I had a hankering to play some Hemorrhage today, and I didn’t know why, but I figured I’d just go into Big Team Battle and find a game and play it quickly to get rid of my craving for bloody, gulchy goodness. So I did so. Right upon getting into a match, the first reason I already retired from this playlist smacked me across the face again. I didn’t recognize any of the maps available for play. Community maps abound! Ick. None of the above was successfully voted, but Utopie was in the next selection of maps. It seemed the other eight players immediately voted for it, then reason number two for my retirement from that playlist hit me across the head. I was matched against a full team, when everyone on my team was randoms. To make this even worse, the lowest rank on the enemy team was a Legend (they also had a Forerunner, a Reclaimer, and an Inheritor). This wouldn’t be so bad, except that I was the highest rank on my team, at Field Marshall (the lowest non-guest rank on my team was a Captain). In other words they were pretty clearly well-rehearsed, experienced, and at a huge advantage for the act they were about to perform on us. I’m sure you can see where this is going, with the full opposing team of high ranks voting fervently for Capture the Flag on Utopie. I certainly saw where it was going.
Well, like I said, I saw where it was going, so I tried immediately to break off and hide. I found a pretty good outcrop of rocks, and I was able to hide there for a good while. I could see from my perch my teammates were dropping like flies and then I heard the whir of the Banshee flying over my base. I noticed the Banshee was flying over my quite a few times, so I figured I would probably be found. Anyways, a number of my teammates quit around this point, and from my perch, I saw enemies taking the middle rock of the map and picking us off with DMR fire. Then they moved on top of our base, and that’s when the Banshee finally found and nailed me. I spent the remaining ~8 minutes of the game trying to escape the spawn trap, in a futile attempt to preserve my kill-death ratio. I failed to escape, obviously. It eventually became a game of activating Active Camouflage right when I spawned to extend my life ever so slightly. So here was reason number three. Spawn camping abound! I ended up with no kills and twenty-six deaths in the end. But I stuck it out…
I took a small break, disgusted with my luck at finding a fully superior team on that specific map, and regrouped in an attempt to find the apparently now much-coveted Hemorrhage. So I find another game. Once again we’re bombarded by community maps, and Abridged is chosen. I didn’t have much of a problem with it, except immediately reason number four snuffed me in the face. A teammate came up and punched me, then T-bagged when I looked at them. I ran off, but I saw a few of my teammates doing this as I did so. We were sure to lose. Then reason number five hit me. Suddenly, the host quit. We had to sit for literally around a minute to connect to a new host, but right when we got dropped back in, that host quit too, followed closely by three more teammates. All-told, we ended up waiting literally around three to five minutes for the game to find its final host; a huge and annoying lull in the mockery of a battle. I went to the bathroom and refilled my drink in the time, and when I came back, three people were remaining on my team, against their full team (two people quit their team by the end, but by then it didn’t matter much). Fun. We obviously lost.
So then I had one actual decent game of Slayer on Mt. Lam Lam, but I still wasn’t able to take it seriously. People were still just fooling around, team-shooting for fun. I always have that problem on this playlist. Plus I still didn’t know any of the maps. But I started up the playlist one more time, I finally found my coveted Hemorrhage. But then one of the stupid problems reared its head again. Right when the game started, two of the opposing team quit, and they were thus at an obvious disadvantage. So my team locked down their base with most of the Warthogs, both of the Wraiths, and quite a few Ghosts. The rest of the game consisted of them camping the inside of their base, our two Wraiths camping both entrances, and Ghosts trying to cram themselves in there like headless chickens. I pretty much sat around and didn’t do much.
All four of my games in Big Team Battle today were absolutely dreadful. Here’s the list of reasons again:
- Too many community maps
- Being matched against full, higher-ranked teams almost always results in spawn-trapping
- Quitting happens, I swear, in almost every game I play in this playlist
- Nobody takes it seriously; there’s always messing around
I understand that it’s a social playlist with few implications, but sometimes I do want to just relive the glory days of Big Team and have a huge, serious in tone show down on a map I’m familiar with, where nobody quits and everybody does their part. But it seems like the only people who do that in this playlist in Reach are those dreadfully annoying spawn trappers. And thus I was reminded why I quit this in Reach. 343 Industries, please repair this playlist somehow.