Tactical Suicide

nothing better when in a close stand-off game when you land a 2 for 1 with the snipe, but one of them was your own team mate

Hey everyone, Have been playing high level Halo, SC2, LOL, chess for a good while now and now playing DOTA 2. Halo is by far my favourite game out of the above.... When it's played on LAN Going by online standards, I would rate Justin Beiber better then Halo (yeah Justin Beiber the little a-hole) Halo puts all the properties of the competitive games above into a space age FPS. Halo : Highly strategic, High skill cap, Requires great team work, Very fun, Constantly updated to maintain balanced gameplay Competitive (On LAN) but highly frustrating and imbalanced online due to peer 2 peer lag Now what makes a game competitive? Most importantly it need to be an equal playing field, one player/team cannot be given an advantage from random properties that are implemented into the game. Examples : Random ordinance drops in Halo 4, Bloom in Halo : Reach. The No.1 thing that makes online gaming fair is a dedicated server, It allows every player to have the low ping based the distance they are from the server. But what if the server is located in L.A California and players on the east coast have 70 ping instead of players in L.A having 12. This is unfortunate but you have the same opportunity to relocate to L.A giving all players equal opportunity to optimal connection. Where as Peer to Peer connection which has been used in every Halo game so far does not allow for this consistent location of the host so you can assume your average ping and adjust over hundreds of game to playing on 70 ping that it becomes very normal to you and only hinders give the players on 12 ping a slight advantage. But in peer 2 peer you will get a random host from new York who has bridged himself host and deliberately downloads torrents while he is host of the game causing 500-1000 ping for all the other players. In online Halo where you have 2 teams of 4 versing each other from opposite sides of the country or even the world, the team with host will be at an immense advantage, all 4 players on the team with host are sitting on less then 60 ping while the other team are all well above 400 ping, so how is it one team being able to 4 shot every time while the other team would be lucky to pop the hosting teams shield with 5 or 6 shots and melees don't register. I'm sure everyone on the website has experienced the games where it takes your full BR clip to just pop and enemies shield or players teleporting and getting assassinations while they are in front of you, or standing on custom for 3 seconds shooting the enemy while he runs straight at you, for him to still pick the overshield up over you and kill you and then tea-bagging you because he thinks he made such a great play...... (insert rage face) In league of legends, the server I play on is located in Sydney Australia giving me an average of 27-29 ping (if nobody is downloading porn from my net ). The only time I will get high ping is when the server crashes (rare) or I am uploading or downloading other content. Now in peer 2 peer I can not be downloading and will match a player across the other side of the world and one of us will have to put up with 300+ ping while the other player is playing on LAN connection. Now since having a equally fair playing field is a must for a competitive game, how can one player having to play with 300 ping delay while the other plays with 0 ping delay be fair? It's not fair, plain and simple. Online ranked matchmaking in Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo: Reach's Arena, and Halo 4's CSR crap. are all a farce due to none of the games being eligible for competitive ranked play since they were not balanced. Fair enough dedicated servers were not really available to console gaming back then but there is no reason in the modern day for Halo 5 to be peer to peer if they intent to be a competitive game. So putting above into a nutshell. Peer 2 Peer online gaming is a random property. Competitive games eliminate random properties. Dedicated servers are consistent. Halo 2 : anniversary and Halo 5 multiplayer need dedicated servers or you may as well not bother with ranked matchmaking.... because who the hell would play unbalanced ranked gameplay on peer 2 peer connection, when the titles I mentioned above have created great competitive titles on dedicated servers. Thanks for reading, feel free to post any feedback.

Dedicated servers are a must this day in age, a game is competitive only if it is balanced. Not having dedicated servers will abolish any hope of the game being a huge competitive title like those we see on P.C in Dota 2, LOL and SC2. All 3 of those game are hugely popular competitive titles which set the benchmark for any game aiming to be competitive. The things they all have in common are dedicated servers, balanced gameplay, constant updates, high skill caps, ranked matchmaking and developer support. So lets look at what Halo 4 had: Halo 4 had Developer support, constant updates and after one year we had ranked (which was fail because the game was not competitive) and eventually we had custom games with balanced gameplay. Overall the game was imbalanced due to heavy advantage to host, imbalanced weapons, poorly balanced load outs and minimal skill cap with such high rates of aim assist/bullet magnetism, no de-scope and SPRINT (I explain below why sprint has no place in halo). Halo 4 was a casual game and in the modern day games, competitive titles take the cake and play on for many years. The biggest problem with Halo is sprint and below I will try to explain why: Sprint's effects on the game go a lot deeper then the obvious complaint made about players running away wen they should have died. People can sprint off-spawn to finish a weakened player which lowers the punishment for dying and make trading kills more prevalent. Previously , a victor could regain their shield and get ready fir the next encounter by obtaining new weapons or positions in te downtime - an advantage to the winner. This works well as an appropriate disadvantage for dying. Sprint wreck the advantage because you or a respawning ally can run straight back to the winner of the previous fight and finish him off. It removes the downtime to regain shields and prepare for the next encounter. These issues disrupt the flow, depth, integrity and intelligence of the game. They cause more anger then enjoyment and these are the only obvious effects. Sprint completely destroys the scale of the game. This is the real underlying problem with sprint. Scale refers to the dimension of a map, in relation to the dimensions and abilities of a Spartan. Halo gameplay has been consistent in the past regardless of weapons, kill times, maps, gametypes, grenades or perks, because the scale was done right. -Box height vs Spartan & jump height. - Box width vs Spartan & strafe width. - Hallway width vs grenades explosion radius. - Average encounter distance vs melee & average weapon effectiveness range. - Map & line of sight distance vs grenade throw distance & weapon range. - Distance between cover vs Spartan speed. (this is very important, too much distance between cover and you can't move without dying, too little and you can't kill anything, which is equally as bad) Geometry Proximity: Areas and geometry need to be close to each other to provide interesting, strategy and unique combat tactics using verticality. The further areas get from each other the less verticality and synergistic-use there is between tem. Snipe tower on Lockout is a perfect example of close areas and geometry creating interesting, strategic and unique combat opportunities. However when sprint is add te tower becomes "too small". So you enlarge the tower but now the exact properties that made it good are lost, it becomes too horizontal and has too much distance between each area for it to work well in combat. These are just a few examples of how scale dramatically affects the game. If any component in any the above examples it too much or too little, the game will have huge problems. This is why sprint is such a big problem - the game has to balance sprint, against itself. it has to sacrifice the integrity of all the properties above, in order to make sprint "work". The average encounter distance is also increased which means a lot of the components that make Halo so unique and successful are made less viable; Circling players, strafing, jumping, melees, tactical grenades, close quarters combat strategy. These aspects cannot thrive or have much effect when the distances are increased to account for sprint. The game ends up functioning like another generic long-distance shooter with no flavour. When a player tries to hold a position down to run a flag, to protect his base, to kill other players, or to land shots across map to hep his team mates, sprint makes it ver hard to. For example Midship's pink tower in halo 2: To use the tower you need to first defend it so you don't get assassinated or caught off guard by a flank. With no sprint you have small windows of opportunity to shoot from it as players cannot sprint up there, all it take is a periodic check to see if anyone is moving in on you. With sprint added, you need to be continually checking, and have no time to fire from the tower to other areas of the map. The power position value is diminished which remove structure, variance and direction from the map. This works everywhere - the idea that players have to constantly check their back and be on the lookout for players running into their area, instead of actually playing the game. it makes it very chaotic, unstructured, at time random, and completely ruin and chess-like mind games that happened in previous title. This is why Halo has been failing so much, the lack of combat structure and strategy makes it boring no matter what gizmos and gadgets you're using. I play online chess on the same very simple board I always have, they could add rockets and guns to my chess pieces and try spice up the game, but I only play for the immense game of strategy chess is, and Halo once was. Sprint overall reduces the strategic values of Halo creating a dull FPS where whomever has a better shot wins rather then the player who makes the correct decisions. I have no objection to sprint being a "loadout" or "armour ability" in gametypes like big team battle and maps that are huge, but in the competitive arena that makes Halo the stand out FPS of our generation, it needs to be non-existent, maybe experiment with putting a power up for sprint on a map at some point in competitive but please don't ruin the strategic arena FPS we used to love.