Bloody Initiate

I don't use the magnum except in SWAT when there are challenges for getting secondary weapon kills. It just takes an obscene amount of ammo and shots to kill a shielded spartan with a magnum. Otherwise I use a boltshot in small maps and a plasma pistol in maps with vehicles.

I agree completely and have been saying something similar for awhile on multiple sites. That's why Frank's apology didn't impress me at all, because he was apologizing for a bunch of stuff that hadn't bothered me. Who cares if you have some kinks as a new developer? My problems aren't the kinks, they're the decisions you made and carried out flawlessly. I'm not bothered by the failure to achieve certain goals, I'm bothered by the twisted goals you set for yourself and your success in achieving them.

Exile is my worst, Abandon is probably a close runner up. Exile is only my worst because you have a 50% chance of getting totally screwed by whatever idiot put the Gauss on just one side. If the map were anywhere close to balanced and I didn't have to spend 50% of my games in it desperately trying make up for the massive disadvantage of being red team, I might do better. As it is when you vote for Exile you're hoping to get lucky, and I'm not lucky. Some people are, most people are neither especially lucky or unlucky, but I am unlucky.

I think Halo 4 is a bigger indication of why most gamers are sickening individuals. Halo 4 caters to all the least impressive aspects of a gamer. The desire to be praised and rewarded without achieving anything (medals for everything), the desire to achieve certain benchmarks without committing the time and practice once required for them (5-shotting is easier than 4-shotting ever was), the desire to be thanked for your time and nothing else (Primary source of experience is completing games, not winning them), the desire to take only the games you want and never commit to the ones that might test you (You're free to quit without consequence), the desire to act without thinking (CoD style gameplay), to move without looking (CoD style maps), and then to be rewarded even though you were careless (CoD style gampelay again). I don't call 343 a lot of names, but I do think they did a poor job with this game and that whoever was making the calls was a poor choice for their position. I think you lose a lot of credibility when you blatantly copy another franchise and then pretend you're doing something different. If you copy another product you don't sell it for the same price, you sell it for cheaper. I also think you copy other products when your own isn't profitable, you don't mutilate your profitable product to grab at the sales numbers of someone else's profitable product. For that you make a NEW product with the intent of grabbing the enemy's sales numbers, you keep your original free of the effort so that you have a stable title. The mountain of stupid decisions that had to take place for this mockery of a Halo game to exist is incredible. There must have been someone stupid at 343, or someone stupid at Microsoft applying pressure to 343, or both. It's bad business, and sadly bad business is becoming most business. It may disgust you that so much toxicity gets directed at 343, but the more I've learned about the game the more often my thoughts on the matter became toxic as a matter of fact. Eventually I can't think of any word but "stupid" to describe whatever idiot places an extremely powerful vehicle on one side of 2-team map. The gentle words don't come to me when I need to describe someone who twists the development of their product to copy another one. I don't even care about the ranking system, but the kinder words don't show themselves to me when I see that said ranking system won't appear but 6 months after the game's release. I really really don't care about a a ranking system, but it's a heavily promoted feature of the game and they won't make it available until 6 months into the game's life. That's STUPID! You don't promote something like that and then keep it back that long. It's not smart. What other way is there to describe such blatant mismanagment of the game's development? Someone over there is really really DUMB. I try to speak softly, but in the face of so much evidence I just can't find the nice words. I look, and I try to be constructive, but eventually what's required is a lot of people yelling in anger. If a lot of people speaking constructively on the matter doesn't work, you need a mob. If the mob doesn't work, then I can once again only think of unkind things to describe whoever makes the decisions. I can also refrain from playing the game and from buying further installments, a resolution I'm quickly approaching. I'm just 1 of many million though, so I know that no one will notice or care when I'm gone. I'd rather try to make it better before I leave, that way I won't have to give up on it. I know the odds are bad, but the odds are worse of enjoying Halo 4, so I feel comfortable stating my displeasure in public forums.

I understand that and I wasn't trying to undermine your purpose, but the fact that they suck is really important. The BR will occasionally outclass the DMR in SWAT (Depends on the map) but overall you're talking about inferior weapons. Like I said, the AR is technically "Easier to use" but when you consider that you'll be the only person using it, maybe one person out of two, and everyone else will be using marksman rifles, the difficulty of using it skyrockets. The fact that the BR is terrible adds dramatically to its learning curve. You have to get good at 5-shotting with it, learn to reload more intelligently because your horrible rifle is ******** away ammo, and then you need to adopt a bunch of surprise tactics to get the first shot more often on DMR users. You basically have to be highly proficient with the weapon, and then you have to become a better player in every other aspect of the game. I compare it to the AR because the AR is just further down that spectrum of "Easy to use but totally sucks." When I've won with the AR I've had the occasional lucky games, but what really made the difference is how extreme I had to get in my play-style. I had to focus a lot on my motion tracker to bait people within range before exposing myself, I frequently had to grenade them without giving them line of sight on me, and I had to be on them like white on rice after that. In short I had to be friggen amazing and my opponents had to have just the right mix of ability and inability. The BR is harder to use because its weakness is more subtle. You have to change a lot of what you're doing to make up for your inferior weapon, but unless you're paying attention you won't notice it's your weapon getting you killed.

When I refer to "aim assist" I'm talking about the way the reticule moves toward a target independent of your command. When I refer to "magnetism" I'm referring to the tendency of your projectile to actually deviate toward a target from the line it is aimed upon (Your reticule is one foot to the left of your enemy, your bullet actually goes right to compensate). I don't know that "aim assist" was increased in Halo 4, it feels like it. If it was I don't think it was necessary. I am pretty damn sure "magnetism" WAS increased in Halo 4, and I do not think that was a wise change. Those may not be the correct technical terms for the features, but the difference between the programming which moves your reticule and the programming which moves your projectile should be clear. I understand that neither should be removed and in fact both have been present in Halo since the beginning to aid console users, but I do feel like both have been increased in Halo 4 which was unnecessary. The increase in "aim assist" and "magnetism", combined with the already low base movement speed makes it extremely easy to hit targets even when they're moving perpendicular to your line of sight at very long range. It makes everyone feel like a marksman, but more importantly it makes everyone feel like everyone else is a marksman. The result is players who feel like they can't move anywhere without being 5-shotted in 1.6 seconds because anyone can 5-shot you at the highest speed possible at any point on the map. It used to take a lot of practice to kill at long range or extreme range with the starting weapon (BR, and even Reach DMR required you to slow down), now it simply requires you to have that starting weapon (DMR, lightrifle is good but people aren't used to it yet). In addition to that, speaking directly to the OP Delpen9, I don't mean any offense but this is not the first time I've seen you make posts with suspect information. I don't think you're doing it deliberately, but I think you need to devote more energy to researching the things you're going to say. This correlation with controller sensitivity doesn't sound as strong as you make it out to be, I think you made this thread trying to defend something no one was attacking. No one who knows what they're talking about wants the aim assist removed completely from Halo, because everyone who knows what they're talking about also knows that it's been present in Halo games since CE and that hitting anything in a console FPS without it is difficult to the point of not being fun.

In Team Regicide I repeatedly executed the enemy king, even when he was amongst his teammates. They were all within a few feet of him fighting my team when I sprinted in and executed their VIP right in front of them. In Oddball I encountered a dude well away from the action at one of the bases in Adrift. I had the ball and proceeded to assassinate him with it. I felt he should be ashamed for being so oblivious in an Oddball game to not notice the carrier of said Oddball walking up right behind him.

Even as much as I've been on both sides of criticism about these games I never was so stupid as to think the people criticizing it were just failing to open their minds. I don't remember why I got on the Halo 3 forums, but I know the pattern I followed with Halo: Reach and Halo 4 was as follows: I got on the forums to voice a complaint, ended up spending a surprising amount of time defending the game against a bunch of people who were complaining about the other things, and overall ended up feeling silly for defending the game because after a while I didn't want to play it any more than they did. People have things they want from their games, they aren't always reasonable and their complaints are rarely well thought-out, but more than anything they want to have fun playing a game that isn't doing it for them. That's not narrow-minded. That's just the opposite. They're open to change, they even start bargaining like it's a stage of grief ("You can keep the boltshot as it is, but can we please just get our shields back a bit sooner?"). I wanted to love Halo: Reach and Halo 4, but the multiplayer in both games was an overall inferior product. That's the most important part of the game for me, which is fortunate for Halo 4 because the campaign sucks and Spartan Ops matchmaking gives problematic lag about every other game. I don't have an iron-clad idea of exactly how the game should work, but I know I don't like the way it works now, and I also know that it's not due to my inflexibility that I wasn't happy with new features of the game. I don't think copying another product and then selling it for the same price is smart business, and I especially don't like finding out that I bought the generic version at the price I would have paid for the name brand. This is not name brand Halo, and this is not name brand Call of Duty, it's a generic version of both. It's like I got a watch with a TV in it, and it's neither a good TV nor a good watch. They took the game in the wrong direction, they made stupid business decisions and degraded the quality of their product. That's not me being close-minded, that's a quantifiable fact. In Halo: Reach they just did a bad job because the guy directing the game wasn't typically in charge of multiplayer. In Halo 4 they succeeded in their goals, but their goals were lousy.

Since Halo isn't played primarily at System Link parties any more I see no purpose in having hot pink colors. It used to be when someone would get up to go to the bathroom or something at a System Link party we would quickly sieze their controller and change their color to pink, their name, and their controls. They wouldn't notice until a game started and no one was willing to back out to let them change their appearance. They could un-invert their controls and such but they'd have to play the game as a pink spartan named "Pink *****!"

As I understand it they originally said it would place a nav point over the last person that killed you and also help you locate the last person who wounded you. It works against the last person who killed you but does nothing against the last person who wounded you (The definition of "wounded" being unclear was irrelevant, people testing it tested on all levels of damage so whatever level = wounded would have been found). So the Nemesis perk will give you a nav point on the person who killed you last for about 4 seconds, but if you get pinged by a sniper whose location is unclear you will have no easier time finding them. Even if it did show who hurt you and who killed you I think it sounds like a much less useful perk than most of the others unless you're trying to kill one dude who keeps killing you in BTB. If they ever introduced a 1v1 playlist it might sound like a good idea to use the nemesis perk, but as I recall in 1v1 back in Halo 3 they introduced a lot of anti-camping and game-hastening measures anyway (The maps and gametypes were tailored for 1v1, almost no power weapons or power-ups etc.). It also might sound like a good idea in team snipers, but chances are the loadouts would be predetermined in the playlist which also makes the Nemesis perk useless.

BR is harder to use because it sucks. It bothers me that this major detail is left out of your analysis. The AR is technically "easy to use" but the fact that it sucks increases the learning curve dramatically. Yes it's easier to aim and the actual act of lining up shots and landing some is easier, but you're not accounting for all the extra maneuvering you have to do in order to make an inferior weapon shine. The BR sucks, it kills slower than the DMR, it is less accurate (Not talking about aim-assist, I'm talking your reticule is on their head and you miss because the weapon has inferior accuracy), it has a shorter range, and it bleeds ammo (those two bullets you don't use in the 5th burst). Just like with an AR, if you get close to a DMR user with your BR you are hanging all your hopes on them missing a shot. If they don't miss any shots you lose unconditionally. There is no silver medal in a 1v1. The BR has no significant advantages over the DMR, thus even if it had more aim assist (Which screws you up pretty often FYI, you're aiming at one guy and his teammate passes in front of him, suddenly your shot is completely spoiled because the aim assist follows the closer target not the one you've already shot 4 times. He has gained the split second relief he needs to dome your *** and aim assist killed you rather than him), it doesn't matter. What matters is that the BR sucks, so it's harder to use. You are at a disadvantage with the weapon, so even if you are the world's finest BR user you are overcoming disadvantages, not eliminating them. Plenty of awesome players use the BR, if they spent some time getting more comfortable with the DMR they'd be even more awesome because it's a better gun. "Easy to use" is relative to the weapons you're fighting against. If everyone has rocket launchers and you have an AR, the AR becomes much harder to use. The BR sucks AND the DMR is better. So the BR might have a more forgiving design, but it's harder to use because overall it's an inferior design. If you are racing your Ford Focus against a bunch of Lamborghinis, the Focus is technically much easier and safer to drive, but since you're RACING you want the Lamborghini. If you weren't racing you'd want the Focus because chances are you aren't skilled enough to fully unlock the power of the Lamborghini or even drive it without dying, but you ARE racing so you don't really have time to become perfect, you just need the better car if you're going to try to win. The BR would suck slightly less if it didn't have to fight DMRs, but it does. That makes it harder to use. AND it sucks.

Hit this exact problem in BTB the other day. Our team was playing smart but NONE of us were getting good ordnance. Of the 8 guys on the other team 5 had some kind of sniper rifle kill at the end of the game. We lost because of ordnance. I got two drops that game, neither one brought anything good and for one I picked the speed boost just to get back to the sniper rifle I'd stolen from one of the enemy. At at least one point in the game I was aware of 3 separate beam rifle positions on the enemy team.

I didn't sign up for it even though I was aware of its existence well before it began. That should tell you enough.

I don't really care that much about CSR, but the degree to which they have screwed it up is unbelievable. They will have failed to introduce this feature for the first 6 months of the game's life. Again I'm not interested in this feature, but they have screwed it up so badly I cannot believe they're even bothering, because no one who is interested in this feature will be bothering with Halo by that time. It's like BPR in Reach, I was kinda pleased mine was on the higher end, but I didn't even know it existed until well after I stopped playing the game and I didn't go back to Reach thinking "ooh, I'm gonna raise my BPR." I have zero interest in Grifball, but some people are happy about it and I don't have any problem with them getting what they want. I have zero interest in Team Doubles, but as with Grifball I'm glad some people are getting what they wanted. As for Spartan Ops, it's the same story for me as with Grifball and Team Doubles, but since that's an entirely different feature of the game and not just a playlist I don't think it's quite as irrelevant as Grifball or Doubles. I find it funny that of the two specializations they're releasing one of them is the one that doesn't actually completely work (Stalker doesn't do everything it says it does). I intend to do stalker last (I played before 11-20-2012 so I don't need to wait for unlocks) specifically because it doesn't work properly yet.

Talking of the skill gap, good players still distinguish themselves, but only if they had a certain playstyle. There are players I play with who were always better than me at Halo, but they're having as hard a time with Halo 4 as I am. What's different is they eliminated the odds of surviving with certain play-styles. They reduced the amount of ways you could play the game. For example, while people complain a lot about boltshot campers I've never seen such a camper dominate because the truth is we can all see him on PV and we all laugh a little before we spam him with grenades. The only hardcore camper that survives is usually camo on large maps where you have to rely on visually spotting the person and your motion tracker and PV don't reach that far. The point is that once upon a time you could choose that play-style and focus on it. Now you have more requirements before it works. Halo 4 is the most anti-camper Halo yet, and if you've tried to camp on a smaller map you've learned this lesson. You also can't just pick a front line on the maps and fight there. That used to be my play-style. Maps used to have sides and generally you could count on the enemy coming from somewhere in front of you (The maps that DIDN'T follow that rule got criticized for their spawns). Myself and many others got good at going to places on the maps where the fighting would be thick but not hopeless, then we spent our time there and won games by being better than the other guys. That's how maps used to play, large portions of them would go largely unused in fact. You can no longer do that because the maps don't have places like that, once again except in Big Team. The maps are designed with circular movement in mind and usually when you're looking at one angle of attack you are exposing yourself to one from the opposite direction. Suddenly people can just get behind you without even meaning to, they'll just spawn there or it'll be the fastest way for them to return to the fight. Suddenly wherever the fighting is thickest is also where it's the most hopeless. Combine that with instant respawns and sprint and you often can't even get away from it before someone respawns and is shooting at you. So my play-style, and the play-styles of a LOT of Halo players, don't work anymore. A player who sticks to the outskirts of the combat and makes a point of running away a LOT will still do well, but only if his teammates play like old Halo players and DON'T run away so that he can get away unnoticed. Players who stick together, wherever they are, can also do well. I used to advise players never to stick together because the way older Halo maps were you would often just be lining yourself up to become a multikill. Halo 4 is different though, because while you can still become an easy multikill, you're going to have a much harder time surviving multiple combats without someone else there. For those of us who haven't yet adapted, the skill gap IS lower, because we're fighting each other with weapons and game settings that are doing most of the work. For those players who HAVE adapted or were just playing the game right from the start, the skill gap is higher because the rest of us are still fighting the game. Some of the most popular play-styles got targeted with the game's design. The game IS designed for players to get one kill then die. You can beat the odds, but those odds are definitely stacked towards getting a K/D close to 1.0. There is no other explanation for things like 6 second shield recharge delay but instant respawns and weapons that kill in under 2 seconds. You are not meant to go from one fight to the next and still have good odds of winning. A lot of the time the people who get killed early in a match get to run around playing SWAT because by the time they respawn and sprint back into combat many of the players who won previous fights are still one-shot. For those of us who play this Halo like it's a Halo game, we have a hard time breaking that 1-kill-then-die design. For people who resist the game, avoid fair fights, and run from risk, there is a wealth of possibilities. For me it's a total overhaul of the way I play to become good at Halo 4, and while I'm working on it I'm also on these forums arguing that a good game lets you play more than one way. Even if I get good at Halo 4 as it is, I am still very much against the style of game they made it into. Even if I were good at it already I wouldn't like the game they made, because a good player is often not beating his enemies he's just playing against the game. I understand you want to avoid fair fights anyway, because smart players want to work with their teams to minimize risk and fair fights are a risk, but you always get into some anyway and in those situations I'd like to know I was beaten by someone who was better than me not someone benefitting largely from the many features of the game designed to kill me.

Yep. The driver should have been willing to give a random gunner a chance, you should have been willing to give the gun to the driver's intended gunner, and the intended gunner should have been willing to give you a chance and made his way elsewhere on the map. If just one of you had yielded the situation would have been resolved. If the gunner had said to his driver 'Give the guy a chance" he likely would have, if you had gotten out you'd have a good shot at the second Gauss spawn, and if the driver had said to his gunner "I'll keep the hog alive and let this guy gun until he gets sniped or something, then I'll come back for you, we'll see what happens" then all would have been well. Instead you three lost the game for your team when your team SHOULD have been starting with an advantage. I'm sure you're a very good Gauss gunner, but the fact is it's not a very difficult weapon to use and there's almost always someone out there better than you. You never know until you give them a chance, and if they're bad that means you'll get your chance sooner rather than later. They shouldn't have been so stubborn, but you shouldn't have been either. I played a game the other day where I wanted the Gauss cannon and mentioned it in the pre-game lobby. Someone else said they wanted it so we raced at the open of the game. I lost, but I didn't attack them or anything. The driver said that after he got his gunner a riot he'd let me gun (His gunner was going for a perfection). That didn't work out (they got blown up at 14 kills) but the point is we all yielded something. I didn't get the Gauss at the open, but his gunner wouldn't keep it the whole game, and his driver was willing to trust a random gunner. The game would be a whole lot better if people would give each other breaks every now and then.

I haven't ever been informed about modding, but I feel like you only need so much. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JehMsDGDWN4 I think I've seen another video of that same guy you linked only in Exile. The sad thing about watching those videos is you get the sense that the guy is actually using mods because he wants to perform well. He's effing TERRIBLE. In the game on Exile he spends like the first minute getting killed.

In this vein, I'd like an assault rifle that doesn't suck. Bungie and 343 both hate automatics and so they've always made sure automatics are underpowered, I've never liked this. I would like a new assault rifle in the sense that I want one with all the best features of all the Halo assault rifles. I want the magazine from Halo: CE, for example. I still have never approved of their gross reduction in its clip.

Yeah I'm not quite sure why you thought the Mantis was at all in that weight class.

I was wondering what MLG was going to do with Halo 4. I'm not horribly sad to see Halo severed from MLG but I'm not especially thrilled either. On the one hand I found the MLG fanboys who strangely understood very little of their own favorite thing frustrating, but on the other I really liked the way MLG went over the game with a fine-tooth comb. Basically I liked MLG but hated their fanboys. I don't think there was much of a future in the 4v4 MLG format though, they need to update and so does Halo. Even if they find something really fun to do I'm not sure how much I'll bother with MLG in the future though, I've never been a spectator. Or at least I thought I'd never be much of a spectator til I found some youtubers I enjoyed watching in BF3, perhaps if MLG somehow makes a battlefield format I like I could be converted.

I created the gametype I outlined above and uploaded it to my file share if anyone is interested in trying it in customs.

I kinda DO 5-shot all the time.... I'm not that good but it's not that hard. I obviously still lose fights plenty of the time but that tends to be because of things specific to the fight. I got pinged by a grenade or the other guy got behind cover just in time to avoid one of my shots or make me hesitate. When I lose DMR-only fights typically the other guy gets me in 5 shots just like I would have gotten him just a split second later. Once again I'm not that good, but since Halo 3 I've always played at a level where a sliver of a second makes the difference between winning and losing. I do play the occasional game where someone's headbox just seems smaller, for example I played one where all the guys on the enemy team had the same strafe, basic until the final shot then jump. The weird thing is when someone is on the ground you can get a headshot by aiming at their neck, but in this particular game the jump saved them every time even though the reticule was at their neck when I fired. I blamed it on a bit of latency and moved on. For me the problem with the DMR is specifically that I DO 5-shot much more easily than I used to 4-shot with a BR. That I know for damn sure. Even if I found a bunch of film of me failing to 5-shot over 10 games of Halo Reach or Halo 4, I could point to a lot more failures to 4-shot over 10 games of Halo 3. I also get 5-shotted a lot more often than I ever got 4-shotted. It's much easier to get the best performance out of a marksman rifle than it was previously. So every fight gets won or lost on a tiny fraction of difference, and therefore even when I 5-shot someone first they landed 4 shots on me and now I'm one-shot for freaking 6 seconds. That's Halo 4 and Reach to a lesser extent, by slowing people down and making weapons take more shots to kill you make it less likely that a person can go from winning one fight right into another. They need breaks more often, which they don't get. It's just percentages. If you are doing 20% of a person's life with each shot and they are too, the fights will leave you worse off when they're close (Close = one more shot would have killed you, that means you're 80% dead by a 5sk weapon and 75% by a 4sk. That means 5sk weapons leave you weaker for your next fight) These may seem like minor differences to some, but minor differences make all the difference in these games. There are no sharp drops or rises in numbers, like the difference between being shielded and not, they make the game different with lots of little nudges here and there. So we wait just a few seconds longer to get our shields back, but more of that time is spent one-shot than in previous Halos. The overall difference doesn't seem great, but it becomes huge when you nudge the number one way and nudge another the other way. That's why carbines have always sucked, more shots to kill means more damage from each fight in addition to more chances to screw up. If you out-BR someone with a 4-shot BR that means you're AT WORST 25% further from death than they are, one good burst will still kill you, but you're not without your shields. If you out-carbine someone that has always meant you were AT WORST no-shields afterword. Even when it took 7 shots to kill the difference between weapons that make you one-shot THEN headshot you with their last shot and weapons that make you one-shot AND headshot you with their last shot favors the latter. What I'm discussing isn't nearly as much of a reduction in the skill required as it is a reduction of the influence of skill though. 5-shotting with the DMR in Reach and Halo 4 is definitely easier than 4-shotting was with the BR in Halo 3, but the greater effect in both Reach and Halo 4 is that you can't keep fighting without a break. Skill still makes a lot of difference in 1v1s, but it makes a lot LESS difference after the first fair 1v1 because of the weapon designs and the rest of the game's design (6 seconds spent one-shot, instant respawns, no grenade pick-up without a perk, etc.). That's why I keep saying this game is designed for you to get one kill then die. You can certainly beat the odds if you're good or lucky, but you can't deny that the odds are stacked in favor of that conclusion. The odds of winning multiple fights in this game are worse than they've been in any Halo game before this, and that isn't an accident. That is how 343 designed the game.

Mine is "BLDY" just to make it easier to associate my call sign with my gamertag. Some people mistake it for "Baldy" and that's kinda funny, I anticipated that mistake when I chose it. I chose it because most people who read my tag just call me "Bloody" in-game so making my sign a shortened version of that seemed like it would be easier for teammates. In Reach it was "HOST" because I thought it was a fun way to make fun of people who blamed host for their problems in the game. Even in the lesser net code of Halo 3 I feel like host wasn't nearly as much to blame as people thought (Assuming you stayed away from certain gametypes like SHWATguns). In Halo 3 it was D13 for "Die," which turned out be a very common call sign. Even as common as it was most of the time you wouldn't have more than one D13 in a game, and I think the most I saw in a game was two on the same team.

I haven't confirmed this but I definitely feel like it gets stunned longer. I'll have to check that out in forge, even with the wheelman perk I feel like the Mantis gets stunned way longer.

Exactly, Transport vehicles just don't fit in Halo. They barely get used for transport in BF3 even on its larger scale because people don't like getting into something that is going to be targeted by actual anti-air weaponry AND piloted by a random who might just crash the damn thing or be using it to go somewhere faster (This happens a lot, you're on the door gun all excited to be in the chopper and suddenly the engines cut because your pilot bailed out). I've seen them used to great effect in that game (Pilot circled area while squad mates spawned in chopper and rained down behind enemy lines, was AWESOME), but only on a few occasions. Also it's worth mentioning that IRL air vehicles do not get used nearly as much once we discover an enemy has lock-on anti-air missiles (Which are present in Halo and BF3). As soon as we get intel that an area is covered by that kind of weaponry we severely restrict our air traffic in there. So you see, there's not even a place for the Falcon in the real world, let alone a video game. I'd love to play on a scale big enough for that sort of thing, but generally the things that make it balanced in a game also make it uninviting (Anti-air weapons, because you KNOW when you design a transport aircraft you've also designed combat aircraft, and ground pounders need to defend themselves, it's game balance).