Bloody Initiate

I love me some Ragnarok. Also I enjoy Solace and Adrift, occasionally complex, and I feel Exile has potential (largely wasted with the horribly imbalanced vehicle placement). I think it's a shame Haven is so popular, I have enjoyed it but I don't think it's nearly as good as people say. It is the most definitively Halo 4 map in all of Halo 4. That to me is a bad thing, because when I think of Halo 4 maps I think of entire maps full of indefensible positions designed to have people sprinting and dying a lot. It's just an aesthetically pleasing paintball court, a circle with a cross in the middle. Nothing about that map feels impressive because it's designed so that every point on it IS unimpressive. If there was a single good spot then it would defeat the purpose of the whole map. They accomplished what they wanted to accomplish with Haven and Halo 4, the problem is I don't think they should have tried to accomplish it.

This is probably partly due to the insanity of grenades in Halo: Reach. They buffed everything that exploded in that game, but also slowed players down. The result was grenades did incredible damage over a very large area and they were very difficult to avoid. Thus people spammed grenades very often. Later in Reach's life they actually reduced the amount of starting grenades to 1 to counteract the fact that grenading someone was simply much better than shooting them. As with many things 343 did in this game, they attacked the problem from multiple fronts, usually creating new problems. In the case of grenades they reduced their damage and spread, gave you grenade indicators, and prohibited you from picking them up without an upgrade. It's also a CoD thing, but the grenades really were way too strong in Reach and something DID need to change. They did NOT increase player walking speed at all that I can tell, or at least they didn't increase it much. They also kept a lot of controller and gameplay aspects of Reach that make the bumper jumper setting more of a personal preference rather than such a practical upgrade. That's relevant because people jump much less in Reach and Halo 4 than they did in Halo 3, where good players could hop around in a room full of grenades and avoid taking damage from most of them. I'm not complaining about these differences, they're more natural than deliberate, especially because the biggest change was armor abilities which gave the left bumper brand new value it previously lacked (Bumper jumper was an easy change to make in Halo 3 because you lost very little functionality, in Reach and Halo 4 though you have to weigh your use of armor abilities with the utility of jumping + aiming). Yes it definitely makes the grenades play much more like they do in Call of Duty, but like I said there is more natural development going on there than just 343 shamelessly copying CoD notes. I think they should have let players move and jump more, increasing their mobility, and also let them salvage grenades without the Resupply upgrade. The power of the Reach grenades HAD to go down though, and you won't see me asking for them back. The grenade indicators are nice, I feel they modify gameplay only a little bit. Most players know when there's a grenade nearby anyway, so they would have done fine with or without indicators.

This happens every now and then, not sure how to explain it. Been seeing it since Halo 3.

Sword is still a power weapon, but much more limited than previously. You can barely surprise anyone in this game, which hurts ALL the CQB weapons (boltshot included), but everyone has sprint and you can frequently jump into a fight to guarantee the kills for your team. Your targets generally need something other than you to shoot at though, or else you're dead. You also have to respect how bad shields are in this game, because where previously the sword would rack up multikills you just can't afford to go for it like that anymore. You have to spend 8 seconds avoiding combat for every 1-2 seconds in combat. That also hurts all the other CQB weapons, because they can't afford to move around as much and get into better positions. You have to let people come to you more often.

I will admit that I've been out-DMRed by someone who incorporated crouches into their strafe, but I also don't think I've seen in much in MLG gameplay.

Not a new practice I'm afraid, it's cheating when everyone isn't playing along and boosting when they are. Boosting is annoying but generally harmless, cheating is cheating. Back in my Halo: Reach file share I had uploaded a video of doing just that with his guest in an FFA playlist. Report him and otherwise do as you've done and that will be all you can do. I think it's against forum policy to call out a specific player.

The biggest thing to a strafe is making sure you're unpredictable, sometimes a quick crouch (very quick) can save you 1 bullet. I never incorporated crouching into my strafe just because I never developed much of a strafe in the first place, but a lot of moving in combat is about getting a tiny edge. Usually you're preparing to fight players of roughly equal skill, so you expect the fight to be over in 5 shots no matter who wins. After that you're working to shave off 1 of their hits or just a tenth of a second off their kill time. Improving past a certain point isn't done in big steps, it's done in a bunch of tiny ones, mastered each one at a time. I'm not endorsing crouching in a fight either, just noting how it's not completely worthless. Especially after Reach people don't have a lot of vertical adjustment in their strafes. In Reach they dropped the jump height and introduced AAs, which made the previously very-popular bumper jumper settings suddenly optional. People also didn't strafe as well due to slower movement speed, so greater emphasis went to landing your shots first.

Am I the only one that noticed the enemy team was hopelessly outnumbered for most of the game, and even when they got some new names the amount of map control they'd lost earlier kept them from gaining any advantage? The first thing you did was dump your gunner, which was a lousy move but the enemy team didn't even have the people to push the tank, and I understand that you don't want a tank sitting empty. Next you grabbed the tank and relied entirely on your bigger team suppressing the enemy while you had a free reign of that map that no tank ever gets against any kind of resistance. I don't think I saw you get EMPed even once, which is ridiculous, because against anyone who knows anything the tank spends most of its time EMPed. So while I'll happily agree that the enemy team was horrible, I didn't see anything that said your team was any good. This is not the type of game you brag about. I'm sure it was fun and it's cool to get nice medals and commendations, but nothing about that looked difficult or dangerous. Your team easily saturated the entire map and the other team was so awful they'd send holograms and hope you didn't notice they were still standing there. I'd be happy to be the guy with the bigger team running around getting free kills in a tank, but you wouldn't see me talking about how hard it was and how it was my skills that kept me alive. Instead this is the type of game people dread, because I bet if there was one good player on that team he/she would have had a hard time fighting 7 of your teammates while he tried to kill you in the tank. It's like a teamquit nightmare. You're outnumbered on a map with a Scorpion and a Gauss, no matter how hard you fight you can't win, and even though they weren't challenged at all the enemy team will get perfections, invincibles, and then post it on Youtube. I hope you get some better content, because I don't have any desire for people to fail. I'd like your channel to be successful, but do please post some games that aren't so painfully stacked to your advantage. Also don't pretend you have some secret strategy when all you did was reap the rewards of the enemy's bad luck.

I think randoms have gotten worse. That might be one of the things I have failed to really observe as I've played over the years. Either that or after playing with teams my patience for randoms has decreased, I just know it feels like a progressively worse idea to search alone than it ever did, which sucks because whatever people may argue about classic Halo I bet a massive portion of the population searches alone more often than not.

I don't have a great K/D, especially not by recent standards. It ussed to be an amazing player MIGHT have a 2.0 K/D, the numbers have gone up since Reach. My average K/D stays pretty consistent (around 1.5), which tells me I have good basics but fail to learn any "secrets" which might be specific to a game or map. I was around 1.5 in Halo 3, same in Halo Reach, same in Battlefield 3, same in Halo 4. Even though three of those games are Halo games, they all play very differently, and yet I kept about the same K/D. Master of none... I CAN tell you that Halo 4 is designed to push you into harm's way a lot more than most games. You are not meant to survive and do awesome, you are meant to rush and die a lot. Where previously this was a choice each player made, now it's built into the game. Keep that in mind when you're playing. If what you're doing feels "natural" for the game then chances are it's a bad idea. Like I said I don't know a lot of good tips, but I do know that this particular game is working against you most of the time, and if you treat it like another enemy you might find yourself doing better. Things to watch: Your shield. Halo 4 lulls you into a sense of security with your shield, it gets ripped apart in under 2 seconds by most weapons and takes 8 seconds to return to full. Your motion tracker. Your enemies are behind you, if they aren't now they will be soon. Also more and more players will be using the stealth perk as the game's life continues so you will find PV less helpful. You should also get used to using a mic if you don't already. A team is the best back-up you'll find, and they're more important in this game than in any Halo game before it because the game is designed to punish rambo-style gameplay. Also crouch. A lot. Don't sprint everywhere, don't sprint around corners, and when you're not moving fast, crouch. I THINK it might be a good idea to just sort of slow down in general. The game doesn't want you to stop and think, but try to do it anyway. Try sprinting less or NOT hammering X the second you die. Let yourself be dead for a few seconds so you can think for a second about what got you killed. A couple of those are tips I know are good but am not good at using myself. For example I don't crouch much. I also rely too much on PV, and frequently don't feel like talking.

I will echo the above statements and recommend a boltshot. I also recommend avoiding melee as often as possible. Avoid it until you have no choice. Even if you drop the guy with melee you're going to finish the fight one-shot, and in Halo 4 there's always someone coming up behind the last guy you killed. The only time you should go for melee is if you have a massive advantage (Sword, Shotgun, Damage Boost, Overshield, etc.) or if you're in a fight you know you can't survive anyway. Try Promethean Vision so you don't get surprised, Thruster Pack to boost away from your enemies right when they think they have you (Or to jump, boost behind them, and assassinate), Hardlight Shield to take the hit right on (You can activate it, take their melee, and then deactivate and return with your melee very quickly), Mobility to keep yourself ahead of your enemy, Jet Pack to boost way above their head and giggle, and any other options that help you avoid melee.

They did dramatically reduce the melee lunge in this game, but I tend to be for rather than against it. Overall it helps keeps the weapons at their appropriate ranges and the sprint + 2x melee from Reach was easily the most frustrating thing I've ever suffered in a Halo game. You couldn't sprint backward, but they could sprint forward, so they could force the combat into a melee encounter even when they started at mid-range. It was AWFUL. The biggest complaint I had with the melee lunge though is I could never identify any kind of pattern to it. People would say one thing or another about what triggered it but there was never anything consistent producing that lunge. Sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn't, and plenty of times one person would get one and the other wouldn't, and that would cost the second guy the fight for no reason. Then in Reach they pulled that lunacy about shield bleed-through that was meant to decrease melee but actually empowered it. I agree it feels silly missing someone with a melee and then dancing around looking for each other for awhile, but since I've played with the alternatives (Halo 3 = trade kills, Reach = melee kills felt so cheap you felt dirty getting them and so much worse dying to melee), you won't find melee amongst my complaints with Halo 4. The end lesson for me that I figured out in Halo 3 and has been true ever since: avoid melee if you want a consistent performance. The thing that was so frustrating about Reach is that you COULDN'T avoid melee, but you still wanted to. The closer you get to your enemy the lesser you chances of surviving the fight, even if you get the kill. Everyone has fists, so everyone is dangerous up close. Not the same for other weapons.

I care because it seems I'm one of the few people who respects the fact that products have to be released by a deadline and that's the job of the people at 343 industries. I may not like everything they do, but I respect that it's a real job at a real company doing work to create a marketable product. So when they're making changes to this game or another I'd like it if they spend their LIMITED time focusing on things that matter rather than giving people an option to watch themselves run. You can't just have all options in every game, little things like programming a second camera take time that could be spent fine tuning weapons or cleaning up glitches. The ONLY shooter I know of that's very successful with the over-the-shoulder perspective is Gears of War. It plays radically different from Halo AND its multiplayer has more narrow appeal. If you want to see yourself that bad just watch every game you play in theater, you'll make as much of a difference. Over-the-shoulder perspective pushes your camera back but you still have to remain competitive. Rather than swiveling on your gun like the camera does now though, the over-the-shoulder perspective swings it wide behind you to keep looking in front of you. The camera has to move MORE to keep up with the same amount of player movment. It's not just a change you can program in and let players pick between it and 1st person. That's why in over-the-shoulder shooters they slow you down so much, so that you don't get jarred by the camera moving super fast to keep up. The OP doesn't understand this because the OP didn't think about it, but if you think about it as a game mechanic the problems become obvious. It's not something you click on and off, it's something you build your game around. Where the camera is in a SHOOTER is extremely important. Like my opinion or not, it's the product of information not random brainfarts.

Ugh, I'm done wasting time on this clown. I never thought I'd be so glad to be on the community-run forum though. Tip for the future: Saying "I refuted that" or "you did not provide any facts" does not make either statement true. You don't have an argument at all, you aren't serious about getting the visible Trueskill back or you WOULD get an argument instead of just wasting everyone's time having a conversation with yourself. Just as I gained nothing from the years of Halo discussions talking about Trueskill I gained nothing from this one, because just as before the fool on the other side had no clue or interest in getting one. Enjoy the futility.

My SR is like 61 or something. My highest trueskill in a playlist is 29 or so, I don't know whether that is because I haven't played a whole lot of one playlist or if I'm just bad at Halo 4, I'm betting on a mix of both with greater helpings of the latter.

It's my understanding file shares aren't working right at the moment? I can't personally check because I'm running on trial subscriptions until Christmas, but you can still save film clips and upload them later. To do that you'd go into theater, select the game, find the clip and record it. If you haven't used theater before there is only so much I can explain in a post, you really just have to get in there and push some buttons to get a feel for it.

1. I don't have to work very hard to prove you don't understand anything, you've done a wonderful job for me. At least the majority of players only know as much as you do, so you won't feel left out. 2. It's redundant because after several years people like you still don't get it 3. I've spent too much time over multiple years explaining this crap to people, supporting my claims, using only facts, and people don't want to listen. 4. Logic and grammar may be the most important aspects of your life, but if you don't know what the **** you're talking about, it really doesn't matter how well you structure your sentence. Logic only helps you when you have information you need, so I'll give some below. 5. No you don't understand it, you don't have any idea what it is or what it's for. No the amount of boosters was NOT miniscule, you either weren't there or you're outright lying because you don't want to admit the biggest weakness in your argument. The biggest hole in your argument btw: The past. History. You're like one of the people who says we should go back to the way things were at ______ time, except the biggest thing you fail to understand is people didn't like it that way and so they don't do it that way anymore. Here's the information that will help your "logic" get this straight, if you have any of it: Trueskil is a sorting system. It's designed to put players of roughly equal skill in games together so the games are consistently challenging. It is NOT a reward system. It is NOT meant to be bragging rights. It is NOT designed to motivate competition. It's only purpose is to keep matches challenging and to avoid players getting matched up against people of very different skill levels. It's based on winning and consistency. Those are all facts. Real ones, like the kind that you associate with the truth. It's also very accurate. That's a paraphrase of statements made by people who manage it. It is more accurate than most people are likely to realize, and more so than most people are ready to accept. That is my personal observation. You haven't refuted anything, because you're still arguing with people who are the very example of why you are wrong. People who were good at Halo loved seeing their Trueskill. People who weren't could have done without it OR lived in denial that the number was accurate (it was). Most people aren't good at Halo (Fact), most people are average (Definition of fact), so MOST people probably didn't think seeing their Trueskill was especially important, you can see this in Halo 3 any time you get on because Social Slayer was ALWAYS the playlist with the highest population. Finally, MLG and the hardcore crowd were about as helpful as they were harmful. That's also my personal observation. For better or worse they're here now and I don't resent it.

Yes and no, you have an increased chance of making one by accident but a decreased chance of making it on purpose, due to the low accuracy and high recoil. I don't think it's something they could do with Halo 4, but I would like it if they considered it later. As it is I have a fine time with automatics in this game, when I use them, which isn't often, and never has been. They've always been like this in Halo games, I'm accustomed to it. Sometimes I let myself get frustrated with automatics though, because ripping off someone's shields and then watching a DMR shot slide in to ****** the kill makes me feel like I'm incapable of finishing my own fights. THAT makes me feel like I'm constantly being rescued, and it all just adds up to make me wish automatics were better. It's worst in FFA, I don't mind a teammate finishing my kills because either way we're winning, but in FFA it's very hard to justify an automatic weapon even though they work better in FFA than any other gametype. Also I'll admit something feels less satisfying about headshots with automatic weapons, having done it in other games, you just kinda get the headshot or you don't, since the weapons are harder to control you never really feel too strongly about headshots with them. The problem with not allowing them to make headshots in Halo (And again this isn't specific to Halo 4) is the shield system creates such a contrast between headshot-capable and not headhsot-capable. I definitely prefer to have shields, it's an aspect of the game that makes it play a little differently than other shooters. All that being said, I really don't think the structure is in place to make it happen in Halo 4, and even if it were I don't think it would improve the game (Maps are small enough for it to create real problems). I just like to mention it once or twice every Halo game so maybe the idea will grow in someone's head. EDIT: Funny when the forum blanked out my text earlier, the word wasn't especially foul though it can and has been used as such. It was the word for grabbing something quickly that is often used in reference to lady parts. Wasn't trying to be foul-mouthed.

I'm not sure why you think we'd have a better idea of what went on than you do. I understand you were hoping someone had heard of it, but I haven't. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, just that I can't tell you much. That's why I said grab the theater clip. You're the only person with access to the information. As for killing people with the initial drop of ordinance, yes you can. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrscOe3Fiqw&feature=player_embedded#! I can't see using it often but I think would be an awesome way to turn the tables in a fight you're losing.

That's weird, you should grab the clip in theater so you can A. analyze just what went wrong and B. point it out. Back in Halo 3 I was playing Lone Wolves and I killed a guy when suddenly "double kill!" No one else around. Confused about it, I went back in theater to check it out, it made no more sense. Some guy across the map who I could not possibly engage in combat lost his fight but I got credit for the kill. I didn't shoot him or hurt him at all in that life, but someone else got robbed of a kill by the game and I got credit for impossible reasons. I still have never figured that one out. If that had happened at an MLG event gamers would til this day claim they'd been robbed by the "kill robbing glitch" in this game or that, when I only saw it once over several thousand games. It's kinda like an illness that people hear the symptoms of and suddenly everyone is self-diagnosing themselves with it. Anyway I'd encourage you to go over the video in theater to make sure you know what you saw, then you can report it and we might be able to avoid the possibility of ever experiencing what you're talking about again.

I don't understand the fascination with the over-the-shoulder perspective. In every game in which it appears they slow you down, and the only thing it accomplishes is blocks you from seeing a large portion of your screen. It's a terrible perspective whose popularity boggles me. It's right up there with quick-time events and context commands as a thing that has become wildly popular for no good reason. Is there some masturbatory fascination with seeing your character perform actions? I'd rather see it like I would see it if I was in the game. People like it, but it does nothing to improve functionality or gameplay, just worsens it (Because they always implement it by jamming a broomstick up the character's butt so you can never move as well). If ever I need to argue that people don't have any idea what makes a good game, I will point to the over-the-shoulder perspective as an example. You might like it, but it improves the game about as much as a single new armor permutation and damages it badly in the process. It's a personal preference thing and I wish people who liked this crap got less of what they wanted so the rest of us could have better games.

If you have a good driver and your team forms a line through the map's infantry choke points the Gauss will win the game for you. Infantry have a hard time holding Bravo though, just as they have a hard time holding any location in Halo 4. If you have like 3-4 guys in Bravo, 1-2 at banshee spawn, and 1 at tank spawn your Gauss can run a U-shaped route (don't circle the map) and keep the enemy on the dark side of the map. Your biggest problems are infantry going for Bravo and marksman in the top of the dark-side base. Neither one will vex the Gauss very much, but they will give the guys in Bravo and banshee spawn a hard time, and if they get through they get behind your Gauss's best firing points. A hog of any kind with enemies behind the gunner dies super fast. He can't afford to turn around and help much with Bravo because if he does he exposes himself to fire from the base and those guys tend to pack sniper rifles. The Scorpion is so horribly placed that you tend not to have to worry about it. The team on the dark side has to run like hell to get it, the ONLY place it can go is into the line of fire of the enemy team (Whereas the Gauss spawns safely beyond the enemy team's reach), it often gets destroyed on spawn by rockets + Gauss, and once you destroy it once the enemy team loses their edge at gaining it. Even when it survives it's too slow to dodge plasma pistol shots and too vulnerable to team shot. Most often I see it get destroyed on spawn, the Gauss pushes the darkside spawners back long enough for it to respawn, and then the team that spawned light side gets both the Gauss and the Scorpion. Obviously all this takes some team coordination and such, but the fact is the team spawning on the light side of the map opens with a big advantage and it requires only a little bit of teamwork to turn that opening advantage into a victory. It should take a LOT of teamwork to guarantee victories as often, instead it takes just a basic amount. There's a very good reason that teams fight over that light side spawn the whole game. I've run and jumped in the Gauss's gun just to force the enemy team to kill me in it, thereby destroying it. It's just that good. Two competent teams that would be fairly matched in Ragnarok or Longbow will not be fairly matched in Exile.

With motion trackers I'm not sure how much of a purpose the suppressed SMG would have. In other games suppressors keep you off the minimap, but in those games your minimap doesn't show as much as a motion tracker does. You usually don't find a fight in this game because of the sound of gunfire (although I definitely have found some that way). An SMG with a tighter spread would just be another automatic weapon that people didn't use.

I don't think if I was making the perfect Halo game that Halo 4 and Halo Reach would be the primary ingredients. I definitely like sprinting, and I like AAs, and I love the sticky detonator, and the Mantis, and the OPTION to respawn instantly. The trouble is Halo Reach felt like it was built to make people feel like they were doing OK all the time, no matter whether or not they were OK at the game. In Reach all the easiest weapons to use were the most powerful. Grenades were better than they've been in any Halo game before or since, in fact every weapon that explodes got a massive boost to radius and damage, as well as less damage drop-off the closer you got to the edge of the explosion's area. The sniper rifle was insanely easy to use and also crushed vehicles. As I recall my first few perfections in Reach involved that sniper rifle. Halo 4 does the same thing as Reach but instead of making all the cheapest and easiest weapons the strongest, Halo 4 just constantly hinders you. Instead of everyone gaining a lot of easy-to-use power, everyone becomes extremely easy to kill with ANY weapon. Empowering anyone to kill but no one to survive. So if you combined Reach and Halo 4 you would get easy-to-use weapons that killed with minimal mastery AND you wouldn't be able to survive long because you'd be super soft (Call of Duty). If I wanted to create a perfect Halo I'd probably combine Halo 3, Halo: CE, and Halo 4. Halo 4 just has the biggest bag of tricks of any of the games just like any most recent game in a series will. Halo 3 had the best multiplayer, Halo: CE had the best overall attitude I think. I like a lot about Halo 4 and I generally don't wish for the "good old days" of any previous Halo, but I consistently fail to understand why Bungie and now 343 always insisted on changing things that worked well into things that worked not-so-well. I also don't understand why they empowered things that were already good enough, like why Bungie made the sniper rifle even BETTER in Reach and 343 continued that progression. It's not like the thing EVER failed to do its job. So why mess with it? For me it seems like a simple mission to improve things that don't work well and add new content, taking breaks to make sure everything works well together. So I'd grab the balance of Halo 3, the variety of Halo 4, and the groundbreaking feel of Halo CE. Of those three CE also had the best campaign (I remember Halo 3 had a good campaign, but it was the first game I could play on Live, so I was just too excited to spend a lot of time on the campaign). I always hated the Flood, but I think I could tolerate STOMPING them in a MANTIS! Or herding the little infectious ones onto a sticky detonator grenade. I'd like to bet someone money that Halo 5 offers at least the Mantis vs. Flood scenario.

I still think automatics should be capable of headshots. I don't really think Halo 4's maps are big enough to make it work, but that reason for NOT letting them make headshots doesn't make them work any better. If anyone is going for the assist commendation, use automatic weapons a lot and you'll get it probably at least twice as fast as you would using a weapon capable of making headshots.