Hello Spartans, and hopefully 343!
As much as I have been enjoying the gameplay of Infinite, it is clear that Halo Infinite needs a bit of work to have the general player base have its back.
Personally, I find that the BP/XP issues could be fixed with two changes. The first I would imagine would be relatively quick, the second would be more involved but would imo lead to not only a better player experience, but offer better future potential.
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Challenges should NOT, and I repeat, SHOULD NOT target specific play. Halo has always been my favorite FPS due to such a pure focus on gameplay, and making that gameplay fun. With a massive focus on playing as a team, and performing as a team. The current challenge system not only directly contradicts this, but it admittedly is self aware of its faults. The fact that “challenge swaps” exist is proof of the band-aid fix. Any challenge that has a high probability that players would want to skip… SHOULD BE REMOVED. Period. This isn’t foreclosure software. It’s 100% entertainment. If something is in the game, especially a challenge, that makes the player base look the other way REMOVE IT. Period. The lowest effort solution would be to remove all specific challenges, and make them ALL generic. “Get X Kills”, “Win X Games/Play X Games”. No weapon requirements, no PvP requirements, no match type requirements. Every weekly challenge should be natrually progressed just by playing the game. Nobody should be thinking to themselves “Well crap, here is another BTB game that isn’t CTF…”, or “Well might as well camp and wait next to every _____ weapon spawn that I need”.
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Now the second fix, while more work, would be to implement a “Player Stats/Milestones” page. That tracks and lists account history for EVERY little detail, including the ones that these challenges are already tracking. Weapon usage, stats, medals earned, and objective stats. Then, at the end of every match, reward players with XP based on progress. Heck, you could cap this XP to avoid exploitation (say 25XP per match). Get a capture? 2 XP. Get 10 kills? 5XP. Stop a player from returning their flag? 5XP. Etc. And then you could also offer one time “milestones” for hitting certain thresholds. That have a dedicated UI element to show milestone progress. And this XP would NOT be part of the cap. Your first capture? Your 25th BTB match? Dying 1,000 times? Why the heck not reward players for doing just about anything in the game? All of this would lead to a better player experience.
Outside of these two things, I also think it would be worth the investment to create a pile of content to improve the “new player” experience. Essentially a collection of challenges that unlock a small collection of skins, armor pieces, shaders, etc. Where instead of XP/BP progression, you could reward a player a new helmet for the completion of the first 10/20/50/100 matches. For their 100th kill. For their 25th win. Etc, etc, etc. Essentially a secondary progression system that is expected to “dry up” after 25-50 hours of playtime. And would be the perfect place to add additional “community event/holiday/etc” unlocks.