To put it short, Halo 4’s banhammer needs to be “like” halo 2’s banhammer where you only got banned for hacking to win matchmaking games. The only thing added to the H2 ban is to ban people for heavy boosting and the banhammer to not be completely automated. Especially if it’s on boosting.
Details:
One of the things that really brought down Halo Reach was the banhammer and you don’t have to go far to find people that think Halo Reach has the most ridiculously strict banhammer ever made for Halo or any video game for that matter. We think that we always need it to be stricter and stricter and that that solves everything out there but it doesn’t. We can take this to real life situations like the prohibition amendment for example. You can’t just say “ban them for this and ban them for that” because its just going to scare away people from Halo that even if they might have done something wrong but just didn’t know but apparently there is a rule against it out of the 100s they didn’t know.
If someone is AFK, just kick them. Simple! How do you know someone didn’t fall asleep or forgot to leave the match or they ran out of batteries and didn’t have any so now they are stuck in a match and everyone else thinks they are trying to boost when maybe there not and then when they come here about it, people on the forums say “We’ve all heard the stories” and what not when maybe they are telling the truth and since its automated bungie, now 343, can’t help you if you found a glitch or exploit in their system and you have to live with a strike on your account that you got wrongfully when it was so easy to just kick them for idling. I have 2 friends who no longer play reach because they had battery controllers, had them die out, didn’t have new ones, and got banned 3 times. Also I have met people that got pranked where they left there controller down to go eat or something in a custom game and the party leader knowingly took them into a matchmaking game and so while they come back thinking “okay I was in a custom games, read all the rules and knowingly obeyed them so I wouldn’t have to deal with people not believing me and so when I get back on I should be completely safe” and bam they get banned for afking in a match. Try and argue that? Exactly. While the person that brought them into a matchmade game gets way with nothing bad to happen to him, the guy that obeyed all the rules and read hours of forums of the rules and then gets banned. Answer me this. How was that fair? He is stuck with it permentantly.
Other games kick you for idling yet you think it’s so hard yet the other games kick people within one match of idling but some of you still don’t think 343 can do that when they can. Gears of War, Homefront, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, etc the list goes on. And if there is level and rank in this then you won’t have to worry if they go down in level if you go to my idea of a simple rank and level system it solves that.
If they are in a social match, rather than ranked match so that they won’t go down and instead of idling they do the jumping modded controllers or rubber band and spin or hold down on the Dpad methods then what it should do is Gears of War method where it should be filmed, and since Halo 4 has a threatre mode as it should then it will be easy to give them a strike and have actual evidence rather than ban them because the system detected something wrong.
And it should be for Heavy boosting and hacking games to win in matchmaking to get banned. Other methods shouldn’t even count. I found out a glitch that it was too late for, at the time, Bungie didn’t say yet for Reach. I thought if you quit a match you get a 15 min ban, no matter what game it is long as it was matchmaking so when I was playing Score Attack I thought if I quit id get 15 min ban so I decided to, every time I didn’t get the map and gametype I was looking for Firefight that I would just kill myself to end the game quicker so I could go back and try again but then I got my first ban because its apparently boosting? I got hardly any credits at all but the system think if no kills = ban because if someone went afk in score attack that’s how it would be that it was just someone cheating. So that I had the films but couldn’t get bungie to fix it because they said even though I found a problem with their system that they couldn’t take it off. So I got a week ban for something I didn’t do because if you do the math I wouldn’t have gained anything if I had played it I would have gotten way more cR.
So the ban hammer is just looking for so many ways to boost its killing it with throwing wrongful banhammers. Again if you go to my simple idea of rank/level this avoids everything because you’re going to the top a lot quicker so you can go to forge and custom games and start playing that more than matchmaking again like it was back them unlike now. If it’s just for finding ways to boost up greatly in a match or to hack to win a match those should be the only ways to get banned
Also depending on what you got banned for there should be a strike removal for going long amounts of time without boosting again. So say someone did do some form of boosting and so now he cant rank up or level for a whole month, lets say. If he goes 3-4 months, including the month of the ban, without doing it again he goes down a strike. The policy will still be the 3 strike ban and if he hits 3 bans he is then perma banned( or ultra banned). But for his 1st and 2nd ban he can go back down. So if he goes 8 months without cheating and is on his 2nd ban then he will be back to zero.
Also, Again only ban hackers that do it to win matches in MM. Don’t ban modders for making custom games and file share more entertaining. If you remember Halo 2 Donkey Kong on Terminal or Halo 2 Race Tracks on Containment where so fun and they never got banned since they weren’t going into matchmaking to cheat, they were making the game better. Those to game modes evolved into the maps today on Halo 3 and Halo reach as H2 Donkey Kong = Hurricane Katrina and H2 race mods = All the racing maps you see now built in forge mode that are all over the youtube. Even RvB show some of them and also on xbox Halo Waypoint. These evolved from modders in Halo 2. Who know a futuristic FPS game would be so awesome for racing and crazy dodging fun. So don’t ban modders that add more to the game like make modded custom firefight maps or what I like to call “Forgeable Firefight” and have a sick -Yoink- time having so much fun having a fort or something and holding off enemies being dropped off by phantoms and spirits. Halo Custom Edition had this able to be made and to have a program on the computer that you could do this on for the players to do and be able to put on a flash drive and put into Halo 4 would be amazing.
Also what would be nice to add in a filter to find the matches you want kinda like BF3 but even better. Say you only like KOTH on one map but you love Zombies on this other map. Have like a filter that is like a table graph where the horizontal and vertical lines are the gametypes and maps and you check mark which ones you want and then you get a list of servers to go for and wait in the lobby. It would be so simple and an end to the yelling and screaming “VETO VETO VETO” or “None of the above”.
