I’d like to start off by saying that I love change in my games and it can work extremely well if done correctly (such as Gears Of War 3). However, I believe the Halo games need to ignore Reach completely and look at what made previous Halo games so populated.
It should be broken down the same as Halo 2/3 so there are ranked playlists and social ones. Halo has always been great because it provided the option to play high level competitive games or to mess about in social and customs.
The problem with Reach was it really did not offer this. You could play Arena… that’s it… and to play against people even close to your level you had to play like 30 games over a week just to get there… not to mention this reset every season. So if you felt like having a few competitive games now and then you couldn’t. Not to mention it was one playlist so no option for FFA or OBJ.
I think the best system would be to use Halo 3’s one as it allowed for progress tracking in all playlists and relied upon the win so players were more likely to work with their team than against them. In Reach you can AFK for 90% of the game, lose, not complete the objective and still get pretty much the same reward as everyone else.
The ranking system in Halo 3 was flawed due to derankers. I think the best way to stop this would be to make the ranking system calculate how much a win is worth based solely on the enemy team’s players (not taking into account who you are playing with). This would allow a similar system to be used as Halo 3, based on wins and losses, but there would be no incentive to derank. It would also stop penalising people for playing as a team (anyone remember the 100+ wins high skill 14 people?).
Mixed parties should play againt parties of the highest players skill bracket. This would stop long wait times for mixed parties. In my experience the mixed party is usually due to one player not having a high rank in one particular playlist yet can hold his own at the overall level.
This would also mean that double exp (woo hoo!) could make a return with awesome new playlists being offered up every weekend!
Post if you actually managed to read the whole thing and want to offer your ideas and/or feedback on the ones I’ve put forward. Thanks.
<3 Bandi