Bloody Initiate

Used to be 5 in Halo 3 and in Halo: Reach. They made most of the weapons take more shots to kill so you'd have to reload more often.

Aka play it like an aggressive suicidal ******* and charge like a mad person at the flood every time you open as human.

Here's an example of the type of people I usually expect to argue against when it comes to a ranking system. IF we're talking about visible Trueskill, then the idea of resetting it completely defeats the purpose. However Bungie did this in Reach and people are still stupid enough to think it's a good idea now. I apologize to anyone in this thread who may feel like I've spoken down to them, but when most of the people I see arguing for ranking systems are that dumb it's hard to go into a new discussion without a bias. The crux of the problem is that people don't understand what Trueskill is for, they think it's supposed to pat them on the head for doing well and slap their wrist for doing poorly, but it's a sorting system and it always has been. That's why I argue against it being visible, people don't like labels IRL, and what they don't realize is they actually don't like them in a game either. They don't like having a label that says "Child of dysfunctional parents" and they don't like having a label that says "This dude is bad at Halo" (Not that the two are in any way related). Good players want something telling people they're good, but average players generally don't, and awful players really don't. Trueskill sorts people accurately, so that label that says "This guy still occasionally wets the bed" isn't so appealing because it's true. Other labels people don't want (Because it's funny to think of everyone having this information visible to all): "This dude can't take a joke" "Down after one drink" "Assault Rifle rusher, 0.8 K/D" "Never been laid" "...Never will be" "Terrible at Tic-Tac-Toe (And Halo)" "Falls down on face often. Really." "Has Herpes" "Betrays teammates" "Sensitive about his mother. No, she's not dead or anything, your guess is as good as mine" "Bad temper, worse fighter" "Has quit more than half of his games of Halo 4" Lol, I could see making a thread for them.

I'll keep all that in mind, thanks guys!

Most of the stances look ridiculous, but the two I like are the Recruit and Believe. Believe requires forerunner ordnance mastery. A lot of people took a liking to forerunner weapons much earlier than I did, so I'm kind of behind the times on acquiring the weapons and keeping them long enough to get all the juice I can out of them. Anyone have the locations and spawn times of most of these? I'm doing OK with Scattershot kills, that one should come naturally, it's the binary rifle and incineration cannon I need more time with and I like both of them. Any tips for using them well would also be helpful, although to be honest I don't know that there is a lot I won't already know. The incin. cannon is a launcher and the binary rifle is a sniper rifle, pretty simple in both cases.

Nah man it's because I'm bad at Halo 4. Thank you for attempting to make it the game's fault, but I'm really pretty bad at this game, lol. What IS the game's fault is all the things that focus on equalling things out so everyone feels like a champ. Perhaps if they had planned to put in visible Trueskill from the start they wouldn't have been so stupid with their game design, but Halo 3 would have still been amazing without visible Trueskill. The idea of a ranking system is much more of a placebo, and that's my problem with a lot of people who argue for it. Having it there won't make a game better automatically, it's not a cure for the game's problems. You have to make a balanced competitive game before you can rank people on it. Now if you planned to put a ranking system in maybe you'd make a more balanced competitive game, but you won't make a balanced competitive game BECAUSE of the ranking system and a game doesn't become balanced or competitive automatically just by having the ranking system. You need a good game first, then you can attach a ranking system. If the system you choose is visible Trueskill, you might want to place it apart from other playlists enough so that casual players have the choice of ignoring it. One thing I can tell you for sure is that the people who like ranking systems the most are the people who are good at the game. People who aren't so good aren't nearly as eager to be informed of that fact. Trueskill is accurate, and that's a problem for everyone who wants to be better at the game than they'll ever become.

That might be a bit of an overstatement.... I don't know how many bullets it took to kill someone in CE but the only weakness it had in that game was that it wasn't the pistol (Also I totally killed pistol users in CE by burst-firing the AR). It had 60 rounds and would drop a spartan relatively quick.

Yeah it had rockets, and they were on the multiplayer version, but not on the Avalanche version. They were really good rockets too, as you say, but the machine guns were so good you wouldn't use the rockets on anything but vehicles. You'd spot an infantry target with the machine guns and they'd be dead before the rockets got there. The Avalanche version just had really accurate but significantly weaker machine guns. You'd hammer a spartan awhile before killing them and usually you were going for the assist instead because they were so weak. They retained the accuracy on the Avalanche Hornet but the power was so low you spent most of the time using your accuracy to annoy from a safe distance.

The Halo 4 Warthog is the biggest obstacle to Warthog kills bar none. That turret can barely kill a spartan before he 5-shots the gunner, and if you're actually close enough to kill anyone chances are you're EMPed then dead. 343 HATES vehicles as power weapons, and the regular Warthog is the weakest of the bunch. Players see those and say "easy double kill" or worse. You need only look at the commendations for vehicles for proof: Mongoose Destroyer, Mantis Destroyer, Banshee Destroyer, Warthog Destroyer, etc. Where's the commendation for killing someone with your vehicle outside of splatters? BTW every good operator knows splatters are extremely high-risk and surviving in a vehicle means only splattering when you must. Instead we get the Wheelman commendation, which to be fair credits Wheelmen, but also people who jack vehicles and hog drivers who get 3 people in their hog and then go for splatters which is the absolute worst thing I can think of doing in a Warthog. The only vehicle that escaped 343's barefaced hatred of Halo vehicles was their own original vehicle, the Mantis, which is still very easy to take down but at least has a shield system which means it can play like a very slow spartan. Hopefully in Halo 5 they put shields on all vehicles and give the rest of the vehicles the same love they gave the Mantis. As far as 343 is concerned if you're not using a vehicle for shenanigans or the occasional objective, you're doing it wrong, which is awful for vehicle fans. In Halo 3 I joined a vehicle-focused group, the Halo Wheelmen, and I've felt like we were under siege in both Reach and especially Halo 4. They've made the hog so terrible that you don't dare get into it even with extremely an good driver and gunner. The new tactics for vehicles involve sticking to the outskirts of the battlefield and avoiding all direct confrontation with any more than one single foot soldier. That's not a joke, the way you do well with vehicles in Halo 4 is you play as cowardly as possible and you avoid engaging any more than one guy at a time. It's disgusting feeling like by getting in the hog I'm being selfish and ignoring my team. It used to be necessary on most maps, it was a powerful asset, now it feels like you're indulging yourself to even try to make it work. You feel like you'd be better off going on foot with your driver and teamshooting. Two players are required to operate a chaingun hog, and the way they play is the way you'd play by yourself with camo and an assault rifle. Badass vehicles like the Gauss don't count, they're on a different level and measured by a different standard. The chaingun hog needs a serious buff, preferrably a much more powerful turret and a serious reduction in vulnerability to splash damage. At least then people would be required to actually stick the hog and actually hit the hog instead of just hitting near it to annihilate it. They'd also have to take it seriously instead of just strolling toward it with plasma pistols at the ready. You often can't kill a spartan before he EMPs and sticks the hog at least once. The first stick flips/turns you and the second one kills you. Usually you trade kills, which means the foot soldier won because he got two kills and the hog got one. Sorry, I've been deeply frustrated with how vehicles have been handled since Reach, decided to rant on it.

Mofo needs an upgrade. This is the first game where getting shot impacts you so negatively (Previously you'd just take damage and de-scope, now you stagger around like a drunk and flinch like a B!7@#!). I'm guessing it's because chief's armor is becoming more and more dead weight. Poor chief can barely walk straight under fire, used to be he'd walk straighter the more you turned up the heat. His power cores are also getting drained and pathetic, his shields get wiped out in under 2 seconds and they take 6 seconds to start recharging, that's seriously weak. Plus the UNSC is starting to get cheap and their weapons are getting worse, used to be an AR had 60 rounds in a clip and you could count on getting 3 kills out of most weapons before reloading, now you can barely get two because the UNSC found a lower bidder to make their guns. Lazy ********, just like every other organization, once they get a taste of success they start cutting costs and screwing the little guy.

I know exactly how you feel, although I felt that way before I saw my Trueskill. I'm awful at this game, I hate it. I was bad at Reach too. I wasn't amazing at Halo 3, but I was at least consistently above average. I can't be consistent in Reach or in Halo 4. One of the reasons I don't really want a ranking system (aside from genuinely believing Trueskill is not meant to be seen) is that I don't want to be ranked on a game where I'm not consistent. I feel like the game isn't worthy of a ranking system, because consistency is extremely important. As it is my performance is all over the place, and it doesn't feel like something I have a lot of control over. I wouldn't care if I was consistently bad, but a .5 K/D one game and a 2.0+ the next is all wrong. The game isn't designed well enough to rank.

I always big up good drivers, after all I want them to keep driving me so I slather them with praise.

Automatics are pretty bad, but to be fair they have always been bad. I may hate on 343 + Halo 4 for a lot of things, but automatics not being very good is something Bungie preferred as well. I don't really agree with their preference, but it has been a long-lived trend of Halo: Automatics are bad. The biggest problem you get into with automatics in Halo 4 is that you basically need the dexterity perk to keep the fire on your opponents. You can TECHNICALLY kill two people with one clip, but that's almost never true in practice. There's no slack in the clips at all (Which is stupid, original Halo AR had 60 rounds, but they nerfed it in Halo 3 for stupid reasons and have kept the nerf for stupid reasons) so you're either perfect or you need to reload a lot. The storm rifle is a bit different, rather than a reload you need a break, which can be better or worse depending on the situation. What you end up with are weapons which require you to work your *** off to make them do their jobs, meanwhile everyone else picks the obviously superior marksman rifles. You can make an automatic do some good work, but generally you're better off with a precision weapon and the difference shows. I take a bit of guilty pleasure in getting the automatic weapon challenges though, because once you get over the initial awfulness of the automatics you end up having to adopt a very aggressive playstyle which CAN take people by surprise. Generally you still won't go as positive as you might with a marksman rifle (Definitely not perfection material), but since you're playing things differently you can occasionally come out on top because you were the one guy prepared for the fight you brought.

The truth is they put JIP in to make matchmaking faster and didn't think about it beyond that. Later someone might have asked "what about a quit penalty" and the marketing guy slithered in and hissed "Join in Progressss dealsss with that."

Yeah Flood is probably best for it. For Slayer... Adrift: I open the way you do, I go and 'nade their top tunnel. I haven't actually gotten the 'nades perfect yet because I tend to only hit with 1, but I still get first strikes probably about half of the games I play on Adrift with that opening. Abandon Red Team: I rarely get red team it seems, but I don't go for a first strike when I'm red team. I go for scattershot. If I wanted first strike I'd go up top, but I don't like it up there. Abandon Blue Team: Go right wide to start up that cliff path. 'Nade the ramp to S3 a couple times to pop the shields of red team guys and headshot them. Haven: First strike is somewhere in top mid, I don't go for it. If it's not up there it's in bottom mid, just depends on where the enemy goes. Complex: First strike tends to go to the sniper rifle on the open side. Map is big so it's hard to predict where people will go. This tends to be the case with a lot of Halo 4 maps due to the lack of powerful positions teams will want to control. Solace: First strike is in sniper perches usually. I got my long-range DMR pretty good by going up there first thing and dropping 1-2 guys. Occasionally the guys going for incineration cannon will be where the first strike is at, but in my experience people go up before they go down. Been going for incin. cannon lately and some people have that grab down to an art. Bad odds down there. BTB/Dominion: Very hard to tell and highly map-dependent. I wouldn't go to these playlists for first strikes. For example in Exile the first strike will be on the tank side of the map, but it's hard to tell where. It will be the red sniper or the blue Gauss getting it if everyone is doing their job. In Longbow the first strike is going to be up at Bravo but going up there early increases your odds of being the first strike instead of scoring it. Meltdown is a mess, same for Vortex, Wreckage, and Shatter. Vortex's first strike might be near the rocket hog, might not be, hard to predict. Ragnarok's first strike is probably usually a sniper picking someone off of the hill.

Got my pistolero challenge yesterday 3 kills into the game (Challenge was get 15 kills with a secondary weapon in a single match). Also got blackscreened twice in a BTB game while no one else in the game was blackscreened. They just didn't do a very good job with the programming, but it's actually one of the flaws I'm most willing to forgive because each developer has a sort of coding M.O. Bungie released very clean games, so did Tecmo/Team Ninja. BioWare released generally solid but slightly glitchy games, same for Bethesda, but Obsidian games come with a minimum amount of bugs and ridiculous glitches. 343 is apparently middle-of-the-line, generally workable but with a few noticeable and annoying bugs. This is the type of thing Frank O'Connor was apologizing for, which as I said I was willing to forgive even before that statement was released. Making the game more about running and dying than fight though? I will never forgive that.

1. Agreed, way too common 2. They're actually much more impressive in practiced hands. A buddy of mine specialized in the Hardlight shield and he is awesome with it. You can deflect tank shots and stuff with that thing. You can also turn a boltshot shot back around on your attacker. He used it to head up a line of soldiers against my vehicle in a custom game, but I agree the fact that it stops your shields from regenerating is complete BS. When are people going to figure out that mobility = power and that when you sacrifice it you suffer enough without other penalties? Thruster pack has a lot of applications which are essentially giving the physics engine a gentle tap. 3. The problem I imagine is present with the DMR and all the other weapons isn't how good they are in the hands of a pro, but how good their are in the hands of a noob. Since Reach Bungie and 343 have been making it easier for players to do well in fights, corroding the advantage better players had for years. 4. In CoD you have plenty of exploits, they change them with each game, but there was drop-shooting and such. That game never had any polish that Halo lacked. The jumping a consistent height is a standard part of Halo... and most first person shooters actually. Gonna have to give you the old "Adapt" for that one, because Halo players have been jumping in combat for a long time now.

Lol there really is. Yours is around 41 according to Halotracker, I took the liberty of looking it up. Halotracker =/= 343 or Halo 4 Matchmaking, but there IS Trueskill active in Halo 4 Matchmaking. This is why I originally alluded to the futility of talking to you about this stuff, because for some reason everyone I've met who argues for visible Trueskill has this really high resistance to facts. Trueskill is the matchmaking system that works behind the scenes in competitive multiplayer titles on Xbox Live. I don't think it's active in games like BF3 which are based on having servers to join and such (The matchmaking is much more voluntary in that game), but it's active in Halo 4, was active in Halo Reach, and most of the other titles where the matchmaking is done via an automated system. You're probably getting matched up with people who are having a bad game or you have someone on your team that's messing up the rating of the match, OR you're having bad experiences in playlists where your Trueskill isn't as accurate (You haven't played as many games in that playlist). Or you're just matching up with people like me who have not adapted to Halo 4 yet and leveled up based on team work or other factors that have less to do with Halo 4 and translate well across multiple games.

The Rocket Warthog appears on Vortex in BTB. It's much harder to use than the other hogs, although I believe it could kill a Mantis if the driver and gunner weren't surprised by the Mantis. If both were aware of each other it might be a tradekill, which works out in the Mantis's favor because it only has one life to sacrifice while the Rocket Hog has a minimum of 2. It would be harder to hit a Rocket Hog with the Mantis's rockets than it would be for a Rocket Hog to hit the Mantis with its rockets, but I'm not sure if a full volley from the rocket hog kills a Mantis. If it does then you have a pretty fair match because the Rocket Hog would be high-offense low-defense while the mantis would be low-offense high-defense. If a fully volley from the rocket hog DOESN'T kill a Mantis then the fight would go to the mantis pretty consistently. Also the stomp may be very damaging but you have to get right on the other vehicles to use it. I also don't know if it kills tanks in one hit. Although if you stomped a tank and didn't kill it, you'd both be dead when the tank hit you with its shot. Either way I wouldn't consider it a serious part of the Mantis's arsenal. I've certainly killed and been killed with it, but every situation that you get to use it in is unique and lucky. You're not going to walk up to an enemy vehicle and have any chance of using it, you have your best chances on maps like Meltdown and Shatter where the maps are made up of narrow corridors and vehicles might have to pass you by. The trouble with using those maps as examples is those maps are universally awful for vehicles. Every solid strategy I've heard for the Mantis involves using the stomp only as an extreme last resort, which means it could come up more often if the enemy team is being stupid in the way they're rushing you, but then their behavior not your ability is responsible for the outcome.

Don't really have a problem with the music. Even though I didn't like the campaign and I think 343 swerved Halo's gameplay in the absolute wrong direction, I felt like even a better campaign would have felt similar to this one. The sense of being out there on your own, abandoned in a far corner of the galaxy, is probably what Halo 4's campaign would have started as no matter what due to the way Halo 3 ended. Eventually they had to deal with Cortana's impending rampancy in one of the campaigns, good of them to get it out of the way. With that stuff in mind I thought the music fit fine. You had to be alone in the beginning of Halo 4, and having your long-time friend dying right next to you is the same as being alone. I didn't like the poor writing, worse pacing, unoriginal objectives, quick-time events, horrible ending, weaker gameplay than previous Halos, and a whole bunch of other things, but the music was fine.

I played just three or so matches of 1v1 when they made it availabe in Halo 3. In one of the matches the guy I was against sent me an Xbox Live Party Chat invite as soon as he saw my name in the lobby and asked me if I wanted to tie the game. I said no and we fought like we were supposed to and he won. I only played like 3 matches of head-to-head, maybe only 2, I don't remember why I stopped playing it (Bungie might have removed it before I could play more, don't remember), but I think overall it just isn't the type of playlist developers want in their games. If you lose your first fight, and your second fight, you're probably looking to lose a lot more. Vice versa if you win them, but I think it's just less fun than it sounds in practice.

If your only argument is "It must be right because someone did it once" then I'm not going to waste time constructing a response. I get tired of people arguing for this saying "you have no basis" when I just spent awhile making a post that explains things to you. Go look up Trueskill, learn about it, or quit asking for it. Nowhere in that link does it say "You aren't supposed to see it" but nowhere in that link does it say "You ARE supposed to see it." The choice is up to each developer, and the problems Halo 3 had with it combined with the problems other games DON'T have WITHOUT showing it is the start of my argument. The rest of my argument comes from a design-based understanding of the system and how seeing it isn't part of its original design, so seeing it keeps it from working properly. I make my arguments based on facts, experience, and my interpretation of those facts and experience. I have plenty of basis for my statements, it's why I make the statements.

I don't want to play Exile until they fix it. I'd be happy if they removed it from Matchmaking entirely until they fix it. As for any extra weight on Wreckage and Shatter, that's what you do w/DLC. It's not a promotion thing because the only people who can play them already bought them, it's an effort to make them available in normal rotation. Only some people will have them, so in order for those some people to be able to play them you have to increase their weight otherwise their probability of showing up is extremely low. It's just playlist math, not any secret agenda. If 50% of the community bought the maps, the odds of 16 people all having them go down, so you increase their weight accordingly, etc. As time goes on their weight will go down as more people buy them, but it's really just an effort to make them part of the normal rotation. As for my opinion of the maps, Wreckage plays OK but Shatter is awful. It's too disconnected. Every game I've played in that map you spend as much time searching for enemies as you do anything else.

Set your network to "My Xbox" once you see you're about to join a game in progress.

I know the feeling, been doing pretty badly lately. I feel that way about the whole damn game though.