BTB needs love from 343Industries!

Games Other Halo
1

Hello Waypoint people !

I am pretty sure there are many BTB lovers around here, and that’s why I’m proposing you some cool stuff and suggestions to make the BTB experience in Reach just as great as it can be !

first of all, I should explain shortly : I’m member of the BTB community ilovebtb.com, which born thanks to the great Halo2 BTB experience, and which provides since Halo3 a regular online BTB championship (with offline Finals).
That’s a really short explanation! If you want to know more about, you can go there : ilovebtb.com » IloveBTB in English (Don’t worry, it’s in English).

Since the start of Halo: Reach, we needed to adapt the basic settings of the default BTB in order to make the most well-balanced and fairly competitive experience on this game. I won’t open another discussion of “is Reach worst than H3 ?” , but from a competitive point of view, default BTB in Reach isn’t enough balanced to pretend to be competitive, so we started to work !

And finally, after 10 beta versions, over 320 organized playtests gathering each week between 100 and 120 players, ilovebtb Playlist v1.0 have been available on the ilovebtb’s file share on March 2011.
It has been the official playlist of the third season, and had been a great success, so much so that Bungie decided to take two of our maps (Utopie (which is in fact BTB Paradiso) and Wayont) even if they decided to make surprising changes we don’t like so much!

So, I come to the point : if you love Big Team Battle as we do, you should be interested to see another BTB playlist in Matchmaking which would provides teamplay, competitive games and all sort of epic stuff! All the necessary work to make this dream happen is ready, and continues to be checked and upgraded regularly by a consistent structure.

More than that, there’s not only French frogs who take care about Big Team Battle : some growing-up structures like bigteambattle.net needs some help to show how great they can become, and in return they will surely be glad to contribute to the BTB popularity by offering many services to the entire community.

So, if you like what I am writing, you could support this by signing the petition for a competitive BTB playlist in matchmaking, and showing how this discipline is popular!

SIGN THE PETITION !
http://www.petitiononline.com/btb4all/petition.html

Here is a short video you can show to "Make a buzz, change your forums signature, talk to your friends, neighbors, parents, grandparents, dogs, cats … Because it’s time to put pressure on our favorite developpers!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQVxOUxanIk

Some of you could think “why should it be another playlist instead of just an “update” of the actual one?” and to that, I can just answer that what I suggest isn’t an upgrade but another experience : the actual playlist is nice for individual fun things and cool for casual players, whereas a Competitive Big Team playlist would promote other aspects of the BTB, such as teamwork, “clan battles” , strategies, and so on.
The two playlists wouldn’t be rival, they would be complementary.

Thank you,

2

I too would like to see the Matchmaking settings in BTB become more suitable for both competitive and more easy-going players.
It’s hard to explain directly, but BTB in Reach sometimes feels like it’s lacking something. Although Bungie removed a lot of the more unsuitable gametypes such as Stockpile and Headhunter I still feel as though something is lacking, especially regarding maps.

A lot of the maps in BTB just don’t resound with being a good experience. Some of this is due to gametypes (1 Flag on Hemorrhage for example) and the maps they are set to, whereas in other cases some of the maps just don’t seem to add anything to the playlist; rather they just supplement what already exists. For example why have Utopie & Paradiso both in the same playlist when Utopie is a much more functional and better balanced version of Paradiso? In some cases the maps are simply not scaled right; Hemorrhage’s Blue team get an advantage for controlling the Plasma Launcher due to their portal’s proximity to the Launcher. Abridged is simply too large and has far too many power weapons making the vehicles practically useless between full parties.

In other cases some of the maps have awkward spawns or objective placement and could be improved greatly if some time was merely spent reassessing those small things. In this example I’ll use Boneyard - It seems to make littles sense that the map should play along the same axis for Objective as it does for Slayer. If the axis was changed to attackers spawning in or near the Frigate and Defenders spawning near the Refinery one sided objective games would suddenly seem much more natural as far as players having a “base” to assault goes and would also allow for good games of One Bomb which aren’t currently found on Boneyard.

Changing things like spawn points and objective placements for specific gametypes can greatly help improve the variety within the playlist as well as hopefully pleasing players who can perceive flaws int he way things are currently set up.

3

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t like Utopie, but Wayont is ok. Without looking at the gametypes myself, what are the main differences between regular BTB gametypes and your versions?

4

I like the current variety but welcome more.

5

> I’ll be honest with you, I don’t like Utopie, but Wayont is ok. Without looking at the gametypes myself, what are the main differences between regular BTB gametypes and your versions?

The main differences in the ilovebTB settings compared to default is that loadouts are restricted to sprint with Armour Abilities being map specific pickups. Maps are also forged to better improve the flow of games and to minimise imbalances that either side may suffer from.

6

> > I’ll be honest with you, I don’t like Utopie, but Wayont is ok. Without looking at the gametypes myself, what are the main differences between regular BTB gametypes and your versions?
>
> The main differences in the ilovebTB settings compared to default is that loadouts are restricted to sprint with Armour Abilities being map specific pickups. Maps are also forged to better improve the flow of games and to minimise imbalances that either side may suffer from.

That is a huge improvement already over default BTB competitve wise lol.

7

Big Team Battle will greatly be improved once the Title Update goes Live. Balanced gameplay mechanics and increased movement speed will make map control by a large team actually feel right. In Reachs current state, any players on the team feel weak and useless since the overall map movement is way too slow to be able to get set up with other teammates when you need to. This and a change in vehicle physics, AA’s, and Bloom will make Big Team Battle actually play the way it should play. Reach’s current state makes individuals feel useless and cannot help the team as they want to or make a change in map control.

8

I just took a look at some of the maps, Incubus looks really cool. And whoever did Headlong did a pretty damn good job, I didn’t think that one was even possible. And best of all, Highlands looks like it will actually be playable on your settings.

You guys really scale back on the power weapons though.

9

The only problem I have with BTB is that it’s ONLY the bigger maps. While I do like the epicness of charging across a field, I would also like the absolute chaos of having 16 people on a medium or small sized map.

10

BTB for me was epic vehicle combat. Now, not so much, due to the DMR shredding vehicles. I would rather have the DMR damage halved or Needle Rifles.

Whining aside, this looks great, I’m downloading this.

11

i support this.