RedStarRocket91

For me, it depends on whether anyone else is using one, and whether I seem like I'd get on with that person. If there's two people on my team talking about stuff that has nothing to do with the game, I won't plug in my mic: same thing if there's somebody who's being abusive or unduly aggressive. If there's people in the game who're chatting about stuff that's actually relevant though (who has what weapons, where enemies are, etc) then I'll more often than not plug in and start communicating. But otherwise, I'm generally pretty quiet. That said, in custom games or on our community playdates, I not only have a microphone switched on but am physically incapable of shutting up. It's also the same when I'm in matchmaking with other people whom I know, though in those situations I'm normally partied up, so other teammates won't be able to hear me.

I know the exact Knight you mean! It took me perhaps twenty to thirty tries to get past him, and another ten or so when I went back and replayed it on Legendary. I was chatting with a friend via headset when he got there too, and as soon as he mentioned he''d been killed I knew exactly whereabouts he was. I don't know what made that particular Knight so lethal: as far as I'm aware he's not a unique variety. Perhaps it's just that the surrounding area makes it easy to get kills with the Inceineration Cannon?

Typically awesome wrap-up, Drizzy! Always good to have somewhere to catch up on things I miss during the week! Also, it took me more than a few moments to realise that '10 000 people' was a username, rather than 10,000 different people. That would presumably have given every person a single Forge credit to play with...

March heralds the dawn of Spring, and with it a brand new Member of the Month. This month's MOM is a member who's been around since the forums were young, who made a name for himself not only through his ever-cheery, helpful presence in the shoutbox but by starting some of the funniest, most creative threads we've ever seen (if you haven't yet read his brilliant This Court Is Called To Order, you really need to)! A member with a kind word for everyone and a fantastic sense of humour to go with it, all the way from the blue side of Blood Gulch, please give a very hearty round of applause to a man who's been with Halo since before it even came to the Xbox: Church! From everyone here on the forums: congratulations, Church! Enjoy your month in the pink: you've well and truly earned it!

Last night, the draw was held to determine the winners of our Majestic Map Pack Challenge, which tasked members to find the hidden symbols around our forums and decipher them to reveal the hidden message 'I Love Certain Affinity'. We're now pleased to announce the winners of this competition: In third place, winning a 343 Industries Community Forum embroidered T-shirt, Azaxx! In second place, winning a Certain Affinity T-shirt and a month of membership to Xbox LIVE Gold, SternuS! In first place, winning not only a Season Pass for the Crimson, Majestic and Castle map packs but an autographed piece of map artwork from Certain Affinity themselves, Zaguroth! We'd like to extends our thanks to all of the members who took part in the contest, and hope you had fun finding and decoding the symbols hidden around the forums. Congratulations to all of our winners, and commiserations to all those whose names remained in the hat. If you didn't win this time: fear not, for we'll be offering similar competitions and more excellent prizes sometime in the future! The Majestic Map Pack is now available to everyone through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, either for 800 MS Points or FREE for those who own the War Games Season Pass. I hope to see you all on the battlefield there very soon!

All of the clues are already hidden around the site: however, you won't have to look very far into the past to find them!

In preparation for the release of Halo 4's Majestic Map Pack on Monday the 25th of February, we have created a challenge for our members that will give them a chance to win some truly fantastic prizes! The first-placed winner of the drawing will receive an autographed piece of map artwork from Certain Affinity and a DLC code for a Season Pass (Includes Crimson, Majestic & Castle Map Packs)! The second-placed winner of the drawing will receive a Certain Affinity t-shirt* and a one month membership to XBL Gold! The third-placed winner of the drawing will receive a 343 Industries Community Forum embroidered t-shirt! If you want to enter the drawing for a chance to win one of these unique items, all you have to do is take part in the contest below. We've hidden a series of symbols all over the site. To win, all you have to do is find the symbols located within the posts made by our Admin, Moderating Team, Staff, current Member of the Month and select Legendary Members. Each of the aformentioned members will reflect a one-time use of that symbol only: for example RedStarRocket91 = 4, Absolute Dog = i, Adamj004 = 3, and imakequilts = 3 to create the secret phrase 343i. There are only 12 unique symbols, yet it will take the combination of all 20 hidden symbols, when translated, to reveal the secret message. The message is not a single word, it is a phrase! Once you've worked out the secret message, all you have to do to enter the drawing is send a PM to RedStarRocket91 with what you believe to be the correct message. Once the contest is closed, we'll pick the winners at random from everyone who entered with the correct message. We'll then pass on the good news to the winners as soon as possible! The contest begins RIGHT NOW and ends at 6pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) on Monday the 25th of February. So what are you waiting for? Get out there, start finding those symbols, and discovering that secret message. Good luck! * - Certain Affinity T-Shirt sizes are limited to Large, Extra Large and Double Extra Large. This may help: List

How do you know they didn't get a warning? The mods here don't make warnings public, if you hadn't told us then nobody else but you and them would even have known you'd got one. Throwing insults at the mods is not going to help anything. Just accept it, learn from it, and don't try and make a public drama over it. I've been here long enough to have seen how that ends perhaps a hundred times, and trust me when I say the members never win. Good call! I'll send a report off, see if someone can move it.

Come on Twin, you're better than this: the guy saw a ghost and you disproved it - pretty handily I might add - so there's no need to mock him for that. Sure, it might seem like an obvious mistake from a coding perspective, but humans do have a tendency to see things that aren't actually there. On topic: never noticed it, probably because as Twin pointed out, it doesn't actually exist. If you're playing with a wireless controller you may just be feeling lag from that, try switching over to a wired one and hopefully you'll see an improvement. If that doesn't help, perhaps you just need to try a new sensitivity? I find what works best for me actually varies between weapons (I like a 4 for a Battle Rifle loadout, but need a 2 or even a 1 for a DMR) so try playing around with that for different weapons, see if it helps you at all.

You may wish to rethink your signature, in that case. Anyway, I think it's a little early to be judging what are going to be our favourite future games when we know they won't be out for at least another year. I thought Mass Effect 3 would be my favourite game of all time, and it basically ruined the entire franchise for me. Conversely, I thought Spec Ops: The Line would be just another generic, boring shooter - I only bought it because it was cheap and I wanted something to play while my internet was down - and I now consider it to be possibly most brilliant and intelligent game ever made. Besides, there's nothing wrong with your affections changing over time. The Halo games haven't been my favourite games for years now: that has, at various points, gone to the Batman: Arkham games, the Gears of War series, Mass Effect, Fallout, Portal, Starcraft II, and even the first Modern Warfare game. But that doesn't mean I don't still love Halo, and even if it's not my absolute favourite way to pass the time, it's still the game I play most. Plus, what's wrong with Destiny becoming better than Halo? Hopefully that will just inspire 343i to create something even better for Halo 5. Competition just improves the markets, and while I know a lot of people were very unhappy with some of the changes made to Halo 4, at least 343i are making the effort to try and innovate and change things and improve, rather than just taking the Activision/EA path of releasing the same game every year with minor graphical updates. No, not everything works - a lot of the changes actually have, in my humble opinion, actually hurt the game - but I respect them for at least trying, and if other games are seen as 'better', that will only push them harder to create something truly brilliant for future games.

Well, we know for a fact that 343i are aware of us, so while they might not reply or even have accounts (and even if they did, they probably wouldn't be allowed to reveal they worked there) there's a reasonably good chance that any suggestions made here will be seen. As for killcams, the way I understand it is that, due to the way it's coded, it's literally impossible to fix. Basically, it uses data from your own system to display the killcam, and since on an internet connection that system will definitely be a half-second behind your opponents due to lag, your killer's aim will be about half a second behind where he actually was firing at, so the killcams are always going to be lagged. To fix it they'd need to rewrite essentially the whole code, and then every killcam would need to take all the data from an opponent's system and thus probably lag you out even more as it downloaded and was converted (a process that might take 10-15 seconds!) for something that most players are almost definitely going to just skip straight past anyway. Imagine you had to wait 10 seconds every time you were killed, just so that you could skip something!

Binary Rifle and damage boost. It's so powerful it literally kills them out of the game and back to the lobby screen.

Not necessarily, it's just that the really creative, interesting threads tend to get buried beneath replies to the ever-popular new threads about weapon balance, Call of Duty comparisons, and map complaints. I, for one, also hate bumping my own threads, so even when I think I've created a really good topic if it's off the first page in a day to make room for people starting duplicate threads I don't just post in it to get it back to people's attention. I know a lot of other members feel the same way. It's not that we can't come up with stuff like this and this (to indulge my ego for a moment), it's just that most people would evidently rather talk about stuff like DMR balance or loadout customisation than hypothetical questions about playlists, vehicles, and armour abilities. Anyway, on topic. I like the idea for the Incinerator, though not the name so much: something like the 'Titan' might be better suited, in keeping with the whole Promethean theme. I'd actually draw a comparison with the Rocket Hog, rather than the Gauss Hog, which is favourable as I consider the former to be much better balanced. I'm slightly surprised there's no passenger seat though: maybe it's more analogous to the Revenant than Warthog? At any rate, as long as it's not too tough for its speed, I can't see it being a problem. The Basilisk I'm not so sure about. I think it's quite possible for a vehicle with a Binary Rifle to be balanced - and I'll detail exactly how in a moment - but not two of them, and definitely not when they're capable of being independently targeted and fired. Even assuming they're single-shot and take TWICE as long as a Gauss Hog's cannon to cool down, that's effectively the same firing rate as the Gauss Hog, with the bonus that they can target twice as many places at once, aim DOWN at targets instead of having to account for obstructions and cover, and can easily evade incoming fire without even the chance of a lucky grenade to bring it down. Vehicles aside - and even then only certain vehicles like the Scorpion, Banshee or Warthog - there would be almost no way to bring it down if it had any amount of health, and if it didn't have that health then it would conversely be too easy for opponents to score a triple kill against. As I said before, I don't necessarily think there's no way a Binary Rifle can be balanced on a flying vehicle, it just needs to be very carefully thought out. So what I propose is fairly simple. Take the two-seat style cockpit and open canopy from a Revenant and set it up so that one player is now a dedicated driver and one is a dedicated gunner. From the Falcon, take the ability to hover and move in any direction, from the Warthog the fully-rotating mounted weapon (in this case, the Binary Rifle) and mount it on the underside of the chin, and from the Mantis a recharging energy shield, though significantly weaker (about 3/4 as strong as the average Spartan's shields) and applying exclusively to the hull of the craft (so if the Spartans driving it get hit directly, they take the damage instead of the vehicle, making it much easier to shoot them out of it - ideally they'd be almost as exposed as if they were in a Mongoose). A very low physical health under the shield would make it easy for a coordinated team to destroy as it would quickly fall under sustained fire, but the recharging shield would allow a good driver to keep it alive much longer. EDIT: When I say low health but shielded, I mean basically that it would take two or three shots from the Fuel Rod Gun to destroy it at full shields, but a direct hit from a Rocket Launcher, Scorpion cannon or Spartan Laser would blow it straight out of the sky even at full shield and hull strength. The Binary Rifle itself would also have a few differences from its regular counterpart. It would work, as you've suggested, on a single-shot reload/overheat system, to compensate for its unlimited ammunition: this would also pair with the recharging shield and low health to make it much more geared toward support than frontline combat, contrasting it with the Gauss Hog, as misses would be very costly and it would be unable to take on multiple targets at once. It would also be operated via a screen in the cockpit of the vehicle rather than held directly, meaning it would need to be zoomed in to avoid having the screen filled with the body of the vehicle rather than a clear sight at the targets. This would be somewhat offset by the fact that it would now stay perfectly accurate while not scoped in, meaning in an emergency or at close range it would still be possible to defend itself. Lastly, the orange targeting beam would be permanently enabled and the crosshair would move more slowly, giving other players a better chance to avoid it. I also think it could be interesting to experiment with permanently enabling long-range Promethean Vision while scoped in, in a similar way to the Thermal Vision used in other modern FPS games when they're using something like an AC-130 or whatever. It would help reinforce the idea of being used for support rather than direct combat, and could help teams who're coordinated by allowing the gunner to call out targets and report enemy positions. I think this would be pretty well-balanced overall. You get the raw power and range of the Binary Rifle, with the mobility and vantage point of an air vehicle, but with the drawbacks of low health and exposed passengers, high visibility and the need to stay still or move slowly to allow the gunner to hit anything. It also fits with what I feel would be the nature of Promethean vehicles: as their infantry seem to be more focused on tanking damage and frontline combat, their vehicles seem like they're be used more for support, and what better support vehicle than an airborne sniper? As for a name, something like the Pandora or the Zeus would fit well with the Promethean theme. What d'you think?

Well, you could always just play Custom Games, because that tracks your K/D separately from your Matchmaking career. Also, I think I remember hearing somewhere that the new competitive playlist will also track your K/D separately from everything else, so that basically turns every other playlist into something where you can just play without having to worry about getting a good K/D. If you have difficulties getting enough people on your friend list to play customs with you, you could also try starting a topic in the Game Invitations section and play with other people from our forums, join in with one of the Custom Game Nights hosted by Spades N AZ every Friday evening, or come along to one of our Community Play Dates, where Halo 4 is the fourth weekend of every month. You can also check the Contests and Events thread schedule to see if anything special is coming up. Good luck, and I hope this helps you get the practice you want!

Big congrats, Skummgummigube!

I've been trying to think what to say here for a while now. I wasn't really expecting to be MOM: I've been around for longer than almost anyone else here and I'm not really one of the regulars in the Shoutbox (for those who're interested, at time of writing I have just 338!), so I've always just kind of assumed that I'd escape notice for MOM status altogether, let alone actually earn it. In consequence I don't really know what to say: I want to tell you all how much I love you, how even if I'm not joining in the conversations I read pretty much everything you say in the Shoutbox and forums, how I'll often start long replies to what you say, only to discard them because I don't think they're good enough for you to waste time reading. And then I realise just how creepy that sounds! In the end, I remembered that when I first joined, I never actually did an introductory thread: the first post I actually made was in the Halo: Reach forum complaining about Armor Lock - a fairly common topic at the time. So, to make up for that, I thought that maybe I'd use this as a chance to actually introduce myself properly. After all, there's nothing wrong with telling people who you are more than a year and half after they've first met you, right? So, without any further ado... Hi, I'm Red! My favourite colour is green, my favourite number is seven, and my favourite letter of the alphabet is E. Yes, I have a favourite letter. No, I can't adequately explain why. In my spare time I like to act in plays, play far too many videogames, and write way too much. I have a book which I'm working on and hoping to have published someday, once I decide it's not too embarrassingly terrible. I've been playing games quite literally since before I could talk, and have yet to noticeably improve at them. The first thing I ever touched was Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my Sega Megadrive (that's the Genesis, for all you yanks out there) and it's still one of my favourite games to this day. It's also one of the games I've yet to actually complete! Sonic games were always my main source of entertainment until the PlayStation II arrived: though I did play on them regularly at my friends' houses, I've never actually owned an original Xbox. Instead I spent my early teenage murdering years not in Halo 2, but in Quake, TimeSplitters and Battlefront. Though I did eventually pick up an Xbox of my own in late 2008, I didn't get online with it until mid 2010 - probably explaining a lot of my ongoing hatred for day-one DLC and online passes included as part of a game's purchase price. While I did play a lot of Halo 3, it was necessarily at LAN parties and against friends via splitscreen: hence why when killed at playdates I'll regularly accuse everyone else of looking at my screen! In mid 2011, I got sick and tired of the forums over at bungie.net, which by then were made up almost entirely of trolls, clans, and people desperately attempting peddle their Forge map remakes, and decided to jump ship to a Halo forum that, well, actually wanted to talk about Halo. And the rest, as they say, is history. A history which I'm now going to bore you all with. The forum was a lot smaller when I first joined. There was a core group of maybe 15 regular posters, and perhaps twice that many again in the shoutbox. As such, I got to know a lot of the early forum members well in a way that I don't seem to manage so much these days: I've never really been a big fan of the shoubox, and while back then there was little enough content that it was possible to really get to know someone via forum posts alone, now it's much more important to be able to chat in real time in order to get to know fellow members. On the other hand, we didn't have playdates back then, so now at least I can get to know you all whilst being shot. In the face. Repeatedly. For a very long time, I wasn't terribly 'active'. I'd log in, have a quick look around, and then log back out: things didn't really take off until early 2012, when I discovered that it is in fact possible to contribute regularly even with post lengths as outlandish as mine. In the end, I went kind of nuts: over the course of three months I went from about 100 posts to over 700, as I slowly got more and more involved and began to feel comfortable posting my own threads more often. I even began to get involved with contests as my university schedule lightened up and had more free time to do so: I joined in the second of our Forge contests, and lost, and even managed to make it to the finals of the 1v1 tournament, the first game of which I also lost, before winning the second and drawing the third. Thus claiming perhaps the most misleadingly titled 'Winner' award in history, I completely fell apart over the exam period and began to disappear for months on end, as various pressures in real life began to have an impact. Things have changed a lot since I've been back. There are a lot less of the old faces around now: most of those who I knew when first venturing onto the forum are gone now. Some of them left for their own reasons; some promised a return, but never did; some just stopped appearing altogether; others didn't leave on their own terms at all. I think I'm the longest-active member outside the staff now, and in its own way, that makes me kind of sad. I don't really know why. The bright side, though, is that with the constant influx of new members there's never any shortage of opinions flying around, of new and interesting ideas to discuss. As a forum, we're growing by the hour: some of us may stay just long enough to create a single thread before disappearing again forever, but others start reading, like what they see, and decide to stick around for a while longer. It's up to those silver and purple members among us to make the newbies feel comfortable enough to join the latter camp, and so it's always great to see the regular shoutbox and Introduction forum contributors doing just that. It's not long now before I'll be hitting my thousand post landmark. Perhaps I'll be able to use that to actually talk more about myself as a person instead of just descending into pearly-eyed reminiscing - though don't bet on it. Here's to a thousand posts' worth of shared opinion, tears, and joy. And here's hoping for another thousand posts' worth of the same. Until then, it's been a pleasure and a privilege knowing you. And what better way to show that than by murdering the hell out of you all on tomorrow's playdate? Verbosity is not a crime, Red

When you say RPGs, I assume you mean dungeon-crawlers, right? If so then you're going to be disappointed, as I don't think there are really any whose servers are still running at this point. That said, if you're looking for a more modern style, there's a fair few I can recommend: The two newest Fallout games are both available on the 360, and you can usually pick up the 'Game of the Year' versions which include all of the DLC on a second disc for under £20, though I've heard they're even cheaper in the US. If you're a fan of Bethesda's stuff, you can also pick up all of the Elder Scrolls series from Morrowind onwards, though I'm not sure if they actually made GotY editions or not. Morrowind is also an Xbox original, so you'll have Xbox Guide restrictions while using it. You might also want to have a look at the Bioshock games, the first of which is particularly good. They're a lot more focused around roleplaying in combat rather than as a whole, but the setting is excellent and the narrative is one of the best that you'll find today. Second one's not so great, but the third one will be out in a month or so and that looks to be very impressive. If you like the Mass Effect series (and before you play the third, I STRONGLY advise you to download the Extended Cut DLC) you may also like the Dragon Age games, which are also developed by Bioware. The combat really isn't great and the plot is paint-by-numbers stuff, but the characters are very well-developed and well-written, plus it eschews the traditional binary moral choice system, which I find is better for roleplaying. As with Bioshock, the first is a lot better than the second, but the third game doesn't look to be so good, so I at least won't be picking it up when it first comes out. There's also Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Bastion, which I haven't played and thus can't recommend one way or the other, though I've heard farily good things about Bastion. Lastly, there's the Fable games, which are somewhat odd. The first and second are infinitely better than the third for the sole reason that they don't have voiced protagonists, and are a lot longer: the third feels very bolted-on and unnecessary, and doesn't even have the saving grace of being better in terms of graphics or combat. The second is probably the best of the three, so if you want to give them a try, I'd recommend starting there as the plots of the first two games are generally unrelated.

I liked the part where they clearly sold the game on its multiplayer element with the tagline ''Wake up, John'. You know something else? People have the right to complain about stuff they don't like. For me, Halo 4 is fine as it is. No, it's not perfect: I haven't played a game I would describe as perfect in a very long time, and Halo 4 doesn't come close to that. A lot of people are very upset about legitimate problems: the file share issue sucks, there are still problems with calculating collision damage, it's possible to be killed while simultaneously being converted in Flood mode, there really aren't very many maps, and cutting out custom game modes like Assault and Race doesn't make sense, even if they weren't going to be used as playlists. But ultimately, I still enjoy playing it, and think for the most part the core gameplay is solid and the campaign is on a par with ODST's, which I had previously regarded as the best one of all. That doesn't mean everyone who disagrees with me needs to be silenced, though. I hate seeing duplicate threads of the same old topics over and over again as much as anyone: I get that a lot of people think the DMR is overpowered against the other precision weapons. I get that a lot of people want the Boltshot nerfed, or the Gauss Warthog removed, or more loadout weapons, or new playlists brought in, or a 1-50 ranking system brought in, or whatever. We don't need more threads about them for me to understand: it's not going to change the fact that I disagree with them. But that doesn't mean we can just ignore their opinions altogether. Besides, if you're mature enough to contribute to a forum, you're mature enough to make up your mind for yourself. If you're someone who thinks the DMR is fine, and then read a post which changes your mind, has that really ruined the game for you? What's wrong with hearing new ideas and them agreeing with them? EDIT: Minor spelling and grammar.

I don't think it's necessarily a problem of power. Back in Halo 3, the SMG overpowered every other utility weapon at close range even when it wasn't dual wielded. If you wanted to beat it, you had to out-range it or find a close-range power weapon like the Shotgun or Gravity Hammer. Now, theoretically even if it wasn't dual-wieldable it wouldn't necessarily be a problem to balance. You could make it sort of 'Pro' Assault Rifle: it has the advantages of a faster kill time and reload, but suffers from lower accuracy and much shorter range. But then it's basically just doing the same job as the Suppressor, and what's the point of that? The other route would be to try and make it a sort of 'My First Assault Rifle' - give it ridiculous amounts of aim assist and bullet magnetism to go with the huge clip, so even though it would have a longer kill time it would be something that was very easy to use. But even that doesn't really work, because the Assault Rifle is already so easy to use that if someone is having difficulties hitting targets with it, they're going to struggle with any weapon. I just don't really see how it could be balanced. If you want to make it a power weapon, then it's basically just a re-skinned SAW, doing the same job for the same race. If you want to balance it conventionally, then it's basically just trying to do the same job as the other three automatic weapon loadouts. The only way I can really see it being introduced is as a secondary, something to give a bit of punch to someone who wants a close-range weapon to make up for their Lightrifle's weaknesses but who doesn't want to waste a tactical package on Firepower. And even then, it's basically just doing the same job as the Boltshot's secondary fire. Maybe the bloom and recoil could just be truly horrendous, so that way it really is something you'd want to use as a backup rather than a primary, or perhaps it could have little to no aim assist and a very low accuracy to begin with (imagine the Assault Rifle at maximum bloom, and bigger than the Suppressor when maxed). Other than that, I can't really see it as a viable weapon. There isn't really any role that it could fill that isn't already being filled, and unfortunately there isn't the argument of race parity to excuse that.