I’ve mentioned before that H4 is the first 1st-person shooter I’ve tried to play, but I’ve stated it again so that anyone who reads this understands that I fall into a different category of player than most of the posters here.
The campaign in H4 is a load of fun. Frustrating (especially when you can’t shoot straight), but fun. The storyline is a bit campy, but cool. The vehicles are awesome (even though I can’t use them effectively yet). In my opinion, my money was well-spent for the campaign alone. And because I’m not very good yet still figured I’d start off on Legendary, it’s given me plenty of playtime. I’m still not done yet.
But the main reason I bought H4 is for the MP side. I played at a friend’s house and racked up all of 7 kills in about 15 games, but still thought it was awesome. So I bought an Xbox and H4 and played primarily MP.
The Problem
Halo is hard . . . especially if you’re doing a 1st-person shooter for the first time. For those who’ve played regularly, you may not realize how hard it is because you’re already used to the basics of aiming and moving in a first-person environment. As much as you want the game to cater to the experts (and it absolutely does need to), there must also be a way for beginners to improve. Being -15 every game is quite discouraging.
Most of you assume the reason the MP player pool has decreased is due to lack of catering to the folks in this forum, who generally seem to be expert players (from my perspective). Please think about this again, because this cannot possibly be the case. There were not 400,000 experts simultaneously playing H4 on the release date. I do not know what the hardcore Halo player pool is, but it is unlikely to be anywhere near 400,000 people who can all play simultaneously. Even if it is as high as 100,000 (which I doubt, but admittedly have no real data to back that up), this means the large majority of the players were casual players. Not as inexperienced as me, most likely, but casual nonetheless - even if they’d played the previous Halo games.
Those players don’t care about many of the problems the experts do. They either don’t know enough to have an opinion (like me) or those problems don’t affect their enjoyment of the game. It is these players that necessarily made up the largest contingent of the original player pool, and it is these players that necessarily have been primarily responsible for the decrease in the player pool. Mathematically, it cannot be any other way.
So while the issues most of you are concerned with do affect your enjoyment of the game and may cause you to drift away from the Halo series, they simply cannot be the primary reasons behind the population drop. I am not trying to minimize your concerns. I am simply stating that they cannot be the primary reasons for the population drop.
I do think I know the actual reason, however. My evidence is only anecdotal, and I may be wrong, but I do not think so.
The reason you lost many of the MP players (most of whom were certainly casual players) is quite simple:
Halo is very difficult to play well.
And you guys can take that as a compliment, by the way, since most of you are far better players than I am.
My friends who got me into Halo no longer play MP. At all. Campaign, yes. MP, no. And the reason they stopped is because most games end with a couple of guys taking the vast majority of the kills and everyone else is either neutral or on the bad side of the K/D ratio. And playing Objective games without being able to compete in gun skills is a futile endeavor.
For Halo to survive as a series with a sizable MP player pool, this has to be addressed. If it is not, then each future game will have a smaller and smaller player pool, the casual players will not even bother, and the experts will gradually drift away. Then all any of you will have is CoD (which is apparently worse than contracting Ebola). Bashing on “noob” tactics does you no credit, as for beginners, many of those tactics are the only way to avoid 20+ deaths. If you want overall gameplay to improve, you need to proselytize, not criticize.
A Potential Solution?
I’ve opined a few times about things on here. Some of my opinions I still think are valid; many I’ve come to change my mind. One of them, however, I feel quite strongly about: You cannot simultaneously cater to experts and beginners with the same match rules. Not possible. Beginners like having incineration cannons fall from the sky like manna because that’s the only way they might luck into a kill. Experts like taking out 46 ordinance-toting opponents with the Magnum.
At the same time, duplicating playlists is probably not a great idea. The pro lists would be occupied by ever-increasingly skilled . . . and, as a result, ever-decreasing number . . . of players. It doesn’t matter how good the gameplay is if there’s no one to play with.
What I would propose for you to consider is rather than having duplicate playlists, have a single “practice” playlist. Big team slayer would probably work the best. This is where the beginners and super-casuals can play. It would have all the noobie benefits and ordinance galore. But the key to making it work as a stepping stone is that some or all of the armor customizations, specializations, spartan rank, etc., cannot be attained in the practice list. And the stat tracking would need to be limited to simple things, like K/D and wins. No more. Otherwise, there’d never be a reason to move up. You could simply “excel” at beating a bunch of other crappy players.
In the “real” playlists, 343 could focus on resolving many of the issues you guys are concerned with - weapon balance, random ordinance, AAs in loadouts, and whatever else is wrong to the expert player.
If you guys want Halo to survive as a first-person shooter that requires skill to play (which means being good at it actually means something), you’ve got to recruit new players. You need the cannon fodder. There is no other option. And if you make many of the changes you ask for apply to existing playlists, you will most certainly prevent new players from developing. So the beginners need a place where they can play relatively non-competitively in order to learn. And that place needs many of the features of H4 the experts don’t like (and probably even more, to be honest).
But to ensure that you always have a place to play the game you want to play, all of the other playlists should cater to the serious players. If beginners want to try those lists (and they will), then they need to step away from the binary rifle and try to shoot someone in the head with a BR. Leave the beginners one giant mosh pit to learn the basics of the controls . . . and once they’ve gotten that done, they will absolutely begin striving for the bennies available in the real playlists.
But until that mosh pit is available, my opinion is that you will drive the playlist population down even further with some of the things you want.
Lastly . . . I really cannot understand some of the vitriol thrown around in here by people who profess to hate the game yet oddly have racked up thousands of kills and lots of playing time. Unless you are deliberately torturing yourself, the game cannot really be that bad.
