Hello Spartans (and hopefully 343).
I’ve now put in over 30h into the “beta”, and from all my past Halo experience (GOAT series imo), I do have some concerns. Luckily, I feel like most, if not all should be addressable fairly quick.
- More lobby control. Sure, challenge changes and XP changes will be nice, but this really is the biggest issue. I don’t, and I don’t think many players in the past have played Halo for cosmetics. That is always a side benefit that is a nice reward for playing a game with such amazing gameplay, and variety! Being able to choose specific match times (this becomes a REQUIRMENT with challenges), would be a game changer. BTB, Slayer, SWAT, Ranked, Shotty/Snipes, Griffball, rocket race, doubles, Infection, free-for-all, etc. We all understand that there is a delay and not all of this is likely ready Dec 8th, but there is little excuse to not give us as much of it as possible.
- Event Playlists SHOULD NOT go away. Once introduced they should stay in the hopper. No excuse. This is especially highlighted by the fact that many of the leaked/data mined event lists have always been part of the BASE MULTIPLAYER EXPERIANCE.
- Event playlists NEED to last longer. Or be available more frequently. Everybody has different schedules. Nobody should have to worry about scheduling their year/months on playing a game. There are many ways to fix this, but the bottom line is no player should feel like they can’t earn a seasonal event due to real life events. People go on vacation, they get sick, they go into surgery, they have children, etc. etc. etc. The player base deserves a system that they know will always be there for them.
- Events need to find a way to continue to be rewarding after the path is completed. Being rank 30 in an event, and to have it come around should still give players reasons to jump in.
- Weekly challenges need to either be more generic, or we need to have better lobby systems. And considering this is all tied to a payed system (the BP), they need to be accessible to all players within a reasonable amount of time. 5 Killing Sprees could take 5 matches for player A, and be essentially impossible for player B. This isn’t right.
- Challenge system needs to be combed over to insure NO challenge is making players ignore objectives, or flat out quit. And lets be real here, DO NOT punish players for doing this. YOU the DEVS designed it EXACTLY this way. I am not one to quit out, but I don’t blame anybody that does. If John Smith has the follow: “Get 10 hammer kills, get 10 headshots, get 25 kills, play 5 pvp games” is it surprising to anybody that this player would camp precision weapons and hammer? Or if they had a “win 1 stockpile match” that they would quit out of every other BTB game type?
- The game needs to be more rewarding for continual play. I’m really glad to see the reward system have heavier rewards for the first hour (ish) of gameplay, but it shouldn’t be as punishing for those of us that have longer sessions. 20 matches is obviously far too many for a single level. Every hour of play should reward a level towards the BP roughly. You are still asking a maximum of 100h per season, or somewhere around 30h for people that use double XP tokens incredibly effectively.
- Challenge swaps need a rework. RNG is not fun. My suggestion is essentially, challenge swaps would instead translate any challenge to a “legendary” version of itself. Meaning the same XP rewards, but drastically reduced requirements. That “get 25 precisions kills”, drops down to “5”. That “win 3 btb” becomes “win 1 btb”. lets be real, the entire reason they exist in the first place is because people look at a challenge and go “gross, that’s going to take forever”. So with the above challenge changes that already removes all bad challenges, this would just keep them in the game and fast-track the challenges that aren’t toxic to the game. For instance, nobody should have a challenge to get kills with a specific vehicle. BAD. NO. But, if all those challenges were to become “Get 3 kill, or an assist as a driver/passenger in any vehicle” suddenly that challenge is more community friendly. And if you use a swap it would simply become “get 1…”.
- Instead of challenges being tied to wins, wins themselves should be valued a little more. I would imagine 25xp would be ideal. Just enough to be worth something, but not enough to promote people from quitting.
Overall, the dev team needs to go over the reward structure and literally sit there and go “Does this challenge mean players are going to play differently?” If so REMOVE IT. Period. Those “get 5 killing sprees” should obviously be “get 25(heck 50 even) kills”. Those “Win 1 stockpile match” should obviously be “play 3 BTB”. Because as soon as you reward for a win, people are going to quit out the second things look bad (which shocker, they are already doing).
And face it, I’m sure I’m not the only one that enjoys the game FAR MORE, AFTER my challenge list is done.
The community has spoken. We don’t have a problem supporting and giving $$$. Heck, the $90 token pile is still the most popular! So stop trying to design systems to create toxic and bad game flow. And bad community interactions. Especially when all of this is related to a system WE ALREADY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. We already paid our $8 for the pass. Why create so many toxic and inconvenient roadblocks for the player base. Especially ones that are incredibly difficult for the worse players (and guess what, they paid the $8 just like everybody else).
Overall I want to see Halo reach the peak again. But I can’t help be afraid that the monetization scheme is going to scare millions of potential players away.