I’d like to know what 343 is doing to address the issue of map packs being released at a later date and then never seeing them -or extremely rarely- in the rotation of generic Team Slayer playlists.
Halo Reach has been a disappointment to me in this regard. I see more forge variants in playlists than I ever do the new maps. (Besides the new map playlists which hosted for a short time)
If I recall correctly, Halo 2 addressed this by making all map packs free after a couple of months, thus improving the playlist rotations greatly.
Will Halo 4 have anything like this or some other means of addressing map packs being integrated into playlists than a higher rate of Forge maps?
Otherwise I think this time I’ll just skip any and all map packs until they become mandatory to use the most popular playlists.
As long as they don’t remove any map pack playlists or make the maps hard to come by coughReachcough I’ll be happy 
I kind of liked how they were handled in Halo 3, minus the manditory part.
I think they should implement mandatory playlists which take over the old ones.
IE. After a month or two of a map pack being released, you need it to play in Team Slayer for example.
Then they set up a “Vanilla” small playlist section for those without it. I think this can help encourage more folks to get the new maps.
> I think they should implement mandatory playlists which take over the old ones.
>
> IE. After a month or two of a map pack being released, you need it to play in Team Slayer for example.
>
> Then they set up a “Vanilla” small playlist section for those without it. I think this can help encourage more folks to get the new maps.
True but the bad part of that would be duplicate playlists which would take up more servers. And if you didn’t duplicate playlists then people would complain that you need the map pack to go into BTB, which would be an easy way for 343i to lose much of it’s well-needed fanbase.
Not a very sound strategy looking like money-loving greedy people now l, is it? So no, this most likely won’t happen IMO.
If they are reasonably priced and phased in over time, I don’t see a problem.
Though one wonders why such map packs aren’t free when we already pay for xbox live gold.
To my knowledge Microsoft actually is the invisible leader in the controlling and dealing with DLC and its stipulations and regulations. I don’t see much 343i could do.
It wasn’t like that in the original Xbox ere which is why Bungie could treat Halo 2 map packs like they did.
> If they are reasonably priced and phased in over time, I don’t see a problem.
>
> <mark>Though one wonders why such map packs aren’t free when we already pay for xbox live gold</mark>.
I’ve always wondered why it was like that too. I pay $25 for Gold, I don’t want to be charged $10 for a map pack that may rarely come up and that we’re just feeding money to Microsoft paying for map packs that rarely come up.
Whatever they do, they need to make DLC mandatory. I hate the fact that I never get to play any of the DLC maps in Halo: Reach’s matchmaking just because some else doesn’t have them.
I imagine they’ll release the map packs one at a time, then after all map packs have been released they’ll pull the playlists so that they can save on the electricity bill by running less servers to host the playlists.
I mean we all loved that on Reach right? :3
They should always have map pack playlists, but something like a search option/filter that prioritized players with the same map packs as you would be good.
I certainly don’t think any playlists (apart from DLC-specific ones) should require a map pack; it’d put off new players too much, and there seems to be a general theme of attracting new players.
The best way to go about it would be to find a way to match players with DLC together more, like a search filter.
Would be nice that if you buy the map pack its makes it so you can only play with other people who have the map pack. So the playlists dont change but the new maps are added into rotation, then all the people who opt out will play together and not hold anyone back.
The only complaints i can see from that way is it separating friend groups, but tbh it could boost sales of map packs if one person brought them the rest follow.