RedStarRocket91

I think this is probably the best news I've heard about Halo 4 in quite some time. To my mind, this addresses both of the two 'big' complaints about the game: our forgers have been upset at the lack of big, open spaces with flat ground to play around with, and the really competitive players have been frustrated with the lack of a competitive ranking system. The adjustments to the Gauss Hog sound really nice, too. I think at this point, all they have left to do is tweak the firing rate on the DMR and they'll have covered pretty much all of the major complaints about the game. It's good to see that 343i really is listening to the fans with this update. Nice find, Fishy!

No Man Left Behind - a short story by RedStarRocket91 Text has been spoilered for your convenience, and the sake of thread length. Warning: extreme tl;dr!

My Facebook profile picture is for showing people what I look like. My skill ranking is for finding matches against people of the same skill. Besides, nobody cares about ranks, they care about how well you play in any given game. When I first got Halo 3, I used to regularly beat up 40s and 50s who were really terrible, and get beaten up by people who hadn't even got to 10. The number next to their name doesn't mean a thing next to how well they do when they're in-game with me. Besides, if it's really that important to you, it's far better that it's on Waypoint and not in-game. That way people can go straight from browsing Facebook to being impressed by it, instead of having to turn on their Xbox, sign in, load the game, and then find your profile and look up your service record to see it. In a way, it's more convenient.

This is the only thing I'd really disagree with. I think what Caboose. was trying to say in his OP was that BTB is a bad thing because, in mixed playlists, people almost always pick Slayer and so there's no point in adding objectives if they won't get used anyway. Now I actually agree with that - just not that we should do with Big Team Objective altogether. Big Team is some of the most fun that can be had in Halo. I don't think there's a single player out there who's played BTB Objective in previous Halo games and doesn't have at least one really good memory of it. And that's why it's so darn important that it gets its own playlist. Caboose has a point: when the option comes up for Slayer in BTB lobbies, it gets picked a frustratingly large amount of the time. I'd like to see separate playlists precisely because I enjoy playing Objective games so much: I don't want to spend five minutes sitting through the joining process, only to discover I've been dumped into a Slayer game, or to be outvoted 12-4 by people who just want to shoot each other instead of going for objectives. Caboose. Nobody is suggesting that we get rid of the other objective playlists. All they want is to make it possible to play Objectives in Big Team AS WELL as in their own playlists, the same way that you can play Big Team Slayer AND Infinity Slayer.

Can you give a few extra details here? I remember 343i said something about cracking down on persistent quitters in Reach when they first took over that, but I don't remember hearing anything about handing out mass bans in Halo 4.

As long as it's doing its job (getting you matched against people of a similar skill level) does it really matter where you have to look at it? In fact, why does it even matter that you can see it at all? As long as it's doing its job, and you're getting good games, why does it matter if you can see it or not?

They got... Dropped.

I personally don't really like them, though for the most part I thought they were pretty well-integrated. The controls for each were generally quite intuitive (you melee an Elite with the melee button, you climb up a lift shaft with the same movement controls you've already been using, etc), which is very important, and there was generally plenty of time to do each - so none of that nonsense you get in other games where they come out of nowhere and you have a second to press a button which doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the ordinary controls. That said, I personally don't like them because I hate pre-scripted sequences. I'd much rather find my own solutions to situations or at least have whether I pass or fail a section being determined by my own skills, rather than my ability to press a certain sequence of buttons at the right time. Sure, it makes it more 'cinematic', but no matter how awesome a QTS is, it's never going to be as cool as the feeling I get from doing something totally by myself.

Very true... however, it is an automatic weapon, and you only asked about those, not automatic loadout weapons! Personally, I think the Storm Rifle is the 'best' of the loadout automatics. However, I still prefer the Assault Rifle, partly because it's just so iconic, partly because it's very easy to use and yet still has a fair bit of kick to it when used at the correct ranges, and partly because it just sounds awesome. I also like the fact that it's possible to scavenge ammunition for it, whereas the Storm Rifle is battery-powered and the Suppressor is just too rare in Matchmaking and doesn't have unlimited ammunition dumps in Spartan Ops.

This is rapidly descending into a flame war. The only reason I'm not locking it permanently here and now is because there's been some very good discussion going on in between the abuse and I don't want that to be cut short. I'm going to lock this thread now, remove a few of the worse posts and hand out some warnings, and then I'll unlock it. From here onwards, the moderating team will be keeping a very close watch on this thread, and no matter how much you disagree with others, we expect you to be civil about it. You have been warned.

It's a Scottish thing, we have a special ritual whenever we're toasting things, as we have to go out to our sheds and sacrifice a bull to the glory of Irn Bru to ensure that our toast is suitably crispy yet not overdone. Irn Bru is easily angered, which is why we have to go out to the shed to do it as otherwise he'll look on our arrogance and set fire to whatever other indoor structure we're making toast in. This is also why everyone in Scotland has a shed, and why you'll never see a Scottish person making toast inside of their own houses. In this particular case though, I think HaloGeek is just trying to say that Spartan Palmer would 'toast' Master Chief in a fight.

The way you phrased it sounded like you were complaining about the ordnance system itself, not the lack of weapons. For what it's worth I completely agree with that, the more wildly varied the sandbox is, the better.

You know, if you genuinely want to gauge the popular opinion, you might want to replace that quote with something less derogatory - also, are you seriously suggesting that a gamemode which is inherently random and chaotic isn't competitive enough? No, it's not competitive: it's the stupidest game mode in history, and that's exactly why it's always been so popular. I personally actually like the new system of constant ordnance drops: I think that it makes matches more interesting because the situation is constantly changing. It's not necessarily better or worse than getting random weapons at spawn and sticking with them, it's just different. Having a near-constant supply of new weapons just makes it more chaotic than ever before, because now there's the added fun of not knowing whether they guy who just killed you is still charging around with a Battle Rifle, or if he now has an Incineration Cannon. More importantly, I don't understand why being able to change weapons is a problem. It's fiesta, everyone has a completely random assortment of weapons anyway!

And exactly which 'new COD-esque' features would these be? If you want to whine about Halo 4 not being good enough for TEH TROO HALO FANZ then go right ahead, but either post in a pre-existing thread or include some bloody details. While you're entitled to your opinion, as a Halo player I'm frankly sick of people claiming to speak for me, and as a moderator I'm sick of people bumping better, far more well-considered topics off the boards for the sake of indulging their egos for a few lines. Thread locked.

Well, sometimes it works pretty well. While I have had some real horror stories involving being joined into games, there's a lot of times it's worked perfectly fine: the only difference being that when something works the way it's supposed to, it doesn't really stand out in the memory so well. As an example, there must have been forty or fifty times now that I've been put into games where the scores are fairly even and the teams are pretty well balanced: a lot of the time it's also still pretty early in the game, too, and neither team has a flag captured or a major advantage in bases. But because it's doing its job so well, I don't really think about it that much because it just seems like any other game to me. It's also sometimes nice to be put into a game very quickly, and have people replaced when people drop out: no, sometimes it's not a lot of fun if a game is going horribly, but most of the time it actually helps keep teams even and doesn't really do any damage. With a few tweaks to the system, it would be perfectly fine.

Ultimately, if join-in-progress is that frustrating to you, there's always the option to just leave straight away now that there are no longer any penalties associated with quitting: and you don't need to feel bad about it because, since there was already a spot empty when you joined, you aren't effectively making your team any worse off than they already were with regard to numbers. Nobody is going to look down on you for not wanting to play when you've been dumped into a game where your team is being spawn camped mercilessly or significantly behind on objectives, as that's through no fault of your own. The only thing I'd really like to see altered as far as join-in-progress goes is a block which prevents you from joining the same lobby more than once during the duration of a single game. A while back, I was joined into a game of Capture the Flag where my only other teammate was AFK and the enemy team was just sitting and camping our spawn area, presumably so they could boost a few kills, as none of them were going for the objective even though it would have been easy for them to capture it. That's the kind of game that I'm just not going to play: that's not a challenge, that's just a way to end up wildly irritated and with a K/D through the basement floor. So, I did what anyone else would do, and quit out, then went back into matchmaking. I got put back into the same game immediately: I quit again, and once again went back into matchmaking. Same result. This repeated twice more until I was so frustrated that I just quit out of Halo 4 altogether. I don't see that it would be hard to code, and it's even easier to understand. If I've just left a match, there's a very good chance that it's because I don't want to play it anymore: moreso if, should I immediately be put back into said match, I leave again. While it's quite probably that at this point 343 can't do anything about it, I'd like it to at least be a feature of Halo 5 that once you leave a game, unless you specifically attempt to rejoin it (join someone on a friend's list, accept an invite, or something similar), you will not be put back into it until the match has finished and the remaining players are back at the lobby search screen. Other than that, I'm not overly concerned with join-in-progress. Some people aren't bothered by it, and it's not hard to just press the 'leave match' button if you are.

I've noticed that most of the animations involving the knife usually have it appear around the thigh: perhaps there's some sort of compartment in the upper armour there where the knife is stored when it isn't in use?

If you have the ultimate edition, absolutely make sure that you take the 'Skilled' trait when asked to fill out your medical history: though you'll rank up more slowly you get +5 to every single skill: considering you assign anywhere between 10-15 skill points per level depending on your Intelligence level, this is the equivalent of adding something like 4 extra levels to your character from the word go, and considering how easy it is to get XP, you won't even really notice the slower levelling. As ever Intelligence is the best factor for ranking up (though you now get one point per two levels, so you'll need for an optimum build to go for it at 10, as 9 will only give you the same points as 8.) and Endurance is, as Harbinger stated, also very important as it gives you the maximum possible number of implants. Luck's also good, as every point in that raises every single skill by a point, as well as making gambling easier. So in short, a Luck of 10, an Endurance of 5 and an Intelligence of 10 will let you not only get an implant for all of your SPECIAL stats below 10, but if taken with the 'Skilled' perk will immediately add +10 to every single skill from the very start of the game: the equivalent of adding more than 8 extra free levels' worth of points. If you take the 'Educated' perk at level four, you'll also have gotten BOUT 90 skill points by the time you reach level 50: enough to maximise a whole extra skill. Also important to note is that you don't actually need to raise all your skills to 100 in order to have an optimised character build: if you buy certain clothing, you only need to raise things like lockpick, speech, and repair to around 90 and then switch to the appropriate clothing in order to get an effective skill of 100, saving you a few extra points for things like Guns and Explosives which will be used a lot more frequently.

Congratulations again, Church! this really has been a very long time coming, it's great to see your years of dedication finally being publicly recognised. You're a great example to all the newer members of the forums, with a fantastic sense of humour and a creative mind to boot. It also doesn't help that you've got a really great aim