Apparently, the original Halo games are being done away with by the end of next year, or something. I haven’t checked this for myself yet because…uh, because…you know what, I’ll get back to you on that.
Anyway, my request is that accounts that once upgraded to Xbox Live Gold gain regular amounts of XP or credit (whatever the thing that progresses ranks in Reach is called) when playing the game outside of online matchmaking, which will obviously no longer be available. Is this feasible? Or is there some technical snafu or other reason that makes this not possible?
Now for the (extremely) boring story that everyone skips! Note: none of this is me moaning or complaining, I’m just recounting my experience.
Before I upgraded to Gold, I had reached the rank of Lt. Colonel through a lot of firefight, a lot of campaign, and rarely, two or three player split-screen custom games when I could convince my siblings to play a match.
And by a lot of firefight and campaign, I mean 40-50 minutes of firefight (normal difficulty, and sometimes easy) each time with almost no idling whatsoever (and let me tell you, Firefight can be really frustrating sometimes), and zero use of cheap credit ‘farming’ methods in campaign, like the infinite phantom destruction thing on ONI: Sword Base.
Well, when I decided to upgrade my account to Gold, my rank was significantly demoted, and a lot of my purchased armour pieces returned to being locked, including the Mark V helmet I had spent all my actually hard-earned credits on. But the worst part is that I lost the ability to earn regular amounts of credits unless I did online matchmaking!
Now, I’m being completely honest here, so don’t laugh, but the only reason I upgraded to Gold in the first place was because I wanted to unlock the Military Police and CQB helmets, which I had completed the requirements for a while ago. But for whatever reason, my Silver account couldn’t access the part of Halo Waypoint (great program, by the way) where I could see these milestones and unlock the helmets. I never had any intention of playing online at all!
So, fast-forwarding through Pvt. Jenkins’ helmet recording and we are at the point where I decided I had no choice but to play online to recoup my lost ranks and armours. To cut an already long story short, I didn’t enjoy playing online because Rumble Pit is forever empty and I could rarely have the proper Firefight experience because everyone votes for nothing but that low effort gamemode ArcadeFight. Now I don’t play online and I can only get a ‘decent’ amount of credits through campaign challenges, but those will be gone too once the game gets shut down.
Moral of the story is, honest players also suffer due to a system intended to thwart cheaters and the like. I would be extremely grateful if I could earn credits offline again, and I’m sure people who are in similar situations would be as well.
Ps. I hope no one hates me for writing all of that text, but it actually felt kind of good to share that, even if The Halo Reach Life Story of SpecialShelf is an uninteresting one and not really much of a story. I’ll put it all into a spoiler box if it would be better that way.