RedStarRocket91

This is a false equivalence. Old-fashioned tank armour is built from different materials than modern armour, and it's not shaped to deflect explosions, projectiles, and concussive forces in the same way that a modern tank shell is. However, the ODST-inspired MJOLNIR variants are constructed with the same materials as 'standard' MJOLNIR sets, and they're about as well shaped in terms of deflecting incoming fire and forces (i.e. very poorly for the most part). More importantly, for the most part it's redundant as the armour is designed primarily in order to power and shape a personal energy shield, rather than actually get hit itself. Frankly, since they're the same materials, have the same integrated shielding technology (which is where your tank armour comparison is completely misrepresenting the situation), and are generally equal in terms of coverage and shape for ablative protection, it's essentially a matter of ergonomics rather than performance.

Why not both? One week have a Halo-related question, and the next week have another topic. That would definitely help put the 'semi' back into 'semi-weekly poll', too!

The Halo Waypoint forum moderators are supposed to have nothing to do with the administration of Xbox LIVE accounts: whatever the reason your account was banned, they almost certainly had nothing to do with it, and if you feel the ban was unfair or undeserved you'd need to contact Microsoft Support directly to enquire exactly why you received the ban, and to appeal against it if desired. If you're receiving threatening messages from other people over Xbox LIVE, the best course of action is to keep the message you've received and to file a complaint against the account for harassment. Blocking them is also a very good step, but unless you keep their messages or find some way of recording them (perhaps with a video on a mobile phone?) there's no evidence of any wrong-doing on their part, and unless complaints are filed then nothing will be done about the abusers, since as far as I'm aware Xbox doesn't actively monitor private communications.

The thing is, though, that if you're getting sick of the old armour and want something new - why not go for one of the hundreds of other armour pieces available? For a lot of players (myself included), the fact that the Mark V is in an older visual style, and that it doesn't look like any of the newer stuff, is exactly what makes it so appealing. It's like an old friend, or a well-worn shirt - not necessarily the shiniest or flashiest thing, but something which helps define your identity, and not something you'd want to be replaced or changed. So seeing the Mark V get what amounts to a fairly substantial visual update is a little... disconcerting, and seems to be just another symptom of 343i's desire to make changes seemingly for their own sake. Also, as an aside - there's no way they're going to change it. THE REQ system, their ideology of quantity over quality, general contempt for player opinions and feedback, and the fact that modelling takes time and they seem intent on taking as lazy an approach as possible to post-launch content means they've probably already forgotten about it and started working on another set of REQ trash for you to spend real money gambling on.

Honestly, going back from Halo 5 to Halo 3 on the MCC... my opinion still hasn't changed that it's the best-looking Halo game. Yeah, the models are low-poly and the textures are crap, but damned if the whole thing doesn't somehow come together to look fantastic.

What I want is a few maps that look like 343i have actually put some effort into them. Maps that look like they've been produced because someone had a really interesting idea, then sat down with a team and spent plenty of time tuning it to be the best it could be, then polished up to create something which plays well, looks great, and feels original. A labour of love combined with all the professionalism and testing that we could reasonably expect from Microsoft's premier studio. Maps like Guardian, or The Pit, or Rat Race, or Lockout, or Chill Out: things which feel genuinely unique, and which are both mechanically interesting as well as visually distinct and which provide a huge amount of variety to the game, ensuring that Halo 5 feels like the biggest, best, and most diverse Halo game to date, and which is so rich in content and variety that people will be able to come back to it for years on end. Though I suspect what we'll get are a series of utterly forgettable remakes and remixes, with a dull art style and little to no life or personality. This isn't so bad when it's Forge - that's part of what it's for, after all, and we have some brilliant community members who can create remakes and reimaginings on a professional quality level - but it's just lazy and uninspiring when devs themselves do it with 'new' maps. Also, this is just an obligatory reminder that the DLC maps are not free, but funded by real-money gambling. I know I bring this up every time, but I'll stop doing it once they stop doing it.

That's it, guys. Thread's over, move along.

And here I was hoping to win Hope everyone enjoyed playing as much as I enjoyed reading - congratulations to our winner, and commiserations to our losers!

In a game about traitors, Church is trying to stab me in the back even though I'm not playing. Is there any clearer indication of his guilt!? I'm actually asking.

Staff Response Please keep all responses to this thread civil and on topic.

It's always amazing to see how, for all they're very similar to each other, there can be big differences between Dutch and English language. For example, this is a very odd translation of 'the servers have been down quite a few times lately for very large sections of the playerbase'.

I dunno lol

As much as I'd like to, I probably get too many sensitive PMs to be able to take part. Besides, it's more fun trying to get my staff lynched!

Consider the following: 1. There is one mafian left. 2. Drizzy is still in the game. I think we can all make the connection here... #drizzy_ban2016

Yeah, the REQ system is extremely anti-consumer. I'm really sorry to hear you spent so much money without getting anything good in return, but the best thing you can do now is learn from this as the risk you take with real-money gambling.

Okay guys, this is it, I'm going in. If you're triggered by walls of text, stop reading now because you're not going to like this. Content has been spoiler-tagged for the sake of length - cheers for the idea, Spartan! Anyway, hope this helps explain some of my problems with the campaign as a story!

343i actually responding to players having issues? That gave me a good laugh, thanks Twin

Well, have to disagree with this pretty much straight away. Halo 5 has had some very harsh criticisms so far, many of which are deserved, and a lot of which are fairly serious. But in the interest of keeping this on topic, I'll try to stick to talking about Halo 6. The main thing for me is that 343i really need to start showing that they actually care. While I freely admit my expectations of developers have been warped by playing so much Warframe over the past year, 343i seem to have an absolutely terrible corporate culture - we get very little information about what's going on inside 343i, and what we do get is almost never specific, instead just being vague, doublespeak hype. It's the kind of empty political rhetoric that's supposed to sound good without actually saying anything, and I'm really tired of it. This is particularly prominent with criticisms of the game, especially when those criticisms are about major issues, and for this 343i's community managers need to step up their game. It took nearly two months for Bravo to even confirm that 343i is aware of the issues which are preventing many players from actually being able to connect to the servers - and which are therefore rendering the game literally unplayable for many people. We've had reports of this since launch day, and that's when it should have first been acknowledged. It was even worse during the Master Chief Collection debacle - 343i basically refused to say anything for months, leaving us completely in the dark, and the various community managers basically disappeared altogether. Now I can understand that dealing with the volume of abuse that was directed at 343i during those months is disheartening, and makes you not want to do your job - and if you don't want to do your job, you have the right to quit, a decision I respect. What's not acceptable is to have community managers who refuse to engage with the community. We're talking about the X1's flagship game, from its flagship studio, and yet when it turned out to be completely crippled, the only response we got to our requests for information was silence. This is not okay. And what's worse is that, after disappearing for months on end, when the MCC was finally playable, the community side of 343i came back and tried to act as though nothing had happened. The Waypoint forums are notorious, whether deservedly or not, for poor moderation and no responses to issues players are suffering, Twitter is usually the same, and even on /r/Halo there are very rarely any meaningful responses or information from 343i. And even when we do hear from them - it's only ever to heap praise upon themselves, give evasive or noncommital answers to player questions or suggestions, and generally avoid tackling anything head-on. So, for starters - let's have that fixed in Halo 6. 343i's community managers need to start actually earning their pay - they need to start actually engaging with the playerbase, acknowledging problems quickly, keeping us updated on what's happening in the studio, and pushing other departments for answers - all while dealing with anything they get from the community, be it questions, concerns, suggestions, whatever. It's not enough to write up a bulletin once a week hyping the latest round of matchmaking adjustments, and occasionally dropping a sentence on Neogaf or /r/Halo or whatever. A more open, honest, and transparent studio would go a very long way to rebuilding some of the bridges that have been burned over the past few years. And next, to single out the development side of the studio - we need to get an indication that they're actually making some effort, too. It's all very well to be promised the biggest map pool in Halo history, but when a third of the launch maps are gametype specific, and about half of the remaining maps are essentially slightly reworked versions of other maps, Forge variants, or remakes of older maps (or combinations of all three), that claim starts to ring a bit hollow. It's even worse that the first DLC map is another bloody remix of an existing map - and no, being free doesn't excuse this, because it's supposed to be funded by the profit they're making from the real-money gambling system that is the REQ pool (and more about that in a minute). I'm sorry if this isn't as profitable as they'd hoped, but frankly, that's their problem, not ours, and I'd far rather pay for maps than get dull and uninspired modifications of existing ones. It doesn't really add variety, and it's clearly only built so that they can fulfil their promise of regular 'new' non-forge maps, rather than because they feel it would genuinely add something new to the game. This is cheap, lazy, and not at all appropriate for a full-priced game. This same uninspired laziness also infects the campaign. I'm not going to comment on the writing and plot, as that's a thread in and of itself, but instead going to criticise the gameplay, which increasingly feels uninspired and repetitive. Almost all of the game's content just feels like filler - you could easily take out about 75% of the game's fights and the game would actually be paced better. It doesn't help that the new Proimetheans are terrible bullet sponges, spawn in extremely large numbers, have a lot of incredibly cheap gimmicks, and are almost always fought in respawning waves. After a few missions, fighting them feels more like a chore than actually engaging, and 343i need to take a hard look at not just the enemies themselves, but their level design. The whole campaign felt less like an actual campaign than it did a second season of Spartan Ops in many ways, and as someone who criticised Spartan Ops for its repetitive design, my opinion hasn't changed. The Covenant are still reasonably fun to fight - but the Prometheans are just dull and tiresome, which is far worse than merely being difficult. Next, I need to criticise the art team, who having crafted quite a few really good looking levels and vistas in the campaign, went back to the same old incredibly generic, dull and unimaginative UNSC visual style for pretty much every multiplayer map. It's not necessarily a bad style in and of itself - but it's the only style that seems to be used (with the exceptions of Truth and Regret which are themselves remakes of older maps anyway), and for a series which has traditionally had such diverse arenas as Halo, this is a huge letdown. And finally - the REQ system. I could write a whole article criticising it (and indeed, have!) and still have room to do another, but I'll keep this short and just state that it needs to go. It's a disgusting system of exploitative, money-grubbing, anti-consumer, balance-destroying real-money gambling and it has absolutely no place in any videogame, let alone Halo. I think that just about covers the short version...

Note - the following video contains some minor swearing. Please view at your own discretion.

Unless, of course, it's just a photo of an edited image which has been set to be viewed as fullscreen... I don't know why I'm getting so involved with Mafia all of a sudden. Especially considering I'm not even playing it. But seriously though Drizzy is totally guilty. Have you seen him dance?