Something I noticed while playing this morning, was that the Slayer playlist had 90,000 or so players and the BTB playlist had 89,000. I’ve never seen any numbers as close like that before in any FPS game. The standard TDM/Slayer variant always has a substantially more amount of player than any other playlist. But for some reason in Halo 4, I’ve noticed that this isn’t the case, and to me the answer is obvious.
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Lack of maps. Only 5 available maps at launch for a Slayer playlist is really…questionable. Especially when compared with Call of Duty which usually has 12 and games like MoH or Battlefield which have near ten for every game mode. Yes, H4 launched with ten maps, but only five can be played in one playlist, five in another, so forth. All ten maps, or even 80% of the maps can’t be played in a single playlist. After a while, you get tired of playing the same five small, maps for Infinity Slayer.
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More action. A BTB game is literally packed with action from the start. A 4v4 slayer game can get mind numbing occasionally, specifically if you’re on a map like Complex. Haven seems to be the only one where the action is always there and consistent. This is where BTB succeeds compared to say, Ground War in COD. A standard 6v6 TDM in COD already has enough action. Making it 9v9 just makes the entire game place go overboard. Where as BTB, the pace feels perfect on many of the maps. I’m really curious for December when the next batch of maps comes out and see how they play on this.
Other than that. I’ve had a lot of fun with this game! The in game numbers show it’s been successful, and even after Black Ops 2 releases, the two main playlists will still be in excess of 50,000 people. My only gripe is the map rotation, and not having SWAT and Grifball available at launch 
edit: And this is coming from a very high level Call of Duty player(in game k/d in excess of 2.8 since Modern Warfare 2 and win/loss rates in excess of 2 playing solo.) Who has gotten really tired with what Activision has done with the series.