RedStarRocket91

The 'Infinity Slayer' playlist now requires the Majestic DLC, so you could try playing a few games there. Unfortunately, I don't think there are any playlists that require the Castle or Crimson DLC, although it's possible they'll be brought into rotation at some point.

5: Playing against GSD

I think he means the weekly LASO challenges, which you can find in the Challenges section of the menu. OT: I think putting the Blind Skull on might actually have been the problem. The LASO challenge, despite its name, actually doesn't ask you to use the Blind Skull: and since it checks which skulls you're using to see if you've done a challenge, instead of seeing that you have all the necessary skulls plus one, it sees that you have the wrong combination of skulls. Unfortunately, the only solution is to go back and redo the level with the specific skulls the challenge is asking for: no skulls missed out, no extra skulls turned on. Even if you're doing it via co-op, I think it still requires you to complete the whole mission without anyone dying: going back to a checkpoint because someone dies counts the challenge as failed, and you'll need to go back to the lobby and restart the mission if this happens.

Forerunners, without a shadow of a doubt. Remember, for all the Infinity is powerful, it's based on a very basic understanding of Forerunner technology - and for all it has the biggest and most powerful guns that the UNSC has ever produced, look at how small the damage to the Didact's ship actually was when it tried to blast a hole in the plating for the Chief to get in. Plus, remember the opening of the portal to the Ark at the start of Halo 3: the entire remaining UNSC navy focusing fire on the dreadnought at once, and they couldn't even slow it down. No matter how good the USC's scientists are, there's no way they could have reverse-engineered and built a new type of ship as powerful as a Forerunner vessel just five years from not even being able to drop its shields. Plus, the Halos themselves are technically a naval construct, and it quite literally took the biggest explosion we're capable of making to destroy one of those - only for it to be almost completely rebuilt in two years!

There's not really any point in bringing back the traditional SMG: we already have three spawning weapons which are perfectly god at close range in the form of the Suppressor, Assault Rifle and Storm Rifle, and with the Suppressor in particular already having such short range and low accuracy, there's not really any point adding another weapon with exactly the same specialisation. However, here's a thought on the silenced version which could make it work. What if even though it was still just as weak and inaccurate as it was in ODST, firing it didn't reveal your position on the motion tracker, and you didn't get directional hitmarkers on your HUD? That way it would be much harder for people to tell where they were being shot from, especially if you were firing from somewhere above them. That way it would make a really good weapon for stealth attacks and for catching opponents off-guard, but would be easily beaten by most other weapons in a straight fight - creating a degree of balance, as you'd need to work really hard to avoid being spotted.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would think videogames make people violent. When I was younger, if I wasn't playing a videogame, I could be playing with toy guns, toy swords, water pistols or even plastic soldiers, and all of those have fairly heavy links to acts of violence. As I got older, I started playing with things like airsoft guns and even went out paintballing on a few occasions, which of course about as close to the real thing as you can get without visiting a firing range. You're probably wondering why I'm bringing up these kinds of things in a question about videogames. Put simply, it's because all of these kinds of things are much closer to the experience of actual physical violence than playing a video game, and yet whenever some horrible person goes around shooting innocents, we always hear about how they played a lot of Mass Effect or Call of Duty or Doom or whatever - never that they often went paintballing, or played Warhammer. The other thing is that the media often tries to claim that playing video games at least makes us more capable of committing violent acts efficiently: if you spend all day aiming down ironsights and pulling a trigger to kill people in Battlefield 3, why shouldn't you be able to do that in real life? Well, let me answer by picking from another genre. I spent pretty much my entire teenage years playing the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer series, and I can tell you right now that when it comes to playing football in the real world, I have literally no idea what I'm doing. On the PS2, I could place a ball perfectly between two defenders and then have a striker lift it easily past the goalkeeper. In the real world, I'm lucky not to trip over myself whenever I kick the thing. Same thing with fighting games, which tend to be extremely realistically animated and controlled. I've knocked out dozens of opponents in wrestling and boxing games over the years. The last time I punched someone in the real world, they caught my arm and started laughing at me. I know exactly how to throw a punch thanks to years of watching fighting games - but actually going out and doing it with the intent to harm is an entirely different matter. Because I can distinguish between reality and fantasy, I know whenever I'm fighting someone in-game that it's not real: that the only harm I'm causing is at worst a few minutes' worth of looking at a respawn timer or a loss mark being added to a big collection of statistics. I can gun down as many Spartans as I like in Halo 4 because I know there's absolutely no harm being done to whoever is controlling them. If I were to pick up a gun and shoot someone in the real world then I know that I'm doing something terrible, inflicting real pain and damage on another human being - not causing them a few moments' worth of inconvenience, but actually hurting them. If someone were to go back and count up every kill I've made in a video game over the years, the total would quite probably be approaching the million mark by now, possibly even higher - and even though that's as many deaths as you'd find in a fairly major genocide, I still hate the thought of doing something that would harm another person. I also found a couple of graphs which you may find interesting. The first one shows the violent crime rates for the USA since 1960 - it might be interesting for your project if you were to add the dates various video games consoles were released to it. The second shows, by country, how much money people spend on videogames per capita, and how much gun crime there is per capita. Obviously, if video games really do cause violence, you'd expect the countries that have the most spending on video games to have the most gun crime.

I must be mixing up achievements then - but there's definitely one involving a Mantis that I got on a map where they don't spawn.

An awful lot of the achievements seem to have completely different descriptions of how they're unlocked compared to how they're actually unlocked. In the Crimson DLC, I think there was an achievement for getting a kill with a Mantis after landing from a man cannon. At least, that's what the description said I'd done to unlock it: if I remember correctly I actually unlocked it after scoring a Railgun kill while on foot in a map that didn't even have a Mantis.

The coming of September heralds the return of school and the arrival of Autumn, as the nights begin to cool and darken once more and the trees start to turn brown and shed their leaves. But for the members of the 343 Industries Community Forum, the coming dark and wet days are brightened by one thing: the announcement of our new Member of the Month. Our new MoM shares a key trait with his predecessor in that he will be instantly recognisable to any regular visitors to our Forge sections. Known as much for his wry sense of humour as his contributions to cartography, he's one of the most prolific forgers on our forum and has produced not only a fantastic beginner's guide to map creation, but a special pack of markers to give map makers a clear, clean and standardised way of showing off exactly what items a map contains - even more impressive for someone whose primary language isn't English! Ladies and gentlemen and especially those among the Forge community, please put together a very well-deserved round of applause for our newest Member of the Month, Zandril! Congratulations, Zandril! We hope you enjoy your month in the pink - and can't wait to see what you'll be forging for us next!

It's entirely different because it's not a physical object - and while I agree that no two players have exactly the same skill level, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least try to match up players with others of roughly the same ability. A number system definitely isn't the best way to do that, but it's a lot better than just throwing players together randomly and hoping the teams are balanced. This is... do I seriously need to explain what's wrong with this? Are you genuinely trying to say there's no point having a ranking system because people get older? I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say here, because wile you're right in saying that people can't choose to age forward and backward at will, you are aware that in a ranking system your actions can actually have a direct effect on that number, right? Okay, as for knowing what people want: I have never claimed to speak for everyone or even the majority. I do, however, spend a frankly embarrassing amount of my free time reading through Halo related forums and chatting with other Halo fans, and CSR is one of those requests that keeps cropping up. Maybe most Halo fans aren't interested in getting a CSR rank: but I can say with certainty that an awful lot of them are. As for it not affecting my overall stats, what's the problem? If it really isn't going to have any effect, why aren't you arguing for it to come back, because you believe that it really won't affect you? Yeah, it isn't going to be added. But if we don't keep expressing our opinions for it now, how exactly are 343 supposed to know that a lot of fans would like to see it back?

I think what you need to do is kill an opponent, and then not move for sixty seconds without dying.

It's a good job that's written and not spoken, otherwise it might begin to... grate! Seriously, a big thankyou to all of you for your support, and I'll do my best not to accidentally wipe half the site while getting the hang of my new powers, lol!

And an awful lot of players do happen to care about it. Your personal ambivalence isn't adequate justification for the lack of a feature. Frankly, I don't like the inclusion of CSR for two main reasons: firstly, because a great deal of players tend to use it to insult and bully others because of a perceived comparative lack of skill, and secondly because provided the matchmaking system is doing its job properly with regard to setting up games where all players are roughly evenly skilled, it doesn't make any difference whether you can see your rating or not. If you're playing against people at your level, you'll be contributing roughly the same amount to your team as you would if your rank was ten higher or lower. If you're not being matched against people of your own level, there are much bigger problems than not being able to see a number. As for one person carrying a team... there isn't a single player out there so good that they could drag three bad teammates all the way to the top ranks and then keep them there consistently. Once you start to hit the 30s and 40s, if you're not pulling your own weight, you're not going to win games. Period. In an even match between two teams of 50s, a single player having a bad game is more than enough to ruin his team's chances of winning: three players all bleeding kills can't be remedied, no matter how good you are. The best solution is just to go back to Ranked and Social playlists: the hardcore fans are happy, the casual fans are happy. Everyone wins. Blindly forcing a system on everyone, or not having any system at all, is guaranteed to alienate a big chunk of the fanbase, and it's really not difficult to set up on set of playlists without CSR and one with it.

You should be able to manually adjust player health to make them invulnerable from the pre-game options menu. This should prevent other players from being able to injure you with items held during Forge.

Do you mean, could it be used with an existing loadout? Almost certainly, I don't think you'd need any special set up other than that to increase your chances of a Perfection.

I haven't really found Survivor to be all that useful, to be honest. Most vehicles get destroyed from concentrated fire in enemy territory, so the most likely result is that you'll be thrown out of your vehicle only to be killed a few seconds later anyway: it's buying a few extra seconds of life at best, especially considering that your shields will almost certainly have been wiped out by whatever destroyed your vehicle in the first place. That said, I can see it being extremely useful for players in the passenger seats of vehicles, as they don't need to worry so much about losing something useful thanks to being a bigger target when carrying either an objective or a power weapon. I'm really liking the Recharge ability, especially when I'm being hit by weapons that don't do shield bleedthrough damage (like the DMR or the single-shot mode of the Lightrifle.) It also fixes one of the biggest issues that I have with the game by making it much more possible to take on opponents in succession, as I quite frequently survive fights only to be gunned down by the next opponent before my shields have even started coming back up. Its also a great way of wearing opponents down, as you can wait for your own shields to begin recharging, fire a quick shot at an opponent to deny them theirs, and then continue retreating until your recharge kicks in again. I find it synergises extremely well with either Mobility or Shielding, the former as it allows you to move more freely and quickly about the map with less waiting time after each fight, and the latter because it drastically increases your chances of going into fights at full strength. So overall, definitely preferring Recharge!

Definitely Halo 3: ODST! It's the single most complete package in a Halo game to date. A campaign with both an open-world combat sandbox and traditionally structured missions is awesome enough, but it's even better when you throw in the cast of Firefly and set it amidst the Covenant's occupation of Earth - a promise that Halo 2's campaign really didn't deliver on. On top of that there was the return of the Brute Plasma Rifle, a wide variety of missions and the ability to tackle different encounters in a greater than usual variety of ways, an incredible attention to detail in the environment, a night vision mode which was actually useful, and a story which was not only dirven by characters, but driven by characters who were well-written and pretty well fleshed out. On top of that, there was the introduction of Firefight, which was incredibly well done, and which provided insane amounts of replay value. And both of these features somehow managed to avoid the usual Halo problems of horrifying lag when playing online: try playing some Campaign from either of the newer games or Halo 3 and see just how horrible the lag is compared to ODST! And then of course there's the big one: the Halo 3 complete multiplayer disc. Halo 3 probably has my favourite multiplayer of all the games in the series, and to be able to play every single map made for it as part of the ODST package is just fantastic. The best multiplayer, the best maps, a fantastic campaign, two new weapons and a new game mode: what's not to love? Also, great idea, Beckoningzebra1! I look forward to seeing more of these forum polls in the future!

...seriously, Zandril? Incidentally, that doesn't actually mean what you think it means. Stulti qui mutuatur a mortuis.

I think a very big part of the reason why a lot of players don't like Sprint is because it takes away a lot of the emphasis on map control and standing your ground in a fight. It's very frustrating to work hard to take control of a key point on a map, only to have your enemies regroup and attack very quickly because they're able to get back to that area of the map within a few seconds of respawning. This is particularly bad paired with instant respawn: it may seem like making excuses, but I can honestly say that perhaps as many as a fifth of my deaths are due to opponents I've just killed being able to get back to my position and attack again before my shields have recharged - or on some smaller maps or with bad spawns, before they've even started to recharge. In a game with recharging health, an opponent should never be in a position to attack you until enough time has passed that your health has fully recharged, and it's sloppy design that allows this to happen so frequently. The fact that a lot of players choose to run away while under attack is also pretty frustrating, meaning you're wasting four or five shots on an opponent only for them to be able to get back to full health simply because of short sightlines and Sprinting. It's even worse with the heavily reduced reserve ammunition in Halo 4. Ideally, Sprint should really be about mobility - getting you from point A to B as fast as possible, rather than to escape combat. Perhaps the biggest issue though is just the way it affects level design. Without Sprint, you have to design for two speeds when creating a map: running and sneaking. You want a few enclosed or narrow spaces where players can more easily sneak around to catch opponents off-guard, and wider, more open spaces where they can run around and get straight to work with their weapons. Once you put Sprinting in, there's a whole extra set of things to consider: whereabouts do you want them to be using Sprint, where can they use Sprint to break the flow or more easily perform trick jumps, do you use jumps which require the use of Sprint to be successful, what happens if they start using Sprint in areas of the map where you weren't expecting it and it's far too effective, etc. So while Sprint opens up a lot of possibilities, like every mechanic if it's not properly considered, it can do a lot more harm than good in a game.

August's MOM is someone who will likely be immediately familiar to members of the forum both new and old, and to all sections of our community, as he seems to be everywhere at once: from greeting new members in the Introductions forum and making great contributions to discussions, to representing our site on HaloCustoms tournaments and even running the Community Forge Project, he's one of the most active members on the site today and one of our most consistent contributors. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a huge round of applause for our newest Member of the Month, SikSlik7! Congratulations, SikSlik7! We hope you enjoy your month in the pink, and wish you the best of luck in the tournament! If you want to get involved with SikSlik7's awesome Community Forge Project, you can find the main thread here and the discussion topic here!

Visibility, mostly. It means that nobody gets a camouflage advantage from picking certain colours: imagine how hard it would be to find white Spartans with the Frost visor on a map like Longbow. Also, it looks a little bit like the colours used on Hazmat suits in the real world, and since they're dealing with an infection, it's probably to add to that kind of feeling.