Bloody Initiate

I'm curious what kind of playlists you prefer, I think if you spend a lot of time in Infinity Slayer, for example, you might have hard time scoring some of the biggest power weapons. I've noticed you get a lot more formidable ordinance in Big Team. There are still some inconsistencies, like the other day I watched with amusement through my sniper scope as some dude had called himself down some ordinance and got a gravity hammer. Lol, what a terrible life he must have led. It was adorable watching him collect his hammer, because the hammers are so big it makes me think of a baby with a giant stuffed animal or toy. He called it down out in the open too, I tend to try and get somewhere safe before I call ordinance. Anyway I killed him, but looking back on it I almost feel bad about it because he clearly wasn't hurting anyone.

I love this gun, got an overkill with it today. It's a gun designed for setting traps basically. You pull the trigger to fire a projectile that sticks to surfaces and spartans and then pull the trigger again to detonate the projectile. It has a maximum range (About 60m maybe?) that detonates the projectile whether or not you want it to detonate, but most of the time you want to stick the floor or the wall where someone is ABOUT to be and then detonate the grenade before they can get away. The grenade beeps, shows up on Promethean Vision, and its beeping becomes more rapid the closer it is to detonating (It has a maximum amount of time before it self-detonates, something like a minute, it's pretty generous). So people will generally spot a sticky detonator grenade you set too far in advance. It IS influenced by the Explosives upgrade! It gains about 2 meters to its radius when used with the explosives upgrade. This is actually pretty handy because the sticky detonator's grenades probably have damage and radius comparable to a rocket. Someone close to the epicenter of the blast will be killed instantly, and if you pop it in between a few weakened enemies you get an easy multikill. You can detonate the projectile as soon as it sticks to a surface, and it has a pretty good velocity so you don't need to worry about waiting too long to detonate. You CAN use it in combat the same way you use any other gun because generally you can plant a grenade and detonate it faster than someone can 5-shot you with a DMR, however this is more risky because it only kills within about a 5-6 foot radius, outside of that space they will only be damage and you'll be killed while you reload.

While I have very vocally preferred Option B, how do you think you'd like a 4-shot BR with a slower RoF that still defeats a DMR mid-range but doesn't so completely dominate automatic weapons? I actually tested a 4-shot BR in a custom (Just a 10% damage boost) and even then I felt like its RoF might be a bit too high to make 4-shotting w/it balanced. The thing is, as I've said, it's nature just requires it to be 4-shot. Also played some SWAT today to get my Pistolero challenge, I still think the BR's lower accuracy keeps it from contending with a DMR at longer ranges even when it kills instantly (Let alone 4-shot). I was in top-mid on Solace attacking some guys in the snipe tower at one of the bases and I put that reticule right on that dude's face and pulled the trigger twice, got headshotted by his DMR without landing a headshot of my own. I think the sloppier +10% damage boost fix puts the DMR, the BR, and the Carbine just about where they should be, but as we've said those aren't the only three weapons. The reason I mention that though is because I feel like the weapons are actually very close to where they need to be if such a small fix can balance them against each other, it shouldn't take much more to balance them against everything else.

Boltshot needs to remain 1-shot kill. You may quibble over range, but if you take away the 1-shot kill you remove the purpose of the weapon. It will not work as a 1-shot + melee weapon because nothing does in Halo 4. Just because you may have made some Plasma Pistol Overcharge + Melee kills does not make it viable. You also can't make it shot + melee because the plasma pistol is already better at that. Your solution creates another problem, you have to get over being mad and think of what the game will look like if you get what you want. They decreased the melee lunge considerably (A very good thing), and the melee lunge is the ONLY reason shot + melee weapons like that worked previously. Furthermore they let you see through walls. The result is the only time you go for a boltshot user within its range is because you're acting against your better judgement. You KNOW he's got a boltshot, you KNOW that it's 1sk within that range, but you want to take a chance for that kill OR you are denied the choice by other players. You go in hoping he'll make a mistake. The biggest reason you go is probably because you know he's one-shot. You're hoping you get get a headshot in before he drops you. If he weren't one-shot, you wouldn't go for it. He's only one-shot though because this game is forcing him to crouch and hide for at least 6 seconds while he waits for his shields to begin recharging. He doesn't want to be cornered any more than you want him to have a boltshot. The fact is the boltshot is a unique weapon which overall I think is a good addition to the game. The problem you're having is one thing they did RIGHT with the game (Shortened melee lunge) and some things they did WRONG with the game (Made it so after every fight you're one-shot for six seconds, and designed the game to corner you constantly). I feel like I'm being hunted in Halo 4, because it's designed to play faster and deny you the time to think or breathe. I'm not the only one who feels this way, so those of us who do like to pack a weapon that we can rely on when we have no other choice. They seem unrelated, but it's the type of gameplay 343 was trying to force by making everything just a bit more deadly. The boltshot is one of the few defenses you have against their mistakes. A boltshot that isn't 1sk is completely pointless, so it must keep that feature. You can argue for decreased range, but the other argument makes a worse game with one less weapon in it.

No one in this thread is arguing for 2 weapons dominating all the rest. We instead argue about weapon balance, offering various perspectives and some facts. We DO focus on the BR and the DMR, but that's because they're in the title of the thread and therefore are the topic, no one in this thread argues that the BR and the DMR should be better than all the rest though. From what I can tell most people think the carbine should be at least as good as the BR. Due again to the topic being DMR > BR, we still spend most of the time talking about those two weapons.

From what I can tell all of the best uses of this AA involve doing something OTHER than what it was intended for, but not so far from the original intent as to merit talk of glitching or anything. The Thruster Pack is pretty basic on its own, but it plays with the game physics and whereas other AAs sort of work best when they are used for the obvious effect, Thruster Pack seems to have most of its uses in its less obvious effects. I only say this because I think to really get the most out of Thruster Pack, you should look around online at thruster pack tips and tricks and such, because that AA can do so many varied things.

I wish I'd played it while it was available, I feel like I never get to use sniper weapons in this game except occasionally in BTB.

I know Ragnarok very well, the BR's accuracy won't prohibit it at all against the banshee on that map. There are two reasons for this: Banshees are much bigger than spartans, so even at extreme range for the BR they are easy to hit BECAUSE of the second reason: All these guns are hitscan, that means you can't outrun the bullets ever. You don't have to account for bullet travel time, you lead all targets by the same amount, and you're looking at a pretty big target. The only thing keeping the BR from being the primary choice for anti-vehicular team shot is that it's so terrible at everything else. If they nerf the DMR to the point where the BR gets used, BTB will be even harder for vehicles than it is now. At least for hogs anyway, I haven't seen anything testing those guns against other vehicles. BTB is already hard enough for non-Gauss hogs though. They're a big paper mache double kill waiting to happen and that chaingun is so awful in this game you often can't kill a spartan before he DMRs you out of the gun at YOUR ideal range.

If I could get one thing changed on the Halo 4 Warthog to better resemble the Warthog in previous games, it would not be the audio. The noise definitely sucks, but so does the vehicle. I'd be focused on improving the vehicle first.

I don't think that will work out the way you think it will: If 343 nerfs the DMR so badly that people get crazy enough to use a BR, you might find the banshee going down even faster. The video only tests the guns against warthogs, so the banshee might have a different armor system (The Mantis can take 2 laser shots, but only 1 incineration cannon shot), but it looks pretty likely that the BR will actually be worse for banshees than the DMR. I suspect 343 did this on purpose to keep DMRs from being too good at destroying vehicles. They still are, but they aren't the best loadout weapon for the job. That's one of the painfully few things the BR can do better.

They weakened all the vehicles considerably, but as other people have said the trick to the banshee is using its speed to keep cover between you and your enemies until you're ready to pounce, so to speak. Also, have a team backing you up. That's a good rule for every vehicle. They're all designed to fight flanked by teammates (Except of course the banshee which teammates cannot flank), not one of them can survive without team support for long.

It is definitely a get out of jail free card, but I feel like this game throws you in jail much more often than it should. Until they reduce the shield recharge delay, for example, I hope I can keep spawning with a 1sk boltshot. 6 seconds is a very long time to be one-shot though, and I think it hurts the game a lot more than the boltshot. The boltshot actually makes that 6 seconds more tolerable because you have a chance of defending yourself when you're cornered. Some people may argue that if you get cornered you deserve to die, but in Halo 4 you get cornered just for being alive in the first place. Not entirely disagreeing, just looking at a big picture.

After splashing around in some other shooters I've begun to suspect the Halo community is actually one of the worst out there. I don't really know why, but it just seems like the people who play this game have a much harder time not making everyone else who plays it miserable. There are always people who exploit things in games, but in Halo the saturation is incredible. Perhaps it's because it takes more than a quick spit from your gun to kill people. Even though you kill much faster in this game than in previous Halos, you still kill much slower than you do in a lot of other shooters. Maybe that makes people search harder for any edge they can get, because killing people is based much more on fighting them instead of just seeing them first. You get plenty of kills where the other person had no chance, but very often, for most of them, you're forced to actually face the other player in combat. Kills are just harder to achieve, so you really resent when you don't get them. In CoD it's a lot about proper movement, reaction time, and generally most of the influence your skill has on the game takes place before you pull the trigger. In BF3 it's like CoD but with some paper-rock scissors and honestly more tactics, did you bring the thing that your opponent isn't prepared to fight? In the little bit of Gears of War I played it was all about beating the game not the player, players dove a lot in order to out-maneuver their opponents sensitivity, and used as much glitching and such as possible to avoid letting the game work like it was supposed to work. I bought Hybrid earlier this year and while it was closer to Halo in the sense you had to work a bit for a kill, it was as much about moving fast to flank and surprise people often. If you managed that it was a done deal. In Halo you face each other. I feel like most players might really like that, but only on their terms. When it's not on their terms, they want someting up their sleeve.

I agree with this, although perhaps their "inheritance" shouldn't extend to the specialization upgrades. I think those upgrades are generally more powerful than their non-specialization counterparts and perhaps shouldn't multiply so easily. Some non-spec upgrades are amazing, I think mobility and ammo are probably the best available, but upgrades like stability, wheelman, and stealth give a very real edge in direct combat (Stealth giving an edge at direct backdoor entry).

Its power has increased in my eyes after using it awhile too. I don't like the idea of it NOT being a 1-shot kill though, simply because I want to encourage 343 to keep doing the things they did right. I will explain: 343 dramatically decreased the melee lunge. This was SUCH A GOOD THING! The melee lunge was the primary problem with ALL melee-related complaints in previous games. As usual the people complaining are frequently complaining about the wrong things, they aren't wrong to get mad about certain things, but they often fail to identify the real source of their problem. In the case of weapons whose primary purpose was to set up a melee, the melee lunge was absolutely critical. That was the real reason people had a hard time with people going for the AR-melee in Halo 3, that was the real reason people had a problem with double melees in Halo: Reach. Without that lunge which was introduced in Halo 2 and got bigger and bigger, weapons that are designed to set up a melee (like a plasma pistol, mauler from Halo 3, or the hypothetical version of the boltshot people suggest which just drops shield) simply don't do that well. How many times have you found yourself punching the air in Halo 4 while your opponent backpedalled and shot you in the face? That happens because you're used to the melee lunge from previous games. I can see reducing the boltshot's 1-shot kill range by increasing its spread, but I think it needs to stay a 1-shot kill. If it's not a 1-shot kill it has no purpose at all. Yeah I've headshotted people with it too, but you know that it's not designed to do that job very well. The melee lunge corrected the problem of people running into melee, missing, and then losing track of each other, but it was very inconsistent and eventually really hurt the game. In order for the boltshot to work as a shoot + melee weapon you need that big lunge, which the game is better without, so it needs to stay 1-shot kill at a certain range. I also still don't have a huge problem with it as it is btw, just because everyone sort of assumes you have one and keeps their distance anyway (Tried goofing around with a storm rifle on Adrift today, it was incredible how fast people backpedalled to keep me out of my ideal range). I DO see what people dislike about it though, because I've kept myself alive with it in situations where I should have been extremely dead, but overall I think I prefer that people have something that they can rely on in their secondary slot. Even if they're much better with it than I am. Also I apologize if my arguments seem to get to their point in a roundabout way sometimes. I tend to look at the situation in which the weapons exist rather than just at the weapons. I'd seen the idea of reducing its damage to just set up a melee a few times and realized that wouldn't work in Halo 4, but I had to explain why. Often a fix for one problem creates another.

I would actually say that while I don't disagree with your subject line, I think you picked just about the weakest scenario possible to illustrate your point. I would have talked about the spawns, or the 6 second shield recharge delay that leaves you one-shot for so long that the person you killed actually has time to respawn, get to you, and headshot you before your shields have begun recharging (Haven is awful for this, Adrift can be too if your fight was on one of the flag platforms and they spawn at a lift). They could spawn across the map, or they could spawn around the corner (have definitely had this experience). I would have talked about ordinance too, but you don't need a game full of bad ordinance drops to prove that it creates problems. I would have talked about weapons that are designed to run out of ammo faster, kill quicker but in more shots (so you always take a few shots before you kill someone), and again about those shields that take so long to start charging. I would have talked about instant respawns and everyone sprinting on maps that are designed to leave you exposed. I might have talked about the wild variation in AAs that make it so you have no idea what a player has up their sleeve. I actually LIKE this element, but it does mean you can have the bad luck of rocking the shotgun in a game where someone else is rocking the hardlight shield. You don't know you're dead until you pull the trigger, and there was nothing you could have done to know ahead of time. That's bad luck. You can run PV but you don't know who's running wetwork, so suddenly even that incredible AA gets beat down. I tend to play smaller playlists because I often have to search alone, but when I can I play BTB, just because in those maps you can at least take a moment to breath and think every now and then. Ragnarok plays differently than Valhalla thanks to new weapons and vehicles, but it's such a map that you can at least GENERALLY keep the enemy in front of you so that winning is about who was better rather than who got swarmed the most. Once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think there are many more examples of how luck is integral to this game than a game full of bad ordinance drops.

I know all that, and I don't disagree with anything in that paragraph. I wasn't talking about what was better, since that's up to each person's preferences anyway, I was talking about what people will want to watch as gaming technology evolves. 4v4 IS closely tied to MLG. They didn't invent it or anything, but if you have a player who wants to be the best they're going to want to play what the MLG guys are playing. Since that's actually a LOT of players, what MLG does to keep filling seats will affect the future of the 4v4 format. I like 4v4 in Halo, but no one is paying to watch me play. You may prefer to watch 4v4 instead of 6v6 or 8v8, but you and I don't constitute the entirety of the gaming population, so we can't really say what will be popular with people. I know that as games get more advanced though, people are going to want E-sports to keep up, and a lot of the advancements in technology focus on allowing more players to play without technical hiccups. MLG will do what they have to do, I don't know what that is, but they're a business and they're going to try to keep making money. All I'm saying is that I don't think that will mean the same one thing forever. Whatever they do, a lot of players are going to want to do that too. It might not be 4v4 forever. If it's not, a lot of 4v4 players will evacuate those playlists.

Seconded. I also think E-sports are nearing a turning point. As technology improves, they have to re-evaluate what fills seats at MLG events. 4v4 became the primary vehicle for their product due primarily to the limitations of the technology at the time (You get less lag with fewer players because there are fewer connections to manage, so you get lots of free advertising and promotion from Xbox Live. People want to see gameplay that is so good it's like a personal fantasy, so they PLAY 4v4 playlists, but they WATCH MLG 4v4). From a business perspective, there may not be as much money in their current model. You can set up a 4v4 playlist that's highly fast-paced, consistent, and competitive but you may find that people have gravitated away from it after they've seen games allow lag-free gameplay in larger teams. Suddenly a 4v4 isn't nearly as entertaining to watch as an 8v8 where players can naturally rack up more impressive multikills and sprees. A squad of 4 getting ripped apart isn't nearly as awesome-looking as a squad of 8 getting mowed down like a zombie horde. I don't know that this is the direction things are going, I just know that I'm seeing a change in what kind of thing people have access to, and to be honest I never watched as many Halo montages (even in Halo 3 where I remember watching a lot of them) as I watched regular (non-montage) BF3 videos. This may bother a lot of players who fell in love with the type of gameplay MLG promoted, because your love of the hardcore 4v4 may be completely unrelated to MLG, but the things that made that type of game popular are the same things that made MLG select it as a format. It may just be that particular type of game is becoming less popular in the gaming world. What was particularly prominent to me shortly after Halo 4's release was that the BTB playlist consistently had a higher population than the 4v4 playlists, whereas in Halo 3 and Reach the 4v4 and 5v5 always had the highest population. If the total population drops down enough the 4v4 will get more popular because there will be less lag in that playlist, but as technology allows for more so will competitive video gaming. It's just a natural evolution.

WARNING: Looong post ahead. I have very rarely encountered someone with an understanding of the ranking systems in these games. People think they understand, but they're almost always missing the point and frequently don't seem to have a good command of the facts. I am not calling you one of these people, I am saying that generally I don't think people are mature or informed enough to play with a serious ranking system. I made a post about this in the waypoint forums, here's the text: I think the impact of a game ranked by visible trueskill is more complex than anyone who argues about it seems to realize. I loved Halo 3, and I was good enough at it to feel accomplished but not so good that I would ever believe I had competitive potential. The thing people don't understand is that most people weren't, aren't, and never will be good at every game. I'm nowhere near the "best" at anything, and I'm OK with this fact, but most people don't realize the same about themselves. I think Halo's player base started going down before Reach came out. I didn't like Reach, don't get me wrong, but I think a lot of players got seriously burned out on Halo 3 because it almost transcended its role as a game. That competitive atmosphere has a lot of bonuses, but most of those aren't apparent to MOST of the players who are only average at the game. To this day in Halo 4 I play with guys who never were that good, and it still bothers them, even though no one on the team complains when they go negative. I think the competitive aspects probably drive away as many people as they draw in, and over time they actually drive more people away. Eventually in Halo 3 you could only rarely find a game where everyone was on their original tags. It seemed everyone who was any good at the game loved climbing the ranks so much (even though that wasn't the point) that they wanted to do it over and over again, and in the mean time all the average players got falsely matched against better players. I doubt that helped the game at all. Your largest bracket of players are average, not good or bad, so when you design a system that punishes them, you lose players. Trueskill's purpose is to provide challenging matches against players of similar skill level. That purpose is corrupted when people view their number as a reward system. That purpose was also corrupted in Reach where Bungie designed a system that literally lied to the Trueskill system by changing the definition of victory. My point is only that people never look at ranks the right way. Even now people are competing for higher SR. I don't think that visible Trueskill had the influence people think it did on Halo 3's success. I think it's much more likely that Halo 3 was just the best shooter available at the time, and it was the best by a very large margin, so there were no alternatives either. There was a market situation and a synergy there people didn't notice, and I just don't think it had nearly so much to do with visible Trueskill. Adding to the above: The hardest thing people don't understand about Trueskill is that it actually tends to work really well. So when it tells you that you're lvl 25, chances are that's what you are. Players who are good LOVE to know what level they are, players who aren't frequently are happier not knowing, and there are more in the second category than in the first. It's a very real ranking system that does its job, but its job is supposed to done behind the scenes. Consider also the level 25 guy who gets crushed by another level 25... who is actually a level 50 deliberately playing at a lower level because it's easy, or because he likes watching that rank go up. What do you tell the legit 25 about the virtues of the ranking system? It was very literally used to deceive him. Another thing about Halo 3 vs. other shooters at the time: It really was the best looking and best playing shooter out at the time. It had no competitors. The way people move and such in Halo has always been smooth and the gameplay has always been tight, other shooters at the time of Halo 3 were jerky and clumsy. GoW would have been the closest thing to a competitor, and it was NOT a competitor (Fewer players per match, poor programming led to a lot of exploitable glitches, plus super-slow movement + aim button makes for gameplay based on defeating the game rather than your enemy.). Later in Halo 3's life the CoD franchise finally made something that worked, and it wasn't any failure of Halo 3's when that franchise gained a bigger player base. There were plenty of run-and-gun type players who had no good game for their style until COD4, so they just played Halo. CoD games had a good population before Reach came out, so it wasn't Reach's lack of a ranking system that made other shooters gain people. The Battlefield franchise also caught up, although a bit later than CoD did. Battlefield games are much greater in scale than Halo or CoD, and so a lot of the people whose only large-scale console multiplayer was Halo's BTB suddenly gained a shooter that was designed for them in the Battlefield franchise. I ****ing love BF3, and you know which gametype I DID NOT want to play in that game? 4v4. Why would I waste my time w/4v4 when I can have 12v12? Those are the shooters I've played. I haven't played much Gears, but I played enough to immediately see some MAJOR problems with its competitive multiplayer gameplay. The measure of each game's success seems completely unrelated to whether it has a ranking system, it's whether it offers players a unique and enjoyable experience that determines its success. Also the one game I've played that DID have visible trueskill (Halo 3) had a lot of problems as a result too. I enjoyed it, but I haven't seen real evidence to suggest it's crucial to the success of a game. I HAVE seen evidence that it hurts a game though, first-hand, literally thousands of times. I played more games of Halo 3 multiplayer than I have of any other game, and I saw so many people influenced incorrectly by visible Trueskill that I'll never ask for it back. My level in that game never affected me much, but I was the exception rather than the rule.

It's harder than nerfing one gun. I want them to buff all the others up to the DMR's level, but I also understand that buffing several guns is harder than nerfing one. Most developers take the easy way out and nerf the one instead of buffing the many. Developers who are serious about creating a good matchmaking experience tend to focus a lot on stuff like this. They need to buff the BR and the Carbine. Ideally make the BR 4-shot (This is accomplished with a 10% damage boost, but it may be BETTER accomplished with a slightly lower boost of 8% or so. The idea is that you make sure it's 12 bullets - 4 shots - to kill. No less.) A slight RoF decrease may be necessary to balance it against automatic weapons, but it should definitely have a faster kill time than the DMR because its lower accuracy and recoil allow the DMR to defeat it at longer ranges anyway, where the DMR SHOULD defeat it. The Carbine should either 6-shot with a slightly lower RoF or 7-shot with its current RoF. The Carbine should either have an equivalent kill time to the BR with 3 kills in the clip or a better kill time than the BR with a 7-shot kill and its current clip. I don't really see anything wrong with the lightrifle, it has the most striking balance of any long range weapon in the sense that it actually does less damage when unscoped. There is no "ease of use" assumption of balance, that weapon just does less damage. The DMR is fine, at most they could stand to add another bullet to its clip, but really it's fine. I think it's an excellent rifle.

I agree. I often find the fans of a thing can make you resent that thing so much more than it deserves (Anime, for example, can be good, but when you meet its biggest fans you start to hate it). I actually like MLG, I love how carefully they analyze the game and the information they produce (I'd do something similar if I was being paid to play video games). The trouble is the MLG fanboys who make it impossible to have a discussion without suffering an assault of BS from morons. I told some once that MLG was all about making the game faster and more consistent, which is their stated goal in most of their tweaks to the game, and they argued with me and told me I didn't know what I was talking about! Talent at a game does not make you directly knowledgable at a game, although it does assist you, it does not make you an authority. It was baffling, all I was doing was restating what MLG had themselves stated, and their fanboys argued because in their minds MLG was out to make the game better and more fun and that was all. Competitive players, and the competitive community, tend to look at the game through a very narrow lens. This is what they have to do to win, so I understand, but they are by no means MOST of the community and their stripped down versions of the game are by no means THE BEST of the game. They have a long history of excluding MOST of what the game has to offer, for reasons that make sense to their purpose, but when you do that you don't get to write policy for everyone else.

You could previously kill 3, with both guns, but that's another issue. Yes you can drop 2 people with a BR before you have to reload, and 2 with the Carbine while we're at it, but the amount MORE than two kills you have in your clip is smaller with each of those guns. It DOES matter, not because you're going to always have fights that require you to keep firing until you reload, that's just the measure. It matters because you're talking about a weapon that will get you to that reload faster. Want to use dexterity because you like reloading fast? Awesome, use a carbine then and you'll get to see that reload animation a lot. You won't see it as much with the BR, and you'll see it even less with the DMR. It's also not ONLY about the ammo you have vs. the ammo you need, I just focus on that because no one else seemed to be noticing it (It IS important). It's about all the little tweaks they did or didn't make that add up to make the gun obsolete. They dropped the damage, but they didn't increase the clip size to accomodate; they made it hitscan and increased its fire rate, but also decreased its accuracy (So you're actually even better at ******** away ammo than ever before). It's a combination of the ammo shortage (Due to being 5-shot), the slower kill times, the lesser accuracy, and the more dramatic recoil. I actually like the lower accuracy and noticeable recoil, but only if the BR beats the DMR at mid-range. It doesn't, so what's the point of it? I don't want one gun to be best at all ranges, that's never what I'm arguing for, I'm arguing for the variety of guns to have a purpose. They brought back the BR, but they made it pointless, so they didn't really bring it back, did they? You have a weapon which excels at nothing when compared to other weapons, so why use it? Personal preference? Go for it, but nobody's disputing that the DMR is better where it counts. As I said in another post we agree on the problem, but disagree on the solution. I believe in elevating the weak elements, others believe in nerfing the strong ones or leaving everything alone. @Dawn Wolf, since you're the only one arguing for the BR being viable (Even though you also admit you'd back the DMR when push comes to shove), I don't know how good you and and I'm in no way attempting to criticize or question your Service Record, but I know when I started playing I was sooo excited they brought back the BR. I was NOT excited because I thought my BR from Halo 3 was back, I was excited for the very thing that I argue for now: I thought the BR was better at mid-range and the DMR at long-range. No one told me this, it just made perfect sense (It really does make perfect sense btw). So I did the thing that made perfect sense! I put the BR in my mid-range loadout and the DMR in my BTB loadout. I was thrilled because I thought they'd solved the problem of "Which marksman rifle" by just bringing them all back and making them good at different things! As I played and talked to friends they started telling me how the DMR had a faster kill time. I thought this was ridiculous, one of those myths that circulates online, like how if you're good then the carbine is the best. I kept using my BR. In one game with some of my old clanmates I fought a team that was tough enough to make me notice something. I was either bad or losing all my fights to DMRs. No grenades or teamshot assisting them, their strafes were only as basic as mine, and their accuracy as well. I began to fear the BR actually did have a slower kill time. You may think something like that is hard to notice, but actually you notice very quickly when you're losing every straight up fight. I watched a video in which the guy showed it was a 5-shot kill with the BR. I thought: "How embarrassing for that guy! He doesn't realize he didn't land one of the bursts right and he made video where he calls the BR a 5-shot kill!" However by this point I was worried, so I got into forge with an idle controller and tested it myself. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I didn't actually believe the results, so I tested it a couple more times. 5 every time. To 343's credit, they did increase the rate of fire by quite a bit, so without counting your shots in matchmaking you FEEL like you're 4-shotting because the kill times are just faster in this game. I even thought I counted, I even remember meeting a guy top mid in Haven and dropping him in 4-shots, but something about fighting for your life makes you accept whatever number you get as the number required. The original reason I mentioned your service record, and again say I'm not criticizing yours and in fact haven't even looked at it, but I DO know that if you're as good or better than me (Tis a long list of people) then you don't need to read a thread to know that the BR stays home when you go out to play. You may argue that it's fine, but you also won't use it much. That, to me, means it's not fine. That or you're a carbine or lightrifle guy, which may be very bad or very good, respectively.

You thoroughly exaggerate the power of the DMR. It just looks a lot better since every other gun sucks. BR should be 4 shot, Carbine should be 7-shot (Should REALLY be 6-shot, but you'd have to slow its RoF to make that work). Lightrifle is actually fine, but it's kind of a specialized niche weapon so you don't see a lot of people talking about it. It's also fine, as I said, so people don't complain about it either. If you make the BR 4-shot the DMR will have to stay back at its intended range in order to survive. Same deal with making the carbine better (10% damage boost is a decent band-aid for both weapons, but a real fix should happen sometime). Your problem is not that the DMR is too good, it's that the alternatives are terrible (or in the case of the lightrifle, fill a specific niche).

The friendly fire on vehicles works both ways. If you have a guy on your team take your vehicle and just start betrayal splattering you with it then you can blow it up to save yourself the annoyance. I imagine that is the original reason they made it possible, because a vehicle doesn't require aim assist to wreak havoc, so vehicles become the primary weapons of betrayers in bigger maps. It's hard to find a way to deal with betrayers that doesn't hit a lot of innocent people who just had accidents. Every method I've seen comes with its own set of drawbacks. I think the ability to boot players who betray you is just about as good as it can get. Like many of the complaints I've seen about this game, I end up defending 343 as much as criticizing them. I think it's just really hard to create a balanced response to players just being ***holes. I hate betrayers, I almost never do it deliberately (I will deliberately kill a betrayer because it saves me the trouble of leaving them alive). They are very hard to regulate though. Even in games with absolutely no friendly fire players find ways to be ****s, like blowing up all your team's vehicles on spawn.

One more thing that I forgot when I made my first post: Episodic Content: Everyone who could make a job for themselves out of Youtube gave themselves a job to do, specifically they create some kind of consistent content. I've already seen someone in Halo doing loadout episodes, where in each video they try a different loadout. I don't actually think Halo 4's arsenal is vast and varied enough to support that particular series for long, but they'll get a dozen episodes or so out of it. The point is you set yourself a task, say every Tuesday. Then on every Tuesday you upload a new episode of a particular series you're doing, Halo 4 provides a lot of material already in the form of challenges. So you could do a challenge series, where you say "these challenges are common, here is the best way I've found to get X challenge" and in the mean time your viewers get some hilarious gameplay footage of you trying for an enormous amount of assassinations or something. Since the challenges don't actually change that much (They only give a few at a time, but they're always drawing from the same short list) this could get you some content. Finally you could just do "challenge" videos without using the challenges from Halo 4. You could do a video where you set yourselves a challenge and say "Our challenge was to win the game without anyone on our team using precision weapons" and then upload the whole game, switching perspectives when one player is doing something much more interesting than the other. To get a team for this type of thing you'd want to enlist other Youtubers or other players you could count on to uphold the terms of the challenge (If you just go in with an AR and your whole team of randoms has DMRs then you aren't really fulfilling that challenge). Another thing I've seen a lot in shooters is Weapon reviews. You focus your gameplay on one weapon for a day or two, and then you upload a video with highlights saying what you felt about the weapon. You also give statistics on the weapon so people have some numbers in front of them instead of just your opinion. In Halo you actually have a good variety of vehicles too, so you could add those to the arsenal of things to review (I wouldn't spend much time on the mongoose). I have seen Youtubers getting information out on such a scale that the developers actually patched the games in order to address issues highlighted by said Youtubers. A lot of the time you're giving the community a voice. You aren't THE voice of the community though, just someone making content that is readily accessible and publicly available. The point of the episodic content is that viewers have something they can expect from you on a consistent basis, and you give yourself consistent work to do minding your channel. That way you don't have a long period where you just got busy or fell out of love with Youtube and your channel dries up without new content. You keep creating content because you make it your job to do so.