Dear 343 Industries,
I would very much like to be more informed about what your mid and long-term plans are for Reach’s Matchmaking.
Right now I’m not sure whether:
A. TU/Default mix is going to stay like this,
B. You’re going to continue to roll out TU changes to more playlists,
C. You’re leaving it all to feedback/feel/population changes.
What is the overall goal here, 343i? What point on the horizon are you driving the MM ship towards? I feel completely in the dark here and I read every single bulletin and am on the forums nearly daily.
The point of this post is not to say ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, I just want to know what the current plans are, so I know what to expect. So we can have an informed dicussion in this forum about how we think that plan should be changed and debate it’s merit rather than taking stabs in the dark as we seem to be. I can see value in not wanting to ‘pollute’ the feedback pool by saying too much but I’d still rather know whether certain feedback has ANY possibility of affecting change. I.e. if someone says “I love the Bloom changes but hate bleedthrough”, is getting reduced bloom without bleedthrough even a possibility? If certain things just aren’t possible I think we should know so discussion can be more productive around here (e.g. how you said 1-50 wasn’t happening in Reach and that ended all discussion of it).
Personally, seeing playlists like Multi-Team and BTB go TU was quite a surprise. A few months ago it was said that TU would exist in it’s own special place, and that Default would continue to have a place - expectations were built up around that. Since then, the boundaries between what is TU and Default have shifted quite a bit, and to me it’s really unclear what will or will not remain Default. To make this a question, what range of experiences can a person reasonably expect to have with Default settings say… 2 months from now? Convsersely, when is Living Dead going TU? Will it ever?
What sort of changes are you willing to make? Is it just about maintaining and refining what is currently there now? Or are you still open to Megalo-ing new gametypes in the theme of Flag Slayer? Is a Race playlist a possibility? What are the roadblocks?
Regarding Firefight, in November the MM Systems Team mentioned in the forums that they were looking into changing the Anniversary Firefight playlist for the December update. Obviously both the December and January updates have passed now with no changes to Firefight in either. Are changes to Anniversary Firefight still ‘on the books’, as it were? What’s holding it back? What about the rest of Firefight? I know it’s not as hotly discussed as the rest of MM but it still makes up 1/6th of the playlists and pulls more players than the more ‘competitive’ versus playlists do and so deserves some attention.
I can understand that you don’t want to come out and say “we’re still looking into Firefight updates” and set unrealistic expectations by that but, I don’t have ANY expectations at this point, I have NO IDEA where you’re going. More information please.
Sincerely,
RC Master.
