Rally
Experienced Member
So le me was browsing MLG forums, and came onto this post by "Bxsouljua004", its amazing how much i and the community at large, agree with what he is saying. Ive played the halo series, since CE, some of the best times i had on xbox live where playing halo 2/3 for hours on end, just trying to learn weapon spawns, player spawns, etc, etc, or just creating a new account to rank up... Anyways, anything i would say would just be re covered in the post below, its lonnng, but its WELL worth the read...
Id also love too hear what you guys think, i know 7s is full of the MLG types, id love to hear who agrees and who doesn't, If you do agree, do support the "movement" and follow what he says to doo.
*Note: some of this post is a "MLG fanboy" type rant, however i still agree with it.
POST::
tl;dr if Reach and COD some how got together and had a baby it would be Halo 4 .... oh and 343 < Bungie
Id also love too hear what you guys think, i know 7s is full of the MLG types, id love to hear who agrees and who doesn't, If you do agree, do support the "movement" and follow what he says to doo.
*Note: some of this post is a "MLG fanboy" type rant, however i still agree with it.
POST::
Links::So the honey moon is over...now what? It’s no secret that the community at large is not impressed and has now become pretty much bored with matchmaking. I know I have. And yes I know many people are waiting for the new year because 343 promised us a CSR system that’s supposed to have competitive ranks and keep us wanting to play further down the line. But let me tell you all you something, ranks are not the problem with the Halo franchise and its community; it’s a small part of a much larger problem. This is evident in Halo 4’s initial sales, it’s evident in the piss poor low playlist population, and it’s evident in the apathy that this community has seem to grow accustomed to. The community used to be divided but now I feel that we all mutually hate Halo 4 and what the franchise has become. We could’ve just looked at Reach and said, "You know what? That was the one bad game, every series has it." But no this is evidence of a much bigger problem with the developers of the games.
Let’s be perfectly honest here, we’re playing a beta right now. There are a ton of bugs and things that need to be fixed. File sharing doesn’t even work, you can't turn off instant respawn, etc. With the plethora of the frustrating bugs and glitches in this game, there’s no denying that this game was rushed for release so that it could compete with Treyarch’s Black Ops II. If this was a competition, than 343 and Microsoft have lost by a lot, again. Halo hasn’t drawn the masses since Halo 3 came out. But as soon as Cod: 4 was released, the general FPS population has bought into that and never looked back. However instead of looking at the problem internally and addressing the major issues with the game. Bungie/343/Microsoft have blatantly tried to copy the best elements in CoD and shove them into Halo.
Loadouts, Sprint, Bloom, No real rank system but a progression system, large maps, weapon skins, instant respawn, kill streaks aka ordinance drops among other things all equal Call of Duty’s formula. You’re not fooling anyone by renaming the ******. The whole community is upset and the developers refuse to admit they’ve done wrong or at the very least correct their egregious mistakes.
So where do we go from here? Do we just sit while the population and community continue to dwindle while 343 release their useless bulletins and rotating playlists? No my friends, I’d rather do something about it. For too long have the old school, competitive, real Halo players been getting the shaft in exchange for a few extra dollars, but now even releasing a Call of Duty game with shields and calling it the next installment of “Halo” didn’t equate to more money.
But enough with the negative ranting. Let’s give some answers and talk about what our supposed “community loving” devs over at 343 industries can do to fix Halo 4 and prevent making the same mistake as their predecessors which have been plaguing the franchise since 2007.
I’m going to start off with the hot topic right now which is ranks. Case in point, we need ranks. Online Halo isn’t Halo without ranks. Everyone from the casual to the competitive need something worth fighting for when we hop into any given playlist. Without ranks this game will die before the year is over. The reason Halo 2 was the XBL juggernaut that it was, was because it had the best and most accurate ranking system out of any Halo game bar-none. Yes there were standbyers, circle boosters, modders, cheaters, de-levelers, but with all that it was still better than what we have today. Ask any person who played Halo 2 online and they will agree. This idea goes deeper than just having some number next to your name which is something I think 343 doesn’t understand.
Your rank was more than a number, it was an accomplishment, a personal goal; it was an achievement before there were achievements. You fought, you studied maps and strategy, and you did everything you could to get to that next level. And when you couldn’t, when you hit the “virtual wall”, you went into customs with your friends. Those games like Cat & Mouse, Tower of Power, Zombies, Boxer, Troy, etc came about because people had trouble ranking up as easily so they spent times in customs with their friends. This built interaction and actual friendships between people. This is something that has been missing since Halo 2. Look how easy it was to get a 50 in Halo 3. No one went into customs and had fun because they knew they could hop into any playlist and had a good chance of getting a 50 with minimal work and effort.
To put a little of my thought into H4’s Challenges, I honestly don’t give a ****** about any of them. I don’t even look at them to be perfectly honest. What’s the point? So what, I can get a new helmet or some ******? Why? No one is going to look at what my Spartan is wearing if they have no discernible difference in the skill level between me and the person I just killed. Yeah I think it’s neat and it gives me something extra to do in the game but if I don’t have a visible rank that I worked for than everything else becomes dull and pointless. A Progression system is ok but its needs to be coupled with an accurate rank system. No true skill either, strictly based on wins and losses.
And maybe this is just me but have you noticed since Halo 3 no one really uses their mic anymore? Unless you’re with a party, good luck trying to communicate with your teammates. You know why this is so? It’s because there’s no need to. You needed a headset in H2 & H3 because talking to your teammates was a key to victory. Even if you didn’t know callouts, basic communication could be the difference in winning and losing. But if you’re playing a game when winning and losing don’t really matter then what’s the point of plugging in your mic? Reach and Halo 4 have in essence taken out that human interaction between random players because there is no reward for winning your match. That’s what I truly hated about reach and H4; it feels like the devs just wanted the players to act like gamer zombies: Just pre-order the game and play it until the next opportunity for you to give us your money comes around. They took away the organic, growing and social part of online interaction. And that is why ranks are needed in Halo multiplayer.
Speaking of the competitive scene you know what really bugs me? When 343 said they had the competitive community in mind but obviously lied. I’m sorry but no motion sensor does not equal competitive play. For gods sake they didn’t even announce MLG Dallas on their blog page, it was free exposure! How could you not make any mention of that somewhere on your website? Look at Riot and what they did with their League of Legends tournament. The winning team received a million dollars! Could you imagine if Microsoft or 343 did something similar? We’re not asking for the same prize pool but just do something like a post launch tournament to show us that you’re not in it solely for the money. Pros use to make a living off of Halo, now it’s impossible. MLG doesn’t even know what settings to use for this game because it’s so bad and unbalanced. 343’s idea of the competitive player is horrible misconstrued. We are at a time where esports are the premier of video games and companies need to understand and support that or their games die shortly after release.
We need a spectator mode like they have in popular PC games like StarCraft II and LoL. If 343 does not actually support MLG and the competitive community it will be the end of Halo as a dominant franchise. Halo was built to be competitive, it was supposed to be challenging, why did you deviate from that path? Please give us 4 shot kill starting weapons back. The reason the BR and DMR are both in Halo 4 is because 343 thought that having both guns would please all the old and new Halo players. We don’t give a ****** about which gun is used we just want one that works and has a shorter kill time! Bungie changed the BR to a 5 shot weapon back in Halo 3 so less skilled players had more of a chance of surviving. But doing that is not only disrespectful to your customers but come on, we are all not that bad at a game we've basically have been playing since 2001.
You can tell 343 is just taking the same route as Bungie by making huge maps with vehicles and thinking that’s what everyone in the world wants. Well it’s not. If you did all these changes and listened to the community we would buy your ******ty map packs, more people would buy the game and more people would play the game longer and the community wouldn’t be painfully dying.
But to get back on track here are a few things that are wrong with Halo 4 and need to be fixed, patched, added ASAP: Forge needs to have colors. Theater needs to let a party view a film clip. Theater needs a fast forward chapter feature already. Another idea that would please literally every single Halo player is the option to upload videos from your fileshare straight to your YouTube account. We need individual weapon modifiers. This has been something that the community has been begging for, for years and Bungie never even addressed it. Halo 4 needs an open API, otherwise, dozens of community sites will die. Its little things like these that kill your community and make people not want to support you as game developers or your products. Flinch needs to cease to exist immediately, it makes the game unplayable. Custom games need as many options as Reach had. Also stop rotating playlists, there’s no point and it’s only pissing people off. Lastly the Boltshot is overpowered and breaks the game; it needs to be significantly nerfed.
Halo 4 isn’t competitive and will die before the year is over. It just isn’t fun to play for more than a few games. Since Halo 3, we have been going backward, not forward. Halo 4 feels like Reach 2.0; what major mechanical differences are there between H4 and No Bloom Reach? Hardly any. The maps are too big; they’re also boring and forgetful. You know why everyone keeps voting for Haven? Because it’s the only halfway decent map on the disc! The maps are pretty but over-textured. This was a problem I first noticed in Halo 3. When grenade bounced and movement is more critical to these games than they are to Call of Duty, the maps are oversaturated with grass, rocks and ****** we don’t need or care about. One could argue that all of Bungie’s success was by accident. The multiplayer in Halo 1 was only implemented 3 weeks before the game was finished and if you take a look at all their classic maps, how were they supposed to know we would still play them 10 years later? Bungie had no clue that maps like Lockout and Midship would be the epitome of completive FPS play for damn near a decade. Instead of modeling their games after the success they've already had, they model them after the success other people are having.
If you’re looking for evidence you don’t have to look any further than the new Crimson map pack they are releasing. 3 huge maps with lots of vehicles. Why do we need more of these? It’s sickening how much 343 doesn’t understand what a small map is or what a competitive map even means. 343 seem like the guys who got destroyed in matchmaking in H2 & H3 and now want to make things “fair”.
Something that made Halo 2 so popular was all the things we did that Bungie didn’t want us to do. We used to love to do things like button glitches and super bounces because it was taboo; we exploited something to our advantage because it helped us win games. I feel that 343 has severely underestimated the simple power of “bragging rights”. Stop treating casual gamers like idiots; we/they don’t want or like that. We can tell when a game is made to be played easily. We liked to be challenged. That’s why Halo 1 & 2 was successful, because it was actually hard. Bungie tried to appeal to the noobs or casual gamers and it failed miserably.
It’s a shame that the community have been the ones taken the beating. Because of these sub-par installments to the franchise there hasn’t been a montage worth watching since 2009; no one cares or watches Halo machinima anymore. Halo 4 is such a CoD rip off, and the worst part is, it’s not even a good rip off. Do we really need “Join in Progress” and a Kill Cam in Halo? What happened to our death markers? Even single player felt like CoD with all the quick time events. And the final boss battle made me weep for Halo. You mean to tell me we spent the whole game tracking the Didact down and having us believe we’re going to have this epic boss battle like Tartaus in Halo 2 and you give us a ****** quick time event. Are you serious? Stop trying to copy CoD’s formula, it isn’t working. For god sake when the Master Chief sprints around it even sounds like sprinting from Call of Duty!
If you truly care about Halo than you will stop feeding us this garbage and make the changes I have stated above
Many have us have been playing Halo since Halo CE came out, some of us have dedicated our lives to these games, some of us have actually learned how to make a decent living playing Halo and producing content. And you give us this polished turd and expect us to love it? No, we refuse.
Halo 4 is a joke of a game. I knew it when I saw what the benefits were for pre-ordering the legendary edition. Simply put, there were none. Why the ****** would I want a weapon skin? No one is going to see it, it doesn’t help me win.
I could literally write another 5 pages of ranting and explaining my points further but enough out of me, below I'm compiled just a few links to videos, blogs, articles, and other forum topics from other community members saying similar things or expanding on ideas I touched upon. So please read them, comment, make your voice heard. Do whatever you can so that hopefully the people at 343 can read this and really sit back and think about the next step for Halo. Tweet them the link if you have to,
http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/287014-lets-face-reality/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11235-we-are-the-1-percent/
http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/287056-treyarch-vs-343/
http://www.change.org/petitions/343-industries-provide-an-open-api-for-halo-4-stat-collection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=T5ItTXmzjqo
http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/best-and-worst-halo-map-remakes-all-time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bQHdYqp_E4A
http://misriahsolutions.com/articles/quitting-halo/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11382-what-happened-by-gandhi/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11333-retake-halo/
http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/288529-the-current-state-of-halo/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11235-we-are-the-1-percent/
http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/287056-treyarch-vs-343/
http://www.change.org/petitions/343-industries-provide-an-open-api-for-halo-4-stat-collection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=T5ItTXmzjqo
http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/best-and-worst-halo-map-remakes-all-time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bQHdYqp_E4A
http://misriahsolutions.com/articles/quitting-halo/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11382-what-happened-by-gandhi/
http://www.halocouncil.com/community//index.php?/topic/11333-retake-halo/
http://forums.majorleaguegaming.com/topic/288529-the-current-state-of-halo/
tl;dr if Reach and COD some how got together and had a baby it would be Halo 4 .... oh and 343 < Bungie