The Director

In that case I'll lock the thread. The OP can message me if they want it unlocked.

How was I encouraging the use of AL?

Welcome back. Please message RedStarRocket91 to inform him of the situation with your accounts. He may be able to assist you.

1. You can read CH first because it's the true prequel to the other books. The forerunner saga is meant to be read after all of the other books so that while you are reading the series, you go "Hmm. I wonder about this" because without that you are going to find the forerunner sage to be really, really dull. CH on the other hand shows you what directly caused the events in the books that you are reading. This way, while you are reading those books, you can be like, "Oh, I see why they are doing that." You don't get that same experience with FS. 2. "Sure it was really slow and lacking substance compared to other books" Not just other Halo books. I meant ALL sci-fi books in general.

10/10

Before I begin, I want you to know that I know where you are coming from. There are very few things more frustrating than being killed by a power weapon or a grenade in a "cheap" way. That being said though, I can tell you that Grenade Spam has been prevalent and complained about in every Halo title that had a popular competitive multiplayer matchmaking with the exception of Halo Wars and Spartan Assault. There has been a lot of time and effort put into figuring out the reason why people spam grenades, and how to stop it. The why? Because it could get you a kill and help your team win. How to stop it? Completely remove grenades. Which isn't going to happen. Here's a few of things that have been found to cause grenade spam: 1. Counter-nading: When someone throws a grenade at you, one of your first instincts is to fight fire with fire. When teams are in close proximity to each other, this immediately results in grenade spamming. Even when players respawn, they've been found to be twice as likely to use their grenades if they died of nade-spam. 2. Preemptive defense: Going into armor lock at the first sign of an enemy (or popping a bubble shield) increases your chance of death by grenade by a ton. First instinct when you see someone go into AL? Blow 'em up. 3. Choke-points: Grenades are most likely to be employed when their are multiple opponents grouped together. In maps with narrow passages, this increases the likely-hood of this and thereby causes grenade spam. Here's some things that have been done so far to try to curb grenade spam: 1. Grenade Nerfing: This actually had the opposite effect. It caused players to have to throw the grenades with near pinpoint accuracy, or throw a bunch of them. Guess which happened. 2. Defenses against grenades: Primarily the Bubble Shield and Armor Lock, both of these also had the opposite effect. When someone pops a bubble shield, you have three choices. You go in the shield to kill them, you wait for a bit and toss grenades, or you run away. The option most chosen was the grenade option, because even if your grenades don't kill them it weakens them enough for you to get a kill. When someone goes into Armor Lock, it prevents them from being immediately killed, but also prevents them from moving. Which gives you time to aim your grenade. Tossing a grenade at someone using AL also works to KEEP them in AL (for fear of blowing up) while you figure out how best to handle them. 3. Increased time between throws: This one is rather subtle, but was intended to decrease grenade spam. Basically, instead of lobbing two grenades almost simultaneously, you had a pause before you could throw another. As you can tell, this didn't work. There are a couple of other things, but it's past midnight and I'm tired so I won't list them all. There is only one thing that can be done to eliminate grenade spam, and that is to eliminate the grenades. Another thing that has been considered but was rejected was making players switch from weapons to grenades. Reason it was rejected was that it would be clumsy, and it wouldn't prevent nade-spam because now the grenades are the players primary weapon. As far as power weapons, the only thing you can do is get there first. Unless you've got a team you can communicate with (because Halo is a team game), your odds of dying from power weapons go down dramatically if you actually pick them up first. In Halo Reach, you can actually learn where they are and make it a point to get there before your opponents (which is actually something that you are supposed to do if you are playing MLG style) and pick them up. Using them is your own decision, but denying your opponent the use of them is a good way to win. The ONLY gametype that doesn't feature power weapons or grenades while still being a competitive slayer gametype is SWAT. I see someone suggested that and your response was "Problem with SWAT is that it's a one shot kill, which also just involves you see the enemy first rather than aim." I'mma argue with you on that one a bit, because I quit slayer due to grenade spam and now prefer SWAT and Snipers.. 1. SWAT is only 1sk if you hit your opponents head. Default centering of the targeting reticle puts it over your opponents chest. Which means you literally have to aim for their head to get a 1sk. Even melee is at least 2sk. Either one shot one punch, or two punches. Firing at the body means you have to hit them five times to get a kill, which is plenty of time to line up a reticle on someone's dome. 2. Seeing the enemy first is a big advantage, as that allows you to fire the first shot. However, if you are going against a skilled opponent and you miss the first shot (or hit their back rather than their head), they are going to pwn you. If you desire proof of this, ask the moderator GSD to go 1v1 with you in a game of SWAT. You will then see the skill required to land the headshot first every time. 3. SWAT takes a learning curve. If you are new to it and playing against those with experience in it, you will lose (unless you are some sort of freak of nature "natural"). This means it requires learning a skill to be proficient at, which in turn makes it a skill-based gametype.

I disagree with Bnus on two points. 1. I believe you can read Contact Harvest first, as it tells you exactly how the covenant war started and why, and will bring a lot of things to light as you read the other books. 2. Forerunner Saga is the driest writing I have ever seen in a science fiction story.

You can also download the images you have in your fileshare on waypoint directly to your computer and then upload the images here: http://www.343industries.org/forum/gallery/

Seen this complaint a couple of times before. Alright, before I continue I want to make sure you know we are not 343 Industries, we are just a fan forum. Which is good because we actually try to help. So there isn't a way to actually change the language of the game. What we have been hoping for is that a language pack will be released for the game, but that doesn't seem likely. Here's a suggestion of what you CAN do, however. You can sell the Spanish Dubbed copy of Halo 4 (or return it if you are able) and then purchase the game online. You can purchase it from places like E-Bay, Amazon, etc. Make SURE that the game you are purchasing is the English version of the game. You can also save some cash by purchasing it used. This way, you get what you want, and you get the excitement of waiting for a package.

Not quite, no. Here's my response: In this thread I am asserting that he is looking for the librarian for her expertise in AI. Not because she HAS Cortana, but because he believes she can repair her or can bring her back.

An armor ability version of bubble shield with no cooldown so you can always be in a bubble? Armor lock that allows you to be invincible AND move? 343i's horrible programming fails? gr8 b8 m8 8/8 If anyone FALLS for the bait, well:

Locke is looking for Master Chief because ONI believes he went AWOL to look for a way to stop the Didact. Locke started off his journey by interviewing those who fought with Master Chief and knew him the best. He interview's the Arbiter because other than Cortana (who is gone) and SGT. Johnson (who is dead), the Arbiter is the one who fought by Master Chief the longest. Since the human's and the Arbiter are at peace, he is able to do this. I believe that Locke doesn't find Master Chief in this Halo game. And when he does find Master Chief, he finds out that Master Chief wasn't looking for a way to stop the Didact, he was looking for The Librarian after learning of the possibility she may still be alive. The reason he's looking for her is because she may be able to repair or bring back Cortana. We then discover that the Didact is still alive and is planning on going back to war with the humans. Something like that.

Just updated the list to match the newest updates. Quite a few achievements got quite a bit easier.

I never said they INTENDED to drop it. However, intentions aside, they may need to as I demonstrated above.

This is correct. Halo Nightfall is to Halo 5 what Forward Unto Dawn was to Halo 4.

Everything. Some assume that they are unaffected by my direction, but that is simply because I want them to assume that. Some know that they are under my direction, and that is again because I want them to.

No, WoW started off as an MMO. It wasn't an RPG or an FPS first. What I meant was that when a game saga releases an MMO, it usually means it's the end of the saga. The only exception to this I have seen thus far is Final Fantasy, and even then the reason was because their games have a different storyline and characters per release, and they don't all take part in the same universe. Now let's look at a few game sagas gone MMO. Star Wars: The Old Republic This game is made directly from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and it's sequel. With the popularity of the MMO in this series dwindling fast, and the fact that it has gone FTP, it's very unlikely that we will see a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 3 or Star Wars: The Old Republic 2. Which means that when the servers for SWTOR go offline, the series dies out for good. Elder Scrolls Online This game was just released, but it is based off of the long standing Elder Scrolls saga. There aren't very many gamers out there who have not heard about or played an ES game. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were their most "mainstream" releases, but the ES games have been successful from the start. ES is one of the most well known sandbox RPGs ever. That being said, since they have released ESO a good chunk of their dev time will now be devoted to maintenance and expansions. Which means they probably won't be getting around to making Elder Scrolls VI anytime soon, if at all. There is a rumor going around that the dev team for this game is completely seperate from the dev team for the single player game, which does give a bit of hope. If that's not the case though, that means that once the popularity of this game dies down, and the company shuts down the servers, it also dies out for good. Legacy of Kain Alright, so this one will probably be completely unfamiliar to those of you who are fairly new to gaming. The Legacy of Kain games are one of the largest game sagas ever to hit consoles. They have more spinoffs than most sit-coms and have been around since a good chunk of our members were in diapers. The newest Legacy of Kain game will be an MMO called Nosgoth. When it was leaked/announced, nearly every fan of the LoK saga lost it. In a bad way. The reason being that once a company releases a dedicated MMO, it's not very likely they will move back into single player. Now you may be asking yourself, "Well why does an MMO have to be the end of it?" Well it doesn't. That being said though, creating an MMO and maintaining it is pretty costly. You make money based off of subscribers or people purchasing in game items. You can also make money off of expansions to your MMO, but that's even costlier and has risk to it. So the primary way you make money off of an MMO is by keeping players interested in your game or getting them to subscribe to it. If you create another game (either MMO or SP), then you are going to take players away from your MMO, making the profit margin for the MMO shrink. Especially if your MMO is based off of a long standing game saga. Here's a for instance: Let's say your company has released three single player games and over the years have gathered 1 million fans. You decide to release an MMO for your game saga, and you lost 250k fans because they prefer single player games and have no interest in MMO games. That leaves you with 750k gamers paying for subscriptions and buying in game items. As time goes by, let's say about 100k have beat your MMO in every way possible and cancel their subscriptions to move onto other games. You then gain 50k gamers back by advertising your game. That leaves you with 700k, 650k of which are your "die hard" fans and 50k of which are new to your games. Now for simplicity, let's say that your profit margin at this point is 10/1, 10 being profit and 1 being cost. You decide to go back into single player games. This means that you have to hire additional staff to develop the new single player game while maintaining the MMO. This shrinks the profit margin down to 8/1. You then have develop a new engine because the engine you used for the MMO is now outdated. This shrinks it down to 6/1. You then have to pay for licensing across consoles and advertising. That brings it down to 3/1. Then comes the manufacturing of your new game and developing pre-order bonuses/etc. This drops it down to 2/1 (probably 1/1 but we'll give your company a bit of leeway). Then comes the release of your new single player game. Let's say that out of the 650k fans you currently have, about 300k of them purchase the new SP game on release. This brings you back up to 5/1. However, they cancel their subscriptions to the MMO, which drops you back down to 4/1. Within the first year of your SP game, you get an additional 100k fans. Total fans now at 800k. However, the majority of your fans have played and beat the MMO and have canceled their subscriptions and have bought the SP game. Which leaves you at 450k owners of the SP game and 350k MMO players. Which increases your profit margin to 6/1, but only for this year. The next year comes out and no one buys your game new, which means your only source of income is the MMO, which has degraded because there are only 350k players and no new content. This brings you down to 3/1. If you fire a couple of the MMO staffers, you might make it back to 5/1, but it's unlikely. So you've gone from a very popular SP gaming franchise and a profit margin that was 10/1 at the release of your MMO to a maximum profit margin of half that. Now, all of the things above are weighed in the benefit of your company. Most MMO's never see a profit margin of more than 3/1, and even fewer than that see more than 800k subscribers. I also didn't include any additional or accidental costs along the way (such as members of your dev team quitting, causing you to hire and train new ones, or hitting a snag in dev, or a thousand of other things that can sink a game). So by releasing your MMO and then a single player game, in the best of conditions, your profit margin went down by half. It's very realistic to assume that unless your company has one heck of a safety net that it would probably be in it's best interest not to try to develop another game, and simply stick to the MMO. Which is why MMO's are where game sagas go to die.

Nah, I think they'll probably upgrade the forge to Forge 4.0 You know, because: Halo 3: Forge 1.0 Halo Reach: Forge 2.0 Halo 4: Forge 3.0

Aaaaaaaaaaand we're completely off topic with the queen shaving shenanigans. Anyways, topics answered, so I'll just lock it.

Topic revival. Topic locked.

I had this happen with my X-Box 360 Elite gen 2. Started happening about a month before the disk drive went out.

Duplicate topic.

I believe they are guilty of the same thing they are accusing others of. Thus, making them hypocritical. Overall, I think that complaining about something that's actually relevant leads to topics of discussion rather than unnecessary negativity. However, irrelevant complaints only lead to negativity. An example of a relevant complaint, "I dislike the way that "A" handles and I think we should make it better." An example of an irrelevant complaint, "I dislike how people keep killing me in a gametype that is designed for people to kill each other and I have no suggestions to fix this."

Twinreaper would like to point out that the H4 pelican is the same size and shape as the pelicans in previous Halo titles. Here's an image detailing the pelicans from Halo 4, Halo Reach, and Halo 3.

This topic has been answered multiple times with about the same response each time. So instead of beating a dead horse, topic closed.