements, and VIP was taken out, so things were more or less the same so custom games didn't thrive as long.
Now we're in Halo 4, and custom games has been drastically reduced. Assault, one-sided CTF, Infection, VIP, Territories, and a few others from Reach are gone. I understand some of these gametypes were redundant, since they could be created through editing other gametypes, but having unedited versions of these gametypes allowed for more variability, more custom content to be created, and more for the community to work with. If you guys decide to bring back anything, please give us Assault, one-side CTF, and the ability to change the infected settings in Flood.
There are some other things we're missing too: the custom and normal power-ups and some general customization options. The custom power-up was a key component in a lot of custom maps, we can't disable the magnum on the flag carrier, cant make a one-sided CTF map, cannot disable sprint, cannot change any characteristics of the flood in the Flood game mode other than the conversion condition and initial flood count, can't drop the flag or the oddball, and more. I know you guys have to worry about feature creep, but that's what the 'Advanced' section is for.
Custom games in Halo 4 is horrible! There's so much taken away and no innovation at all (except for a very few improvements to forge). You've managed to neglect a huge part of the game. The game is going to suffer in the long term if you guys don't fix custom games to have more options, more variability, more tools for the community to use to create it's own content. And please, please PLEASE, if you guys decide to change one, and only one thing, please let us change the flood settings, Let us change their weapons, set their speed and gravity, just let us change the standard things we can change for any other gametype. Flood is the most important gametype, let us change it's settings.
Some other, less important things:
I agree with the ranking thing. Right now, there is a skill-sorting system (not sure exactly how it works, but it's there), but there's no way to view it. I'd love to be able to see my arbitrary number determining my skill level. I'm not saying have it like Halo 3 where there were some playlists that sorted players based on exp, and others that sorted based on skill, since that would allow skilled players to rofl-stomp casuals with lots of exp they built up over time in the exp-based playlists, scaring them off from playing. Instead, just let us view them in our profiles.
Team doubles, rocket race, SWAT, and others should come back, and I'm not the only one asking for these - a lot of people miss them. Bringing these back would create a wider variety of playlists to choose from, since at the moment there isn't much in the way of goofy playlists. or competitive playlists. You could say Slayer Pro is competitive, but it really isn't. It allows for the use of power weapons through ordinance drops. Players should not having access to power weapons in any sort of competitive match.
My reasoning for having goofy playlists is that people love to take a break from shooting at people - casually or competitively - in goofy playlists like Rocket Race or Grifball. It's a great break in the normal pace of gameplay, keeping things varied and keeping people interested in playing for much longer than they would otherwise. It would be a good move to have at least one or two goofy or competitive playlists in the pool to choose from at any given time.
Wouldn't mind seeing a classic playlist where there's fixed weapon spawns, no ordinance, and no armor abilities.