We all know that the progression system and battle pass are absolute messes as it stands, so I am going to briefly cover the problems with it as I see them, and offer a solution.
Problems:
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No incentive to win: Matchmaking is a horrible experience when people care more about challenges than cooperation. Competition breeds motivation. Motivated players have fun.
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Progression is too slow overall: If progression were sped up, people would feel rewarded more frequently and would feel far less apathetic. A large part of this apathy comes from challenge skips which I will cover below.
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Challenge skips: Some challenges are FAR TOO DIFFICULT to realistically accomplish. Challenge skips are your way of creating the problem and selling the solution and that is unacceptable.
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The battle pass: Between challenge swaps and xp boosts, 2/3 of the battle pass is taken up by purchasable solutions to problems that you created. Nobody likes that.
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The ultimate challenge: This would be fine and pretty fun if the rest of the system were implemented well. The problem though is that if you get stuck with a nearly impossible challenge (chaining 4 spartans with the shock rifle? really?) then you are stuck either buying a skip or wading through up to 30 unrewarding matches that you have no motivation to win just to see if rng is nicer to you when assigning the next challenge. Just no.
Solutions:
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Win rewards and win streak bonuses: Halo reach had this right. Winning feels good, and being rewarded does too. A small multiplicative bonus would go a long way toward player satisfaction.
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Slot machine: Halo reach also had a fun random reward for finishing a match, that way everyone feels rewarded, but very rarely someone gets to feel really lucky, which is obviously a good thing,. If I remember correctly, the slot machine rewards raised during streaks of finishing games and would lower instantly when a player quit a match.
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Skip to rewards, not past bad challenges: As I have shown, challenge skips are very problematic. Instead of those even existing, challenges should be balanced down to the point of being universally reasonable. If you want to sell something, maybe sell a token to instantly skip to an item on the battle pass that you want, or swap an an item some distance forward on the pass to get it sooner. I would love this, buy them, and I am not about to pay you for a solution to a problem you are making as it stands. Every batttle pass is probably going to have about 10-15 things people really want, and would like to have earlier in the season. This could be quite profitable and fun for players.
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XP: If there were win bonuses and slot machine participation bonuses as outlined there wouldn’t be a need for wonky xp boosts that are hard to tune properly. If you wanted to keep selling xp boosts, fine. but honestly there are other ways to make money that people would enjoy more. It might be too much work and I understand that, but more cosmetics would make the season pass feel less like filler, and more rewarding. Or maybe giving players a rebate of spartan points or whatever the currency is could work. Lots of other battle passes that have proven successful have done that.
I have been playing halo since combat evolved, and it was my reason for buying the original Xbox. I want this game to do good, and these are just some of my ideas. I really hope they help.
Thanks.