Bloody Initiate

You also frequently get a different K/D calculation from different sources, so if you do the math yourself you'll get up to two different K/Ds from waypoint and also in-game. I don't know exactly why but I suspect much of the time it's due to the different speeds and times at which the information is grabbed. Also one source might consider certain games illegitimate or otherwise use more samples than another source. As for why you have 1 DMR kill on waypoint and otherwise, I don't really have any idea unless that particular engine reads its numbers as beginning at 1 or beginning at 0. Remember also that all of this information has to go over the internet, which fails pretty often in games, so why wouldn't it fail when it's telling waypoint your stats? For me most of those questions are secondary to this one: Why do you care? It's 1 DMR kill, will your family disown you for it? Here is some information I've gathered personally which may be very helpful for you: Stat-tracking systems are frequently unreliable and often extremely unstable. The "Unstable" is much more consistent in my experience, multiple stat-tracking sites I've seen crash or fail in one way or another all the time. I can't explain why, I don't have the technical comprehension to understand it myself, but I know for certain that I've seen web programmers stuggle endlessly with stat grabbers. I assume the programs that do it end up being pretty large and complex so it's easy to overlook code flaws and harder to find them. This may relax your concerns a little, or at least allow you to forgive their errors. Watch a few stat-tracking sites for a bit and you'll notice entire branches of them fail and frequently they kill the sites which host them. It's pretty common.

It's sort of clear that you haven't played much at the levels where this stuff matters, I'm not trying to criticize you but in-game visible ranks come with lots of pros and cons. I tend to agree with you in general that in-game visible ranks don't matter or improve the game that much, but the examples and arguments you're using aren't making the point you want them to make. Speaking directly to the tank example, you ALWAYS go for the tank. In that regard both you and Chris were wrong, which doesn't make either of you bad players or anything, it's just the difference between players whose primary arena is BTB or not BTB. I haven't played Halo in awhile, so they may have changed the tank's spawn to be upside down on top of the banshee or something, but you never neglect that tank. The only time you can afford to even talk like that is if you're playing solo and you have a highly-independent game-plan (Like camping your base or bravo). You plan to either capture it or destroy it, never to neglect it. Seeing people's Trueskill rank AND whether they're in a party or not (Both are kinda critical if you want to make a serious evaluation of the enemy team) IS helpful and fun. You generally never "overthink" it because they're either going to do what you expect or they're not, and 99% of the time good players do the exact same thing. In Halo 3 they always went for sniper rifles and tried to set up a rifle strategy. The ONE time any of them surprised me was when they went for the Chopper instead and turned out to be a really awesome Chopper pilot. There are really only 1 or 2 "best" strategies for every scenario, and the best players just won't deviate from them much. Also if there are 2 "best" strategies chances are they're identical except on one or two points. If someone "bought" their rank or was otherwise illegitimate you treated them as a wild card - which means assuming they're good. If they're NOT good that's fine, but you can't afford to UNDERestimate anyone, so you would assume they were good until proven bad (Which was about 50% of them at my level). It was always fun punishing a player for misrepresenting themselves by destroying them repeatedly, but until you know for sure you have to act with caution. Players with noticeably bad service records let you try new things and relax a little. I was never ever the best or even close, but in Halo 3 I got good at reading ranks and service records. Generally by seeing a.) their in-game rank and experience total and b.) whether they were in a party or not (and their relation to their party members) I could predict a team's overall threat level and how they would play. This wasn't a special talent btw, because as I said the best players all do the same thing. It's depressingly typical to pick out a guy in the lobby and say "He's going for sniper rifle" and then to go and find him there every game. You read people just like Trueskill reads them though, you see how much they've won and you see how consistently. You read: Success rate and predictability. It was simple and effective, but only as reliable as the player you were looking at (Someone who had a high amount of uncertainty according to Trueskill would be a wild card to a player too, they read the same way). The reason I generally don't argue for visible ranks has never been that they weren't accurate or useful, but instead that I simply don't want the game ranked before it's good. As it is now I would never want to be ranked in this game and I wouldn't consider ranks in this game as very good indicators of player capability, because this game just doesn't allow for the kinds of consistency that I personally understand. Combine that with all the damage they did to the morale of players in Halo 3 as well as the success of a much less competitive game like COD4, and I doubt the overall effectiveness of visible ranks at making a game both "competitive" and successful.

Noting trends is a lot easier and safer than making specific predictions about how a product will perform, which is why I spent more time noting the trend in my post. There are a lot of different things that can happen with Halo 5, and even though 343 showed zero interest in making a good Halo title with Halo 4, there are still a lot of variables in between now and Halo 5. I can agree that most of the evidence (Halo 4 + 343's Public Face on Halo Waypoint) still shows a developer with no resemblance to any fan of Halo I ever met. I only get to see so much and the same evidence that damns them could throw us a curve ball. For me I would never have predicted that a company could be so stupid as to blatantly copy other games as much as 343 did with Halo 4, but that same shock could be something else next time. What they've shown is an ability to do much worse than I expected, which could either mean they're just plain awful and have no hope, or it could mean they "had a bad game" just as all of us do so often when playing these games. If 343 had a Trueskill rating the variable which measured their consistency would be very high right now. They've only made two games on their own, both of which were largely copies of other games. That could mean they're worthless copycats with no original ideas, or it could mean that they're improving by imitation. We don't really know, but since Halo 4 at least pretends to be original, I suspect they just don't have any plans for innovation in the future. The evidence I have shows that you can't count on these people for anything, sadly that includes consistency in failure or success. I can't comfortably project as many years into the future as Halo 5 is, I can only hope they'll do well while I play other titles, because I'm sure as hell not playing Halo right now.

Your estimates of how long matches take are about average as far as I remember in earlier games. They may feel faster for a number of reasons in Halo 4, but a match in a smaller playlist might take 5-6 minutes and a Big Team match might take 7-8. The round timer starts at 12 and ticks down, which is how it was in Halo 3, although I can't remember how long they took in Reach or in Halo 2. They might be up to a minute faster on average, and without objective games in Big Team you won't get games going to the final seconds very often, perhaps you're noticing a general shortage of objective? Slayer games almost always end well before the time limit unless someone is employing tactics to keep the match from ending fast (like camping). I'm not sure exactly what's making the matches feel faster for you, but like I said if your estimates of the time they're taking are correct then they're not much faster than they've been previously.

Halo 3 was much much better than Halo 4, it was also much much better than Halo Reach though and better than Halo 2 as well. I'm not going to list all the ways in which H4 is terrible and H3 was awesome, but H4 is just a cookie-cutter shooter in a time when there are lots of options for Console FPS games. H3 was a trailblazing game (So was H2, but it came with a lot of serious failings from the technology available at the time), it was the first of certain weight class in the genre and the last really spectacular Halo game. H4 is just a frankenstein cobbled together from other games. It's only fair to note that the market is different though, H3 launched largely devoid of competition. There weren't other shooters out there that looked as good or played as smooth, but H4 is coming out in a market with several major titles in the shooter market. There are multiple CoD games still being played on XBL, Crysis is similar to Halo in a lot of ways that might mess with both of their audiences, and I personally think BF3 would be a lot more popular if EA weren't its publisher (Not that people all know to shun EA, but EA makes just logging into a game offensive, I expect Crysis will have similar problems). Combine that with the uniformity that's sort of plaguing the market right now, and it's important to point out that H4 grew up in a harsher world than H3. That doesn't make it better though, it just makes it clearly more challenging to succeed. There are two things you can do growing up in a tough environment: Cave in and become a nothing and a nobody, or overcome your challenges and turn them into strengths. Halo 4 did the former, it just gave up, broke down, and beat up Rihanna. It sold well, but we see through the numbers. Sounds like you got into it pretty late though, which is always a tough time to start playing a competitive multiplayer shooter. In addition to everyone having the DLC enough to make the playlists require DLC, players who were still playing would have been a bit hardcore, and you would have missed out on the familiarization period that exists at the beginning shortly after a game's release. I'm not saying your experiences are at all illegitimate, because if I were considering picking up H3 or another older game now and trying to enjoy its multiplayer, I'd want to ask someone like you who got there late too. However if I wanted someone to give me a review of a game to see whether it was a good game in general, I would want to ask someone who had been playing it from its release or shortly thereafter. I got my bro BF3 for Christmas, and he has been REALLY struggling with the high learning curve in that game. When I got into it they were still releasing patches and DLC a lot, and it wasn't too far into its life. He's just gotten into it in the last week or so, which means he's up against a bunch of hardcore fans who have all the DLC and 1.5 YEARS of playing and practice with a varied arsenal. I remember in one game he said "I just don't see how you get good at this game..." and I remembered feeling the exact same way when I started, but it's probably even worse now that so few people are at his level of new-ness. I remember I tried just playing recon and calling things out for him one game, but even my callouts were a little advanced.

I'm not sure holding 343i to a typical business model makes sense. First, last, foremost, and most importantly, the definition of "good business" has been changing a LOT lately (I'm guessing within the last decade or three, I've personally only noticed it in the last decade+, but I'm only 27, so it's not like I have a lot of observation time logged). Each industry, one by one, is changing their model to be measured more and more by the year or even quarter. The gaming industry is doing this right now, and so I'm not really sure ANYONE at 343 or Microsoft cares AT ALL that Halo 4's only success is sales. Second, I'm not sure how much we're looking at 343's game. Due to the skyrocketing price of designing and producing a game a lot of the details get sort of contracted out. That's not unique to 343, btw. They pulled a lot of their skeleton from previous Halo titles, didn't make their own maps, didn't even make their own gameplay, and as far as I can tell the only people working over there are just a few people "minding the office." BS Angel releases irrelevant bulletins occasionally wherein she speaks a paragraph or two of wasted time and then hands the "mic" over to someone else. Obviously there is more going on than what we are shown, I understand that, my point is what I've seen of 343 just didn't look like what I've seen from other gaming companies. Third, this is one game in one year. I think we're looking at their new business model. They copied everything else that they could from other titles, I fully expect them to get a comfortable formula and start using it as a template for new games which can be produced faster thereafter. You see this with a lot of titles lately, EA is especially bad about it. Call of Duty also has a very well-known formula. UbiSoft as well very clearly has an easy time selling Assassin's Creed titles, I suspect a major part of their success is that they aren't a shooter. I don't know that we should expect 1 Halo title every year, but 1 every 2 years is very doable and probably on the horizon. So addressing the original question, my view is and has been that we simply shouldn't expect the same out of 343 that we've enjoyed from other developers in the past. We should probably expect it less and less from big developers as a group in fact, but the trouble is they can and will occasionally make really good games. So you buy the next game hoping for the same experience, and it's a bit of a let down, but around the time you're about to give up on a franchise (2-3 games in probably) they'll update their formula and have a major hit again. I can think of an example in every damn franchise I've played: Assassin's Creed II was amazing, it was stunning. I haven't played an AC game since, and from what I've read of the reviews that's not a horrible choice on my part. The games since aren't bad according to my sources, but that pivotal charm from AC2 hasn't been rediscovered. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare blew my mind for a military shooter. I was accustomed to trying such games and hating how hard they tried to make things feel "real" by really just making you terrible. For example whatever idiot many years ago thought you should have to switch to grenades to throw them as if they were a regular weapon should have been fired. Halo got it right, if you want players to throw grenades make it a single button. Then CoD4 got stuff like that right. Combine that with the slick production, genuinely solid gameplay and multiplayer, and a few other things, and there's your hit. I played the MW2 campaign and cannot think of a worse campaign in my own gaming history. I haven't played any of the Black Ops campaigns but heard they were good, but I DID play the multiplayer and see they hadn't really updated it. I heard MW3 was awful. Mass Effect made an excellent stab at a sci-fi RPG with a whole new world and a whole new pseudo-science propelling it. ME2 was pretty good, but directly betrayed a lot of what made Mass Effect unique. I also got a whiff of simplification and uniformity in ME2. Dragon Age: Origins surprised the heck out of me, I had been busy with college and didn't even know BioWare was making the game. I didn't play DA2, but based on what I read and heard of it I wondered if they'd gotten their template from ME2. I still haven't played DA2 or ME3, but I'm told my fearful theory turned out accurate. Ever wish you were wrong about a prediction? Developers now are just making stamps and to make a new game they upgrade some of the graphics technology to give it a facelift and then just stamp it onto a new title. That's the new model. It's not a good model, it's not appealing in most ways, but that's what it is. The people who say Halo "evolved" can at least claim to be half-right, it's business model definitely "upgraded" (I wouldn't call it "evolving") but the game didn't at all. This has been going on for a long time in a lot of places, but it's only lately that I personally have felt it was such a trend. There are some good things about uniformity. You can count on the same gameplay returning, which may or may not have been a problem for you depending on titles you've played in the past. I played multiple titles that were very good games (according to me, other players, and reviewers) but never made the money necessary to continue. Big business models bring uniformity. They do not bring much that anyone would call unique though. They don't innovate because investing in new ideas is a gamble and "smart money" doesn't gamble. You don't get new ideas, and you definitely don't get old ideas that a minority enjoyed. The only thing less attractive to a business than a new idea is an old idea that didn't sell as well as Call of Duty.

FYI Everything has stats if it exists in a computer-generated world. In Halo 3 for example spartans had 70 shield points and 40 health points. I only quote Halo 3 because I don't know what the numbers are in more recent games, but I do know the numbers from Halo 3 because at one point Bungie explained the damage system in an update. As far as I can tell that stuff hasn't actually changed much, although the values may be adjusted one way or another. Marines also have so many health points. Except in Halo 4 where they appear to have a health point (That IS a bit of an exaggeration, but they really don't have many). In Halo 2 Marines actually had more total health than the chief, but they couldn't regenerate any portion of it which made them less versatile. I learned this only from many hours invested in the Halo 2 campaign (I didn't have Live, so the only way I could practice was in Legendary campaign). In Legendary the marines could take 2-3 shots from a Jackal sniper but the chief could only take 1. Keep in mind the marines would get stunlocked by the beam rifle shots and so it was as good as dying instantly, but it showed without a doubt that the marines could take a greater amount of damage than the chief. But in this game the marines are very frail and their A.I. is horrible. As for your question about whether they continued ahead of you in previous games, I think they did at some times and not at others. Often they'd hang back waiting for you in a vehicle segment, but advance in a foot-travel segment. I distinctly recall them going off on their own in a Warthog when they had enough guys to run it though, so I think mostly the marines just waited to get a ride. I aslo believe they wouldn't advance without you in the Halo landing from Halo 2, but it's been so long since I played that I'm not 100% sure. Mostly I think it was scenario-dependent. They have also adjusted the marine A.I. to advance a maximum distance before either standing down or dismounting from vehicles. It used to be marines were just sort of attached to you for the duration of their lives with a few exceptions, but in Reach and in Halo 4 they will stop for narrative purposes more often and they will dismount from a vehicle if you take it somewhere Bungie & 343 didn't want you to take it. Previously you'd mount up a bunch of marines with sniper rifles and rocket launchers and then you'd maneuver your vehicle through the geometry barricade that was supposed to stop you from taking the vehicle, and then you had a fully loaded vehicle + badass marines. Now even if you get a vehicle somewhere you're not supposed to the marines will dismount and proceed on foot. The problem I have with the all-new all-crappy marines is that they were never game-changers in previous games, they were just fun. My brothers and I would challenge ourselves to keep our marines alive for as much of the level as possible on Legendary, and outfitting your fellow soldiers with good weapons just makes all kinds of sense. It isn't a major sticking point, it's just one of those many little detail issues that I ask "Why?" when I saw that they'd changed it. Sometimes it was nice to have some A.I. buddies along, especially when you're slogging through Legendary on your own for the umpteenth time, it gives you something new in that playthrough.

You probably hit them with splash damage from rockets or something. That being said, the marines were AWFUL in this game. In addition to having absolutely worthless AI (I don't know what game anyone else was playing who thinks their AI is passable), they actually have worse stats than ever before. It used to be the marines would step out of cover and get stunlocked by enemy weapon fire, which would kill them pretty fast, but if you equipped them well they could potentially stun their attacker too and therefore avoid the stunlock ("Stunlock" being the condition AI suffer when they take a hard shot and have a stagger animation which doesn't end before the next shot, it's why you used to be able to snipe the caps off brutes and then just fire again to hit their head before they moved. Same with blue elites). They were also impeccable shots so if you kept them at a safe distance but gave them sniper rifles and beam rifles they could really speed up combats. Now though they get stunned and die almost instantly, in addition to having the absolutely abyssmal AI from Reach. It's upsetting how many things Bungie did WRONG with Reach that 343 saw fit to carry on into Halo 4. There were good things about Reach, but instead of using those we kept miserable movmeent speed and retarded marines.

While that may be true, your solution isn't especially realistic, practical, or satisfactory. You just want the annoying thing gone, you aren't thinking about the impact on the game. You may be able to have your wish granted for Halo 5, but Halo 4 has a DMR, we have to deal with that. So you re-balance things instead of just removing it from all maps and loadouts. It's just slightly better than the other guns, so it seems pretty silly to just want it gone since all it takes to fix things are some slight tweaks. That says nothing of the fans of the DMR, a lot of Halo fans started with Reach, they think the BR is weird. I know my GF's brother never played Halo before he played Reach, and he loved Reach. I may not have liked Reach, but the point is each game loses some fans and gains new ones. That's probably why 343 included the DMR in the first place, Reach was so different from previous Halos that returning to "classic" Halo would have seemed like a bad idea. Why alienate all your new fans? You can't bring the ones you lost back, but you can do your best for the ones you have. There are probably more Reach fans playing Halo 4 than fans of Halo 2 or Halo 3. They won't like seeing their standard issue marksman rifle removed. These are things you have to think about if you want to talk about fixing the game, because you have to think about it from the developer's perspective. 343 can't just get mad because they lost to a DMR and rip it out of the game, they have to work within the boundaries of the game as created. They have to think about the consequences of changes, and if you want to make valuable critiques and suggestions, instead of just being another unruly voice, you have to make your suggestions as if they could be implemented. "Just get rid of it" is never the solution.

While I won't argue that the gravemind appears to have traits of a sentient organism, I don't think you have a good handle on what makes a creature sentient. It has less to do with reasoning (which plenty of animals can do, contrary to your claim) and more to do with awareness. However I think if bees were allowed to run the place for awhile they'd probably evolve into something special. Apes, Dolphins, and Parrots are already damn smart. You're talking about an evolved organism, all organisms can evolve. Don't forget the Flood are effectively an apex predator, which is extremely significant to their evolution. If you don't have anything that can kill and eat you, then you relax and focus your development on other things. That's what happened to us. We got good enough at surviving that we could relax a little and grow our brains. Also the initial flood aren't sentient and they don't have a gravemind, they're just worker bees, but they're actually not nearly as "perfect" as you claim because they're parasitic. Bees develop an equilibrium with their environment, they're basically farmers, and they live happily ever after within their means. They don't spread themselves thin or exhaust their resources (as the flood do), so they're really much more utopian than flood. Since flood only develop one mind, they're not even a society. They aren't made up of individuals, they're mindless drones until they get one gravemind, then they're an individual with many limbs. I just don't see the argument for them being any kind of effective society or utopia. They're just a particularly effective parasite, no more capable than a bunch of bacteria in your stomach.

The carbine stands on the same ground relative to the BR that it always has. It kills faster but with more shots. It takes even MORE shots in this game (8, used to be 7) and both of them suck pretty bad anyway. That's why I always say we need to bring those weapons up, because even if people who want a DMR nerf get what they want, the BR and the Carbine will still be complete garbage. You can't make trash valuable by making everything trash.

I enjoy boltshotting people, but I enjoy it like I enjoy shotgunning people. You don't think "Damn I have awesome aim with my BOLTSHOT" you think "LOL did you see how long that idiot chased me?" Chances are they accomplished the range nerf WITH a damage nerf.

Eh, I don't try to model my philosophies on ants or bees, which are similarly "perfect" but not at all sentient. There are plenty of "perfect" societal structures and in all cases it's because the creatures which make them up tend to be mindless drones. If African Americans weren't people then American Southern culture could have been "perfect" because they had someone doing the work for them and they got to spend all day visiting with each other and drinking sweet tea. However African Americans ARE people and so instead of "Utopia" you get "Slavery" and that's neither unique nor impressive. While I think you can refer to a large collection of organisms with a structure as a "society" or you can at least refer to that structure as a "society," I don't really think the concept of "Utopia" applies to any "society" that isn't sentient, or if it does then I'm about as interested in Utopia as I am in the Flood. The Flood are just something suitably creepy that Bungie thought up as a video game villain, I don't know if they intended to have the biblical allusion when they first made the game but it's all just a fabrication, so it can't ever really be "perfect" and it isn't especially intriguing to me therefore.

There is definitely a sense that 343 is simply doubling down on all of their bad decisions. Rather than ever consider the idea that someone made a mistake they figure they gain credibility by never reversing any of their bad moves. It's BS, and probably came from some corporate punk's powerpoint presentation, but they aren't being smart about it at all. I've had a few guesses about what made them behave so idiotically, lately I think that they got pressured to have a "Plan" from the start (Corporate people love plans) and they've been discouraged from straying from that plan at all. That's why their updates take forever, that's why they're never good enough, that's why things like a ranking system (Which I really don't even care about) get held back to 6 months into the game. It's stupid, it's baffling, and it's 343's M.O. The real issue I see is that even without their impossibly bad management and planning, there is still a healthy dose of utter incompetence beneath it all. I don't think 343 would have made a very good game even if they were allowed much more autonomy, because either a.) they just aren't very smart, I like to use the example of 1 Gauss on Exile or b.) there isn't some corporate snot forcing them to do stupid things, they're just doing stupid things because they ARE the corporate snots. Everything I read in their bulletins feels like they've never played their own game, they don't intend to, they never did, and they're just playing the part and collecting paychecks. They don't sound like game designers, they sound like middle management. I remember one bulleten that talked about the joys of camping - even though Halo 4 is the most anti-camper game I've ever seen. It's like they read some video game lingo on a game wiki and fashioned a fan fiction out of it to pretend they're actually "our people." I simply don't get the sense that there is any potential in 343 to make the best moves without someone forcing them to. I think if Halo 5 is good it will only be because Halo 4 was so bad that someone higher up said "stop that!" to 343. They will not change because they know better, they'll change because their market shares force them to, without them ever figuring out "Why?" They aren't game designers, they're people contracted to make a game in a certain license franchise in order to keep installments coming out and keep the franchise profitable. They can design a game that you tell them to make and if you give them the guidelines, but if it were up to them they'd just go play golf or something because it's a lovely day outside and why would you want to make/play a game anyway? "Sure I got the degree to do it, but if I'd known better I would have majored in something else."

I wonder if the OP has noticed the distinct trail left by the beam rifle and sniper rifle when they fire that would surely get any real sniper spotted and killed every time they took a shot. ...Or the fact that the "Assault Rifle" is really just a very large Tec9, which isn't to say large caliber, it's just a Tec9 in a larger gun-shaped box. ...Or the lack of sights of any kind on said assault rifle... ...Or the presence of dual-wielding in previous titles being completely out of line with reality... ...Or the UNSC and Covenant's fondness for generally less accurate weapons.... ...Or the peculiar capacity of Halo weapons to deal their full damage no matter how far the projectile has traveled, never losing any velocity or force... ...Or the critical design flaw in the Scorpion tank that allows people to simply shoot the operator in the face... ...Or the Halo protagonists' general limited flexibility that keeps them from going prone... ...Or... I'll stop now.

I'd either leave it the way it is or make it map-dependent, because that's the way I choose them now. On Complex for example you want a DMR, but on Haven you want a BR. On Solace you want a DMR if you're going to be up top but a BR if you're going to be down low. I don't see the availability of both as a problem because the whole point is for you to pick your ideal weapon, and what is "ideal" changes based on the map and the way you play. I don't really understand why people have been having problems with the two weapons, I'm guessing the mistake they're making is always picking the same one. It doesn't take a genius to realize the BR is going to be completely outclassed on a large map like Complex, and that the DMR will require a bit too much accuracy on a tighter map. It's up to you the player to choose the right tool for the job, don't get mad when the game gives you the choice, get mad at yourself for making the wrong one.

I've played lots of games of Haven (You have to if you play a playlist that has Haven in it, people vote for that map in their sleep) and the AR/Storm Rifle/Suppressor are all very easily countered. They all get wrecked on that map. The reason people like Haven is because the encounter ranges are extremely consistent. You will almost always be fighting people at mid-range, not much longer or shorter, which means that the automatic weapons are always just outside their ideal ranges. Other small maps like Solace, Abandon, and Adrift have a greater variety of encounter ranges and players can therefore control their game a bit more and make an automatic weapon work, but on Haven it's mid-range all day.

This is what I've been saying from the first moment that I said anything on this issue. It's painfully simple and obvious that the BR needs to be 4-shot, and painfully stupid and counterintuitive for it to be 5-shot. The only issue is that you need to then slow down the BR's fire rate, otherwise it just starts eating other weapons within its range without them ever having a chance. The DMR's 1.6ish second kill time is a very good control number, the BR and the Carbine should both kill faster than that because their lower accuracy will keep them from dominating, but then the AR/Storm Rifle/Suppressor need to kill even faster than the BR and Carbine. In terms of kill times they need to get faster the closer you get to your target, but not so fast that we end up with weapons that wipe out a spartan before he can even turn to see who's shooting him.

My big problem with the SAW is that the AR sucks. "What?" It creates a new power weapon, but is basically just a really badass AR/Storm Rifle/Suppressor, which means in order for the SAW to become/remain badass, those weapons can't get any better lest they "become a friggen SAW!" What people in this community (I refer to the Halo community, not the people on this site) fail to realize is that when you get something nice 343 has taken something else away (Bungie did the same thing before them) or at least made their final nerf to it. Player base speed went down in Halo 2, then again in Halo 3. By that point people were complaining about how slow they were and they wanted sprint. So they got sprint. ...but they also got slowed down EVEN MORE, after all, now you could sprint to make up for it right? No, you HAD TO SPRINT to get ANYWHERE. You wanted sprint or jet pack to make up for your lack of speed in Reach. So the AR got a massive clip nerf in Halo 3. In Reach it got so bad that the game would have literally been much better without it (No "personal preference" BS, if you used the AR a lot in Reach you sucked). People likely said "PLEASE give us a better automatic weapon" "BUT we still hate the AR and melee." So now we get the SAW, which has effectively staked out a claim in the automatic weapon turf that keeps the loadout automatics from ever being considered for improvement. I like the SAW, but I don't like what it does to the weapon balance. No arguments that loadout automatics DON'T suck will be heard, because they do, invariably, inarguably, suck. As long as the SAW is around they'll stay that bad too. Or perhaps more accurately, as long as the community is full of idiots who can't identify the source of their problem, we will never have good automatic loadout weapons. The SAW is just the face of that problem.

Let's get the AR's clip from that game too.

That trailer made me nostalgic for better Halos, lol. Doubt that was their intent, but it was definitely enjoyable, if maybe a minute too long (Eventually the fact that they were capturing loops from different angles was apparent). I rarely stop to enjoy the scenery in Halo 4, it seems like in both the campaign and the multiplayer they wanted to make sure you didn't have a lot of time to do so. It may also be that I just got a lot more focused in the years since Halo 3. I enjoyed the trailer though, thanks for posting it.

Psst, the OP is from NOVEMBER OF LAST YEAR. Also the dude hasn't posted anything since then. Can we let the dead topic die?

Are you familiar with the concept Field of View? I don't know the word for the sensory deprivation that occurs by viewing your world through a screen, but that's relevant as well. Humans can see something like 100 degrees vertically and almost 180 horizontally, but your TV only shows you about 90 degrees. You also can't feel the floor of the game world vibrate through your feet, or hear all the noises people make just moving around (They're too much of a pain to program I expect, especially for something that won't sound recognizable anyway). Also even with the massive improvements in sound design, not every TV/Xbox comes equipped with free surround sound (none of the ones I've ever purchased have anyway). Furthermore, some of us don't live alone and don't devote our finances to being hardcore in a video game, so we don't invest in headphones or surround sound. You can't feel the air move as another spartan passes within inches of you, and you can't hear their armor make any noise behind you when they level their rifle at your head. The motion tracker is and always has been there to replace all the senses you lose simply by playing the game in the first place. It's perfectly fine that you don't like it, but don't pretend removing it is somehow the only right way to play. Please also avoid saying stupid things like playing defense is bad, because every damn piece of pro advice I've ever read on the matter says that it's better to get into a strong position and let the enemy come to you. All that "play aggressive" talk is the product of MLG, which recognizes (very accurately) that teams playing defense aren't as exciting to watch, and MLG is all about making the game entertaining to the spectator (Where do you think the money comes from?!?). I have nothing against aggressive players, I frequently am one, and they are definitely more fun to watch, but don't pretend it's the only right way to play the game. Your narrow thinking is exactly what got us this crap game in the first place, someone kept saying "faster is better" and "camping is bad" but those are OPINIONS. Faster is not always better, what matters is that you control the pace, whatever it is, and don't let your enemy set it. Camping isn't always bad, what matters is that you're winning, camping or not. The best players in the world will play BETTER with a motion tracker because MORE INFORMATION is BETTER. Also what kind of idiot thinks FFA is more fun without motion trackers? The whole point of removing motion trackers is to cripple you into talking to your team, the whole point is the handicap you into playing a certain way. It's not just plain better, it's a decision designed to force a certain type of gameplay, and there were way too many of those decisions in Halo 4's design. Will you become a better player if you play without a motion tracker? In team games, probably so. But that doesn't mean everyone wants to become that better player. I play with some deaf guys, tell me what they gain from the team communication that arises from removing motion trackers? Will you become a better player if you play without a motion tracker in FFA games? No you'll probably just spend a lot of time looking like an idiot as you and other players flail around each other without any idea where each other are. That's what happens when you remove the sensory surrogate that is the motion tracker. I've seen in MLG games, two players got into CQB and then as soon as they're off each other's screens they don't know where the other has gone, because they can only see 90 degrees of the damn conflict area. If both players turn the same way to find the other (Like they probably will because odds are they're both right-handed) they will continue to dance around each other without seeing the other. Eventually they find each other, but the problem should be obvious. Ideally, if you want to be a badass, then you should play with your team without motion trackers until you get your communication and movement perfect, then you turn the motion trackers back on in matchmaking so that you have two weapons adding to your awareness instead of just one. If I were to make a training playlist (Like the basic training one that was in Halo 3) I might remove motion trackers, but a playlist where you play competitively should expose you to all the cheap and dirty tricks that can be used so that you don't get sheltered in a world where the "bad things" have been removed for you. I'm fine with encouraging teamwork, and as a training tool I think removing the motion tracker can make you a better player, but keeping it makes you a more informed player, and as I said the best players in the world will play better with it than without it because they've already developed all the skills that come from not having it. They've learned the lessons that you learn without it, and so if you give them more information they will become even more dangerous. Does it let people camp more effectively? Yeah, but camping, as we know, is a legitimate strategy.

Lol if it were up to me everyone would have PV as a permanent infinite AA should they choose. That's a whole game. Also making people rage is more fun than you make it sound, a fact which I'm sure you'll admit even if you don't admit it publicly. I don't teabag or trashtalk or grief at all, but I do use PV + Boltshot and love the idea of it making someone crack. The same arguments for trash talk work for cheap kills, if you can get your opponent angry then you're giving yourself an edge, and playing that psychological game is completely legit. Cheap kills are actually waaaay better at it than trash talking. When I play against a team and they clearly have one guy who is having an awesome game, I do my best to make that guy miserable. I'm not any good at it anymore, but knocking that one guy off his rhythm can mean the difference between winning and losing (A player who is just "on" is a nightmare to face, you have to shut them down fast). When my clanmates and I used to get split up and have to fight each other in matchmaking I'd zero in on the guys who I knew had bad tempers, because I wanted them to freak out, get pissed, and start making the rest of their team miserable. If I could get them yelling into their mics at their teammates then I'd win. There are many more ways to disrupt your enemy than just scoring a kill on them, and it's important to appreciate and understand the presence of such tactics at higher levels of play. If you can find their strong point and break it, or find their weak spot and make it contagious, you've made a serious contribution to your team's efforts. If I know someone hates the boltshot, you can bet I'm going to boltshotting them every chance I get.

Ugh, you completely missed the point, but that's what I get for making a long post. First: I didn't make up my mind about this game before I bought it, I hadn't done any research or any thinking on it at all. I wanted it to be good because I bought it, I wouldn't have bothered buying it if I was determined to dislike it. This entire idea you have that people just planned to hate 343 and Halo 4 is ridiculous. Second: Halo 4's harshest critics are also big fans of one or more Halo games. We criticize the game because we want better for Halo. Most importantly you cannot accurately critique something if you haven't really experienced it on one level or another. Third: Everyone's a critic, get used to it. It will never change.