Bloody Initiate

Yes it would, but we're playing Halo 4 now. Simple practical features available in previous games were removed for our enjoyment. Knowing stuff slows the game down and we wouldn't want that.

SWAT was created with BRs man. They were the inspiration for the gametype. Sorry I just don't see any merit to the idea of removing them. Also SWAT creates the only balanced environment between those two weapons. The DMR is still much better at long range due to its accuracy, but the BR wins at mid-range due to its burst-fire capacity. SWAT is the only gametype in which the DMR and the BR do what they're supposed to do in comparison with each other. Outside a certain range the BR is at a very clear disadvantage due to its lower accuracy. I recommend the BR on smaller maps like Haven, Abandon, and Adrift. I recommend the DMR on larger ones like Complex and Harvest. On Solace either one can work, I've lost fights on Solace due to the BR's inaccuracy but I've also wiped out teams due to its forgiving burst. Choose the right weapon for the map.

I would love it if the shielding perk cut your delay in half, although as ridiculously bad as the delay is I think it would become quite overused. That gets to the heart of a lot of the problems Halo has been having though, instead of just giving you something they give you something and then take something else away to make sure nothing good really comes out of it. Faster kill times for example, we have them now for better or worse, but then they made the weapons take more shots to kill. WTF is that about? They also gave us this insane shield recharge delay so our shields get wiped out in under 2 seconds but we have to wait 6 seconds to see them go up again. Do you know how you make it so a shield matters less? Make it available less often. Do you know what the core of Halo gameplay is, and the thing that people noticed made a good rhythm when Halo first came out? Shields. Go back and read game reviews, reviewers noted how the shields created a kill/cover/kill/cover rhythm, and now we have kil/coverrrrrrrrrrr/ki/coverrrrrrrrrrrrr/assist/coverrrrrrrrrrr. People don't realize that this is one of the biggest departures from core Halo to date. In Halo you have shields, that's Halo, that's the foundation, but in Halo 4 you have weak shields that take much too long to recharge. I'm actually OK with them getting wiped out fast, I don't prefer it but it's one of those changes you get used to. Being one-shot for 6 seconds? That's just the opposite of Halo. That's SWAT only everyone else has shields. It's not good, it's pure bad. Also Dawn Wolf, if you don't mind my asking, how do you remain neutral on the idea of being one-shot for longer? That means at some level in your head you have an argument for it. I don't personally think shield recovery should be instant, but I think 6 seconds in a game that speeds everything else up is just horribly bad, unquestionably so. Yet you have a question?

Yes, YOUR post is all the evidence anyone should need. With such lanterns in the community I'm amazed we don't have it yet. It's also shocking that I should be so foolish as to continue to find my facts disagree with you, since your statements are automatically backed up and stamped in gold while my facts lose relevance as soon as you say so. Oh wait, if it weren't for people wasting everyone's time failing to understand the system like you are, then we would actually have visible Trueskill still because clowns like you wouldn't have made it miserable for everyone. Would it be nice to know exactly what kind of players I'm up against before a match? Yes it would. However since eventually in Halo 3 my evaluation of most players was "We'll see," I'm not convinced it'll make that big of a difference. Aside from the information that is occasionally helpful in telling me whether I should focus a little extra on one guy, I just don't think the game would automatically get better with a ranking system. However my opinion on the matter is irrelevant (My facts remain facts, FYI), because 343 will have CSR ready in April. I don't know whether CSR is actually going to be visible Trueskill, but I don't really care either. I never really cared, I just thought it was annoying how many people argued for visible Trueskill without knowing the first thing about it, like you.

I don't know any way to tell if the enemy is in a party or not. I would like to though, I would prepare differently for each match.

I was thinking of how earlier Halo games had particularly good timing and all had something very special they offered at launch that was otherwise unavailable. Halo CE made console shooters viable, the genre existed on consoles before Halo CE but Halo CE made it work well enough that suddenly consoles had something PCs didn't (PCs later got it, not at all relevant). Halo 2 brought console shooters online with Xbox Live, this wasn't an innovation so much as right place right time. Or was it? Did you know Unreal tried to get in on the action? Their game didn't even compare, I played it, and the only fun thing to do was to get a certain gun that called something like an air strike. Halo 3 set the standard for Xbox Live competitive multiplayer on the Xbox 360. (When I say "competitive" I'm referring to the fact that you win by making someone else lose. The alternative would be a "cooperative" multiplayer game) It also actually did a pretty good job with cooperative multiplayer on the Xbox 360. I didn't play Halo Wars, no comments on that, I did play ODST though, and even that game had a bit of an ace up its sleeve. It was the first Halo game to use Halo skills in order to find out about someone other than Master Chief. It was the only one to diverge from the original focus. I mentioned "use Halo skills" because Halo Wars was an RTS, but ODST played just like a tweaked Halo 3 (Thus the name, Halo 3: ODST). So along comes the time for Halo Reach, and there isn't a brilliant launch opportunity. There isn't anything it can really plan to offer that hasn't been offered. It can offer Halo, or do its best anyway. I end up feeling the same way about Halo 4. I almost pity the situation now, because how lousy to be scheduled for release as early as a year before the next Xbox comes out? I find myself wishing they'd waited a year to publish Halo 4. I feel there was no opportunity for Halo 4 to capitalize upon, nor was there for Halo: Reach. They are in my opinion the weakest in the series, and I'm beginning to suspect that's because they broke no new ground. In fact the original title of this thread was "NOT Breaking Ground: How Halo 4 is a "me too" shooter" and then I shortened it to just "NOT Breaking Ground" and I found even that wasn't adequate. This was also originally a much longer post, but as I typed it occurred to me that what I wanted to say was diluted by my disappointment in Halo 4. While CE and Halo 3 were astounding games (I actually never thought Halo 2 was that great), they also had awesome opportunities at the time they were released. They were excellent by themselves, but they were both magnified by the times in which they were released. I would say Halo 2 benefitted most from that timing, just because of the three I thought it had the least to offer on its own. So as I thought about this I wondered whether we'd have a better game if it was released with the gravity of one of those titles. More accurately I wondered if my opinion on Halo 4 would differ if it had released at a time when it had something special to offer that wasn't already readily available in the market. The answer I came up with was "not if it played like this," but what do you think? What would you think of the game if it had something original in it? I'm not trying to mock the game, I'm trying to think of what it would be like if Halo 4 brought something to the shooter market that wasn't already present. It's sort of a "What If?" game where you look at a world where something important was missing, like yourself. Only in this case what if previous Halos were missing? What if other shooters were? What would Halo 4 feel like if it remained unchanged but the market did?

Just so we're clear, the Carbine will never shine as much as the BR or the DMR for a multitude of reasons. The only way it will ever shine as much as them is if it shines much more than them. Basically you'd have to make it as easy to use and effective as the DMR. Why won't it shine? Because as long as it is the Carbine that it has always been (Trading more shots for a faster kill time than the BR) then it just won't catch on, it's genuinely harder to use. It's not "harder to use" like the BR and the DMR are "harder to use" than automatics, it's really harder to use. I don't know this because of any advanced knowledge of the game, I've just been playing since it was introduced (Although I barely got to play Halo 2 on Live), and it's never seen the action of the BR. Part of that is obviously that it was never a starting weapon as much, but when people have the choice they usually don't throw down their BR for a carbine. You don't need two guns that do the same job, especially when they're different enough from each other. Aside from perhaps the focus rifle from Halo Reach, I'm not sure there's been a gun that's harder to use in its intended role than the carbine (Focus Rifle could kill pretty fast at mid-range and was easy to beat a DMR with, but it was INTENDED for long range, and that was laughable). Keeping your reticule consistently glued to someone that long is just plain harder. It's not even a matter of "if you're good, it's the best" as the popular myth of the carbine states, it's just harder to use. Hard to use = unpopular, even in skilled hands. Skilled players know they need a forgiving weapon when they make mistakes. They can make lesser weapons go a lot farther than average players like me, but they won't prefer it. There's a few people who might recall how awesome they were with the carbine in Halo 2, and even Halo 3, but it's a very few. I think the "3" variety rifles will be the DMR, the BR, and the Light Rifle. I would prefer the carbine had a place and became an excellent weapon, but as long as its model is "More shots" then it's never going to end up on top.

We know it sucks, that's why we discuss possible fixes.

First you should accept that the carbine, the model of the carbine, the concept of the carbine, have all always been destined for second place. The beginning concept of "takes more shots to kill" becomes a deal-breaker, even when you adopt a "kills fastest" model. I don't know how exactly to explain the limits of human concentration because I'm not at all qualified to do so, but the carbine simply demands more concentration than any/all of its peers in all games. There is also the matter of shield percentage per shot, which is just the question of how healthy you are after beating someone in a fair fight. More shots to kill means you're less prepared for the next fight. This has kept it as a second-place weapon forever, even when it lives up to the popular perception that it's the best if you're the best (This is far from true in Halo 4, people just keep thinking it is). If I were to fix the Carbine, I would fix the BR with it. Those two are supposed to be the mid-range kings, so any adjustment to one has to be done with the other in the mind. I've talked plenty about how to fix the BR in other threads, and this thread is about the Carbine. First off, it needs to kill significantly faster if it is to remain an 8-shot kill. If it doesn't remain an 8-shot kill, it must take fewer shots to kill. 7 or 6, as you suggest. The fewer shots you take to kill the slower your kill time becomes as a balancing act. The carbine should always kill faster than the BR, but how much faster? The answer is dependent on how much harder you have to work to kill with a carbine. If you have to shoot someone 8 times to kill them, then the Carbine should be a very fast kill indeed, .15 to .2 seconds faster than a BR. Increasing its clip size is also an option, but you're trying to make room for more shots and that's the wrong direction to go. The more shots it takes to kill with the carbine the more people will avoid that weapon. Another direction you could go, and I think this direction is the most interesting, is make it fully automatic with about the same rate of fire and other stats. This lets a player press the trigger and focus on staying on target, making the weapon unique in several ways. It would be the only fully automatic headshot weapon, easily the most accurate full auto weapon as well as the one with the smallest clip (Still has more kills in its clip than an AR). This slightly counteracts the original difficulty of the carbine, which was focusing for that many more shots. More plausible adjustments to the carbine include: A 10% damage boost, dropping it to a 7-shot kill like the old H2 or H3 Carbine, but killing much faster due to the Halo 4 kill times. This carbine kills much faster than the 5-shot BR, and if the BR is also re-balanced it should still kill slightly faster than the BR (Probably not more than .1 seconds). A higher damage boost coupled with a noticeable reduction in RoF, thus you take 6 shots to kill but have your RoF dropped to keep it from getting out of hand. This Carbine gets 3 kills from its clip, which is more than the 5-shot BR so it should have either an equivalent kill time or one that is faster only slightly. A 6-shot Carbine becomes a better weapon than a 5-shot BR in a lot of ways, so it shouldn't keep a vastly superior kill time. The three things you have to consider when balancing these two weapons out are: Time to Kill Shots to Kill Shots in a clip They draw on the following three resources, respectively: Time available to the player - This is added to and subtracted from by other players. They're here to kill you, you have only so much time to kil them first. Focus player can muster - This is important, each shot you take you're more likely to miss the next one. It's how your brain works, it can only do this so long. Furthermore, weapons that take more shots to kill leave players weaker when they lose fights. So if two carbines fight and one dies, the winner is now less prepared to take on another enemy. So in addition to being harder to use, more shots make victories less substantial. Ammo before reload (And presumably death) - In addition to the countdown before your reload, bigger clips forgive more mistakes. It's always good to have a bigger clip, it's always bad not to, so this one is pretty easy to measure in the "good/bad" department. It's a simple binary spectrum. Unfortunately for us 343 wanted us to reload more often, so Halo 4 weapons run out of ammo faster than their predecessors. Keep in mind I'm speaking specifically about balancing the BR and the Carbine. Once you bring weapons from other ranges into the mix you add more things to balance. For example it's perfectly OK for the Carbine and the BR to have faster kill times than the DMR (even though they don't) because the DMR has the option to retreat to long range where its vastly superior accuracy will outgun both weapons. It's also perfectly OK for the BR and the Carbine to have slower kill times than automatic weapons (Even though they don't) because once again the BR and the Carbine and strike outside the range of the automatics. Overall I'm fine with the Carbine continuing its tradition of being faster to kill but taking more shots. At the moment it IS faster than the BR but takes too many shots and it still gets owned by a DMR. I agree the Carbine needs a boost, I insist that the BR needs one at the same time, and I might feel good about automatics getting one too. I don't really think it's fair that no one is ever interested in rebalancing those.

Assault Rifle is not and has never been overpowered. It is and always has been the first weapon you throw away. I don't know that I would call the Halo CE Assault Rifle "underpowered" because everything lost in relation to the CE pistol, but I know that every Assault Rifle since that game has been underpowered in one way or another. The biggest problem has been clip size, and I think generally the kill time has been pretty low as well. The Halo Reach Assault Rifle is the only one that was horrible without question, the Halo 3 Assault Rifle and the Halo 4 Assault Rifle play similarly, should have deeper clips (Clip size should never have been reduced).

Of course there should be a penalty. Silly to think otherwise. Of course plenty of people think otherwise, which just shows how silly they've become.

We know why they did it, there is no question about it, I just hate it. As for people who think it's cute to say stupid things like "Just play smarter" I play as carefully as possible, but spending 2 more seconds one shot is something that every player has to reckon with, and the fact is no matter how good you are the more of the match you spend one-shot the more you are going to die. That's true if you're and MLG Pro or a total n00b. I distinctly recall a match on Haven where I got plainly beaten by a guy but managed to leave him one-shot. I got a respawn around the corner from him, walked around the corner, and headshotted him. There was no action he could have taken in the whole game to stop me. He was in a good spot to recover his shield, but I knew where he was and I spawned close, so I walked over and killed him. That wasn't a fair kill for me, he should have been able to fight by that time, but because 343 industries is staffed by idiots, I got a free kill on someone who had beaten me. And it's not "more instant respawn" because it's not always the guy who you killed that comes back to get you. You're just one-shot for so long anyone can come along and clean you up, and as Hater says it promotes chasing. The time it took to regen your shields before was just enough time to make someone chase you into a trap, now you get chased and killed. Do you know what good players are REALLY good at? Turning the tables on their enemies when they begin at a disadvantage. Do you know what's much much harder when you're one-shot all the time? Turning the tables on your enemies when you begin at a disadvantage. Thus how good you are matters less the longer your shields take to regen. Any trigger happy idiot can chase you down and kill you, where previously players at high levels learned when it was good to chase and when it wasn't. Now it almost always is. As for instant respawn, that is definitely a contributor to the problem, I just don't like it when people try to reduce the seriousness of a major problem with the game by saying "It's actually THIS that's causing that problem" when most often it's a combination of both things. The reason I say instant respawn isn't as much of a problem is because it isn't available in objective, and it doesn't plague you throughout the campaign and spartan ops. Your slow shields are with you in every gametype except SWAT. That makes it a bigger problem with the game, because any time you're playing Halo 4 and you take damage you have to wait longer to be at full strength.

I hate the 6 second shield recharge delay. If I could fix nothing else but one thing I would change that. I also just finished getting wiped out as red team on Exile, even though I NEVER vote for it, because people are so painfully stupid they still vote for that map hoping to get blue. 10 votes for Exile means at least 2 people on my team voted for, had some choice words for them in the post-game lobby. I know I shouldn't post angry, but they give us Grifball (Yuck), they're giving us Team Doubles (don't personally care) but they haven't FIXED anything. We still have a map so imbalanced most people wouldn't make it by accident, and someone at that crackpot company still thinks they have an ounce of credibility so we still have 6 second shield recharge delay. 343 are simply horrible at their jobs. Laughable. Like you never lose your shields? Never get hit ever? Gimme a break.

You might also consider the possibility that he didn't actually have radar and what you saw was only available in theater. The glitch might be with theater, not with the game.

If it goes out like Halo 2 did then we have 2-4 years left with it. If it goes out due to next gen consoles not supporting older games (Which would be weird, you can just download Xbox 360 games off Live now, so losing this capacity seems unlikely) then it'll be gone at the end of the year. That seems very unlikely from a technological point of view. I would instead bet on it going out more like Halo 2 which gives people plenty of time to go back and play laggy games of Halo 3 with people in distant countries.

His pistol from Halo CE. If I were a video game character whose adventures were defined by violence with weapons, I would want the best weapon available.

I'm with you here. I've never seen Halo 4's weakness as a difference in gamers or a result of one faction's whining. Although I WILL say the community's widespread ignorance fueled a lot of bad complaints, and some of those bad complaints were addressed to the detriment of the game. It wasn't "casuals" or "competitive players" though, it was people who weren't thinking because of any number of reasons (they were too angry at the time of their decisions to make good ones, still see this regularly, they were ignorant of facts, or they were just plain stupid people, plenty of those in any large community). My hate has always been aimed at the decision-makers. As for the skill-gap arguments, there's something else there that people keep missing. I was firmly above average at Halo 3, and I'm not angry about Halo 4 because I don't get to pulverize n00bs. I didn't get to pulverize noobs in Halo 3 in the first place. I got placed at my Trueskill level and fought people who were close to my skill level, and I didn't make new accounts. What people are missing when they talk about the skill gap being gone is the fact that it actually got bigger in ways that are very difficult to understand and explain. MLG players in Halo 3 might have a K/D slightly above 2.0. A player of that level in Halo Reach and Halo 4 would have a much higher K/D, frequently 3s, 4s, and 5s. I THINK it's easier to understand the shift in skill gap thusly: Being a good player requires a lot of different characteristics. When you're improving your characteristics (With practice, experience, research) it's easier if you're also talented at that particular characteristic (The people who play this game professionally began with a lot of talent and honed it with a lot of practice and such). Halo 4 diminishes the value of some of these characteristics, but increases the value of others. The ones required for the highest level of play were largely left alone in Halo 4's new features. The best players are all excellent team players, for example, they have to be. Teamwork and communication are both characteristics that you can have a talent for and that you can practice. One thing Halo 4 left largely alone was teamwork, even though it does diminish the ease of teamwork with lesser team indicators (The ol' Red X makes no appearance in halo 4). The brunt of teamwork and communication are things you bring to the game, not things already present and available. Highly accurate hitscan guns that lead the pack in kill times are something the game gives you, but the game can't make you talk to your team or move with them. The game can make it easier, but not make you do it. So players like me whose primary practice came from searching alone and going it alone aren't really any good at Halo 4, but players who spent a lot of energy developing their team skills and communication excel even more at this game than they did in games like Halo 3. Halo 4 only lowers the skill gap in a few places, it actually increases the skill gap in others. It decreases the skill gap in 1v1 fights, and especially decreases it in 1v1 fights after one of the combatants has had a fight, but it made teamwork harder. So players with THOSE skills suddenly shine even more. Also since teamwork was always a HUGE contributor to success anyway, suddenly those players gain a huge edge. It also increases the skill gap in terms of survival instinct. Players who spend a lot of energy preserving themselves and being careful gain more from it in this game than they did in other games. You could be careful in Halo 3, but a lot of the time you could be too careful and miss the best opportunities in the game. One thing Halo 4 seems to do with the skill gap is decrease the reward for risk. The fewer risks you take, the more you are rewarded. Previously you needed to take risks to gain rewards, now you take as few as possible and excel for it. I'm not arguing for one over the other (Taking fewer risks feels like it should be rewarded, as does taking certain risks), just noting how players who are careful in all aspects gain more of an edge than previously. The point is Halo 4 didn't lower or raise the skill gap so much as it just relocated it. Different skills gained additional importance, others lost a lot of importance. It's always important to be accurate, for example, but not as important in a game where the weapons are simply easier to use. High accuracy grants a slighter edge than before. It wasn't absolutely necessary to have a teammate nearby in other games, it's almost unforgivable not to in Halo 4. How is this related to the topic? Well it's mostly me responding to other posts, see my post on the bottom of page 6 for much more topic focus. This one is long enough.

I'm not even sure Halo 5 will be released on a disc. I think the disc format is only still in use because it was so widespread (Just like a lot of older formats. Did you know no one makes audio cassettes anymore? But you can still have the device that plays them). Multiple Xbox 360 games that I've played required multiple discs, which suggests to me that the format is failing to meet the potential of its content. While I don't know what the next gen consoles will do, the point is technology is moving forward, and Halo 3 likely will not. We will probably get an Anniversary edition that uses Halo 5's engine just like CE: Anniversary used Reach's technical chassis.

Everyone did actually. I don't remember the details but I remember that eventually recon was either very easy to get or just made available to all. I think it went in three phases, there was the beginning phase where it was only ever awarded by Bungie, there was a short phase where it could be achieved (Again, I don't remember the details of what criteria were involved), and then they made it much easier or just a given. I got mine in the second phase, and while I can't remember what was required of me the only reason I remember that it required something is that I wouldn't have worn it if it didn't. I didn't actually like the armor set that much, and I was very much in love with my Rogue Helmet + Katana Chest piece and Standard Shoulders. They all looked like they could be part of the same set of armor (I liked how similar their architecture was). I wore the recon shoulders though because it signified an accomplishment, I just can't remember what that accomplishment was. If it had just been given to me it would have stayed in my armor chest collecting dust.

I expect it will go down the same way Halo 2 did, and it will take Reach and Halo 4 with it. That's my beloved Halo 3! Taking two punks down with you! 2.0 K/D for Halo 3! ODST gets an assist on Reach and, fearing the idea of ending with zero kills, trades kills with Halo Wars.

I wore the chest plate in Halo 3 due to it resulting from difficult achievements (All my achievements except the skulls were attained legitimately, so I was proud of them and wanted my armor to show my accomplishments. All the things I achieved through actions I was proud of were represented in my armor). However I found the helmet ridiculous and wouldn't really care that much if they brought it back. What made it special enough for me to wear in Halo 3 was that I had to work to acquire it, I haven't really felt that way about any armor permutations since. It's all just "Chief dress-up" now. I still have pieces I want and prefer, but it's more about aesthetics than accomplishments. Aesthetically I thought the Hayabusa helmet was awful, I forgave the shoulder plates, and I liked the chest piece. Since the two things I liked about the chest piece were 1. Its katana showed I'd accomplished difficult things and 2. Its architecture seemed very similar to the rogue helmet and standard shoulders, and I liked the rogue helmet, I liked wearing the Hayabusa chest piece with it

I was listening to NPR today on the way to work and heard about Research in Motion unveiling a new Blackberry phone that it hopes will establish a strong foothold in the smart phone market (The company is floundering and needs a hit product). They interviewed some guy about its chances of succeeding and the guy said something that reminded me a lot of Halo 4's problem: He said the new Blackberry has a good chance of doing awesome things for its company because it's not a "me too" phone. Instead of trying to just have all the features other smart phones do, the company had focused on innovation and offering new capabilities. It can't compete in the app market, Droid and Apple own that, but it can do a lot of things people use apps for and compete in the functionality market. The thing that really struck me is how he said its biggest edge would be that it wasn't a "me too" product. Halo 4 is a "me too" game. Yes the features it shares with CoD it also shares with shooters other than CoD, but the most upsetting thing was never the ideas it copied, it was the things it sacrificed to copy them. Halo 4 is just a "me too" shooter, it does almost nothing original and even sacrifices a lot of the things that previously made it unique ("Original" is when you come up with something someone else didn't, "Unique" is when you keep doing something other people aren't). The reason I say Halo copied CoD instead of saying "Halo copied a bunch of other shooters which had a lot of different features from which it picked daintily" is because CoD is the sales king, and thus if you're doing what it does that a bunch of other shooters also happen to be doing, the one that gets to take the credit is CoD. Halo got the same priviledge when it first came out and did awesome because it was the only decent shooter on the Xbox, even though there had been multiple console and computer shooters before it, many of them with the features it offered. That being said, I thought I should step in and defend the "get one kill then die" thing, since I say it a lot. Going 45-2 doesn't disprove statements about how the game is designed. The game's design lends itself to a certain type of conclusion, and that conclusion is "get one kill then die." The DMR is a better weapon than the BR, but you can still get beaten by a BR, that doesn't make them equal. The fact that you are weakened more by fights in Halo 4 than you were in previous Halos automatically leans to one conclusion: You are more likely to die after a fight. Most of the time you are only alive after a fight if you won it, so thus Halo 4 is designed for you to get one kill and die. It's much more elaborate and diabolical than that simple statement, but I'm focused more on the arguments against it at the moment. Also K/Ds get pretty wild when you speed up the kill times of a game. If people are dying faster they have less time to think and defend themselves and luck plays a greater role, but so do positioning and teamwork (Positioning and Teamwork can also be the result of luck, you being in the right place at the right time isn't always due to your expertise, and getting good randoms is the pinnacle of good luck). I went 44-2 in a game of BF3 the other night, it's not because I'm amazing, it's because I had a position and a team that kept me alive while also allowing me to eliminate players before they could react (Being a military shooter that attempts to be realistic, BF3 kill times are pretty fast). I've played that same map the exact same way before and not gone so positive, or even close, because I wasn't as lucky in those games. Next up: The biggest thing Halo copied from CoD is actually more abstract than specific features. It's more of the attitude and overall gameplay design, which can be traced through game features but you have to look at them as a whole to see the unmistakable resemblance. You can point to killcams and say "Look Halo copied CoD" but it's only when you gather a bunch of factors that you realize "Wow, Halo really copied CoD." The biggest obstacle I find to explaining Halo 4's mimicry is when people haven't played the two games enough to get a sense of their different feels. I've played much more Halo than CoD, and in fact I have played much less CoD than I would like since I enjoyed it when I played (Although I found the experience of getting butchered by some guy's AI-controlled attack helicopter absolutely appalling), but I've played both and most importantly I've paid attention with great interest to both. Lots of shooters had features Halo did before Halo came around, and lots of shooters had features CoD did before CoD perfected them, but in the case of both games they were the first to create games with good enough production values to shatter the market. I never really viewed them as competitors because even when it fell behind CoD in sales Halo was still doing very well, I used to laugh at people who talked about them like warring Titans, since both of them were profitable enough they didn't need to compete. So when I got Halo 4 and saw it was trying to compete with a non-contender for its market, I was appalled. CoD definitely sells a lot more games than Halo, but in my mind they were both different enough that each had a secure fanbase (I'm also pretty sure this is accurate in terms of sales, but I don't have that data). Then Halo made the fatal mistake of trying to get a piece other than its own, and sacrificed some of its already-smaller piece to accomplish this. That was a bad move, and I'm upset because I'm part of the piece it sacrificed. To be fair, I didn't really like Reach either. But Reach just failed to be a good Halo, Halo 4 doesn't try that hard to be Halo. It's a lot of imitation, take your pick which shooters it's imitating, but take enough things from other sources and there isn't a lot of Halo left. It's just a "me too" game now, and that's not a winning strategy. Ask any successful innovator.

...or you back pedal to avoid their CQB weapons. Happens to me a lot, putting maximum distance between themselves and me is the only way I can put them down in time, that means going straight back, and then they realize they're going to lose and go for the stick. I get stuck a lot more than I'd like

What? You just quoted yourself to pretend it lended validity to your own argument? Also I don't know who the member of the month is and I mean no offense to them when I say I also don't care. I don't care who the member of the month is in my own clan. Given that you've shown no ability to argue your point and a lot of ability to look ridiculous, I'm gonna let this one go for your sake. [sarcasm]Also your post count definitely correlates directly to your knowledge of the game and its community [/sarcasm].

Grenades are weaker in this game than they were in Reach (They were insane in Reach). I can't say for sure how they stack up against Halo 3 or 2 or CE grenades, been too long since I used those. The reason you suffer a constant hail is because people die a lot and come back with new grenades. The reason you die a lot is because the game is keeping you from surviving too long via other means (Did you notice you're one-shot for something like 2 seconds longer than previous Halo games?). There isn't much to be done about it really.