343 could easily add all these game modes in playlists right now, but when?

Games Halo Infinite
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10

That would be nice, if the population were reliable enough for it. You’d be juggling a nice 280ms ping playing with Russia, Australia, Europe, Asia, North and South America, pulling players across the globe, if your mode of choice wasn’t popular enough. Slayer, Swat, and CTF would be pretty easy to find matches for, but Action Sack modes would be pretty iffy, since there would be a lot of modes individually queued. Infection and Grifball might even struggle a bit to find matches. Some modes are better left bundled as a party mode playlist.

In MCC, it’s really hard to find matchmaking, ever since they added Custom Games Browser. Everyone just plays Customs now. I don’t blame them. I would rather play Customs too.

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So since you like unpopular modes, the solution is to force other players to get in those modes?
That’s one of the things people are mad at 343 for

12

Not exclusively. Playlists are just the party mode bundle solution, for when you want to play a KD only mode, an objective only mode, a wacky action only mode, a BTB mode, an FFA mode, but nothing specific. I’m not against individual mode matchmaking, but you’ll need to understand that if you have 50 modes, only the top 5 or 10 will be populated, so if you wanted to play a less popular mode, the ping and matchmaking wait time will be much larger.

343 could take the top 5 or 10 popular modes, and give them individual playlists, while still having bundled playlists as well. We are just looking for a content hotfix, since 343 won’t be turning Infinite into MCC for up to 5 years. I’d rather not be getting one new mode per month or longer, to drag out each season.

13

Before Splitgate became bot simulator, it had the exact thing I am talking about and I had no issues getting in a match.
You are thinking that people will just pick 1 mode and search for that, which a lot very well might.
But I myself will just pick a variety of modes that I want to play and then go, who cares what I get.

14

So you would like a custom playlist maker, where you can choose like 10 modes you’d like to play.

Say for example you want flag modes, CTF, 1 Flag, Neutral Flag, Speedflag, Stockpile, Speedpile, Rocket Neutral Flag, etc, so if you queue multiple modes, you’ll search for players for them all at the same time?

Or you just pick 10 of any type of mode and join whatever pops first?

That would be nice to have. Doubt 343 would bother, but it would be nice.

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Yes

This.
It worked in Splitgate and I would get 2-3 bots max and Infinite has maybe 3x the players that they had then (now it is bot simulator) and if 343 fixes things, the playerbase would be bigger

16

Do you have a source for this? (No lying accusations, I want to read it so I can tell them how stupid they are).

The only reason Match Composer would be “impossible” would be population.

The fix for this would be a minimum number of selections which would give the same result as playlists but with more advantages for the player.

Example: have ALL of the modes listed in OP (and more) have to select at least 5. If I select 5, that would give the same population pool as a playlist. If I selected slayer, swat, fiesta, KoTH and CTF then the pool would be far higher (3 current playlists and two modes).

If player retention over 10 years is a concern then I’d argue giving people more choice gives more retention, not less.

So again, is there a source?

Edit: I see this has more or less been discussed between yourself and @GusTank04 but I still want this source so I can read their excuses :joy:

17

I’d have to dig through the past pinned posts, but it was back before when BTB first broke, everyone was demanding more game modes, because we only had Quick Play, BTB, and Ranked. 343 said they were “hard at work” on the feasibility of adding a new Slayer playlist to meet the demands of players, but it wouldn’t be as easy as just dropping new modes into matchmaking or rotations, because the UI is extremely limited, and they would need a few months to do it. A week or so later, Campaign drops, and BTB breaks, then 343 needs to go on a long vacation, and dumps Tactical Slayer, FFA, and Fiesta, into matchmaking, as a bandaid hotfix, since they couldn’t leave us with just Quick Play and Ranked for a month or two. That means they just completely lied about not being able to drop new modes into matchmaking.

Due to the forums being unreasonably flooded and disorganized, it would be hard for me to find that old update pinned posts, but they did say that the Slipspace engine isn’t capable of adding playlists and modes on a whim.

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That’s ok, I know what posts you mean now. I’m not taking that as match composer being impossible though, I’m taking that as they could if they wanted to.

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It was whoever posted the update that Sketch is referring to in this update.

https://forums.halowaypoint.com/t/playlist-update-dec-14/41577

Which reminds me, wtf happened to that Slayer playlist update they were working on anyway? They said this was a basic Slayer offering update, and they would expand in a future update. It’s mid February, 2 months went by Sketch.

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I was going to say, “excuses, excuses” but it’s more like, “hope they forget, don’t mention it again” :joy:

And this
"Next week’s update will also include adjustments to challenges including removing some particularly frustrating mode-specific ones, "
Hmmm ranked CTF!?!

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Yeah they said that many times, and we still had “End enemy killing sprees in Fiesta” after the uproar the last time. Most of these challenges are doable, but some are just poorly thought out and completely untested.

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Might be in the upcoming feb update.
That might just be the hopium talking though

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Just thinking about the Match Composer thing again.

I was thinking it would be annoying and going backwards if there was a fixed minimum selection. If you want to play slayer you can now, but if they had a minimum of 5 selections then it’d be worse than it is now, so tried thinking of a better solution.

Maybe if every selection had a traffic light system for how many players are searching for that selection at that time.

And as you added selections a bar would increase and when that bar filled you could begin searching.

Example 1. You selected Slayer and it was green, this had enough people to allow you to search purely for Slayer.

Example 2. You select Grifball which is red, your bar goes to 25% so you add Husky Raid in Orange and bar goes up to 75%, so you add another red playlist and the bar fills and allows you to search with 3 selections.

To simplify further, you could even do away with the bar and just accurately update the estimated wait time encouraging players to select more options if they don’t want to wait that long

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343i will continue their dripfeeding until Season 2.

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Regular Slayer and Tactical Slayer should not be in the same playlist. Those must be separated. Plus, we need a Team Doubles playlist.

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Isn’t that really the same thing? If you wanted to play grifball but the pop is low, you have to search for other modes and then you could possibly get stuck behind those for 5 matches before you get grifball

I would like to say, the variants for each mode are included in their core mode, so (attrition, attrition dodgeball together, fiesta, fiesta CTF, fiesta strongholds, ect ect)

Including the variants (If I remember them all) We would currently have this in the online section.

Slayer
(Slayer)
Fiesta
(Fiesta, Fiesta: Attrition, Fiesta: CTF, Fiesta: One Flag CTF, Fiesta: Strongholds)
Tactical Slayer
(Tac slayer, Tac commandos, Tac manglers, Tac sidekicks, Tac stalker rifles)
Attrition
(Attrition, Attrition: Dodgeball)
Elimination
(Elimination)
FFA Slayer
(FFA Slayer)
Oddball
(Oddball)
CTF
(CTF, One flag CTF)
Strongholds
(strongholds)
KOTH
(KOTH)
(then ranked lobbies)

So each of those modes requires 8 people I think.
That is 19 separate mode lobbies (I would like to say, lobbies should stay together, I think this would drastically increase player retention and let you get into battles faster but that’s just me)
So you need 152 people to fill all of those lobbies.
If we have 200-250k concurrent players online, subtract say, 50k for those that play ranked, that is 150-200k
That is 987-1316 unique lobbies.
That is 52-70 lobbies per mode (variants)

So, with this knowledge, lets go see what each one would have

Slayer
(52-70)
Fiesta
(260-350)
Tactical slayer
(260-350)
Attrition
(104-140)
Elimination
(52-70)
FFA Slayer
(52-70)
Oddball
(52-70)
CTF
(104-140)
Strongholds
(52-70)
KOTH
(52-70)

And of course, this wouldn’t represent it exactly but you get the idea.

And I of course forget BtB, lol, so everything would be slightly smaller.

Also, quickplay could be swapped out for a 2-3 “featured” modes, which rotate in every week.

27

Similar but not the same.

For example you’ve got a CTF Playlist there and a Fiesta Playlist with some flag variants in.

This is what I mean, having every gametype separate gives the freedom to choose. So if you wanted to complete a CTF challenge, with separate selections you could choose fiesta CTF, fiesta one flag, CTF (standard), one flag (standard) rather than in your grouped example you’d probably go for the CTF playlist and miss out the fiesta CTF modes because you’d risk matching standard fiesta etc.

Even forgetting about challenges, I liked H5 fiesta but hated Husky Raid but tough :poop: for me when 343 created fiesta party and grouped them together so I moved to BTB Fiesta. If I had the choice I could’ve selected Fiesta and BTB Fiesta. It just gives flexibility but I realise spreading population too thin creates problems so that was the traffic light/estimated time suggestions.

They could even have tick/check boxes grouped to encourage ticking more but the ability to deselect ones you don’t want.

For example have Action Sack which ticks Mongoose Sumo, Paintball, Snowball Fight etc but then each of those have individual tick boxes so could deselect Paintball (obviously there’s be more than 3).

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343 could

easily

Strong assumptions.

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29

Fair enough.
Maybe we could have 10-15 permanent modes and then have others (5-10) rotate in every week, so they are “fresh” and people will be more inclined to play them.
Your idea would work too probably

Another way to decrease wait time, you can spectate matches until you find an open lobby.
And, if people are waiting for a lobby, you can play a maximum of 5 matches before you are booted from the lobby to spectate until another position opens up.
This allows a cycle of fresh players to rotate in and out and decreases wait time for lower population lobbies.
Plus, it gives you something to do while you wait.

I mean, in reality, you only need 7 people near you to play the same mode out of hundreds of thousands playing the game to get in a game.