I still don't believe what 343 said

Neither have I, it’s just called knowledge before making an arbitrary statement because you’ve played 2 games.

Yeah I’ve totally only played two games when I own probably about 60 different games all of them I’ve bought with my own money, and you completely ignored the fact that I mentioned that fortnite’s beta wasn’t what it is now

They did do it on purpose. Look, at some point some of you (as some of the community have accepted it) Halo, and Xbox fans must realize that this is who Xbox, and 343i are. THIS INCLUDES PHIL!

Halo 5, Halo Wars 2, now Infinite. Along with, Forza M 5, 6, and 7, Gears 4 & 5. Along with releasing games unfinished/incomplete with lacking content. See Crackdown, State of Decay 2, and Sea of Thieves! That is called a track record. It is what it is. And what it is is foul!

Phil, and Matt, clearly have mandated that games be a GaaS, and 343i had to get this game out this holiday. And they will patch on the go, and slightly scale back the awful monetization so it is just “Good Enough”.

Halo Infinite has had nearly triple the development cycle of Halo 3. But somehow is releasing with a third of the content/options. BUT YOU BET THISE MICRO-TRANSACTIONS are fully functional, thought out, and working!

Personally I am passing on Infinite until it is a complete, working, and finished product, with a severe work over on the artificial grind accompanied by predatory Micro-Transactions.

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It’s called being facetious.

Whoever decided the Commando was an acceptable replacement for the BR probably uses the Plasma Pistol and tells their friends, “GuYs I sWeAr ThIs Is ThE bEsT gUn In ThE gAmE.”

I hope so the game is looking very bad right now I really do hope they are planning more…

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I hope they’re planning more stuff as well and I hope they add in firefight or something like Spartan ops that would be something I’d like to see with Halo infinite as they have a massive open world now and to make it to where players only get to experience that through the campaign is a bit unfortunate

Not to mention it was delayed by a year.

Yeah no crap
and he’s acting like a child lol.

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Just play the campaign lol

I’m one of the first guys to tie the challenge swaps to the gamemode playlists, but I’m not unreasonable.
I do believe that the decision to only have 3 playlists was outside of Ske7ch’s influence, and it likely comes from a direct request from higher up and is known primarily to the UI design team. So I don’t necessarily think Ske7ch is lying, but I also don’t think he has the full picture given to him.

Back when this was flaring up I said “The only reason to constrict playlists is to sell challenge swaps.” But now I don’t think that’s the only reason anymore.

Let’s talk about CODE
Sometimes code gets messy, and hard to alter without breaking things, especially if the guy who designed it years ago isn’t working there anymore (Possibly)
But more importantly, if you’re trying to do something like add a new playlist, the expectation is that you could simply copy an existing one, remove all its contents, and fill it with new ones, then drop it in next to the existing ones and it would just work. That’s somewhat simplified but in essence that’s how it would normally be done.
UNLESS there’s more layers to it, such as a matchmaking algorithm that influences the probability of what modes, maps, and teammates you land with. That’s when things get complicated.
So really it all comes down to the framework of the game. They intentionally designed it without pregame lobbies and a veto button, and so I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an algorithm of some kind that needs to be dealt with whenever playlist changes are made.

It’s not necessarily bad. It could be trying to give you the best possible experience within the limitations of probability… but just thinking about how I would implement such a system, it’s like two different spiders working on the same web. I would not have made this tradeoff, I would have kept it random, with a player veto option. It would have allowed for each playlist to be a simple array with a random number picker deciding which index gets chosen. Then you really could just Drop In new content, test it for a couple hours, then ship it.

So, I say we should cut them some slack. With many players leaving, they’re under a lot of pressure to make these changes as it is. And if it was important to their monetization, Microsoft would’ve tried to block them from telling us it’s coming… It’s just too bad that it won’t be until the end of the month before things get better in the playlist department.

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I cant believe people are spending money on challenge swaps while I have 11 left at level 53 of the battle pass and never got below 7 or 8 of them. I only use like 3 or 4 a week so far and have finished all the capstones

You accepted it when players wanted every single feature to be in one game. Halo has outgrown the old model. There’s no way they could sale the game for $60 when players want never ending multiplayer content. They clearly focused on the gameplay aspect more than anything else. WHICH IS GREAT! If you like the game then play it, even support it. If you don’t there are other options. Halo has to get in where they fit in and this is the standard live service model. I agree some store items are egregious (looking at you pineapple grenades and 15 dollar camo coating) They will find a balance of making the fans happy and keeping Microsoft happy.

Likely as much as they may want to give us everything we ask sometimes they are not allowed to by the higher ups going off some live service stats and has never played the game but believe they know what’s good based on other previous live services and surveys. I play other games and for example this one BR game will not for the love of god implement a solo que. Because “their stats say people don’t like”. I call Bs. Halo on the other hand.
Lone Wolves and Team Slayer are integral parts of the Halo experience. Forget what the stats say.

As far as them forcing people to buy challenge swaps and xp boost I think is a bit dramatic. They are literally littered throughout the battle pass. Given in the free event, given out on gamepass, also on the back of other products that you probably buy already anyway.

The challenge system can be a little more robust, but what do you expect from a first time live service for this franchise. Even though others copy Halo I don’t think they are going to outright copy other game and need to tweak it a bit. Things like Weekly challenges only counting when they are visible on the main que instead of being counted all week long, This past week my last weekly challenge was win 17 games. Ironically I likely completed and won 17 games just to get to that point. Slightly frustrating but pwned the noobs to get it down. More daily challenges would be good. Examples being, Get 10 or 20 headshots. Play 5 games, easy stuff that you would do anyway and your weekly challenges can be slightly harder but are also being tracked all week long. I lost count of the time I was asked to do something for weekly challenge that I had done already in the week only to not have it count because it wasn’t on the main challenge list.

So I have a very specific counterpoint to that: If it is the case that there are technical limitations to adding additional playlists, why would they take that approach on a game where they intend to do multiple live events per year? If that’s the case, they kind of screwed themselves in the short AND long term, no?

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Hard to blame code when the standard has been set many years ago. Even Splitgate has 10+ playlist. Again I Am one of the ones defending 343. It becomes bad when I have my double XP going and I can’t find the match I’m looking for to complete challenges. For example I had one that was Complete a Total Control match, not even win it just complete it. I qued 6 times back to back and still didn’t get one. I moved on to quick play to try and complete other but wasted a good portion on time searching instead of finding what I was looking for.

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They could easily have the multiplayer have endless content by the likes of DLCs or something similar to the MCC.

Also no I really don’t think they did focus on the gameplay first I think they built the store before they did anything else.

Also what happens to all the purchases 10+ years from now when the game is eventually shutdown? Its ultimately a waste of money for players if it’ll all be turned off one day.

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Beyond the possible technical limitations, they likely had some sort of plan and had all these things ready to roll out a few times a year, but the severe public backlash may be causing schizms within 343’s teams and management. Whatever they were planning is no longer going to work, and so their choices are to either stick to the plan and let the game die out before 2023, adjust the plan to make it more consumer-friendly (saving the game but losing some dignity), or take the current revenue and run.

Remember, SOMEBODY planned and approved the current state of the game. And that somebody doesn’t want to look like a fool or a pushover to his peers.
It certainly did not end up this way by accident, though.

Though it is still possible that the system is designed in a way that makes it tricky to change course. Why they would do it this way, I’m not sure. It’s not as if it’s any faster to brute-force your code unless all the programmers have severe ADHD and that’s the only way it could ever be finished.

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I mean yeah, I agree.
In my opinion it should have been simple enough to rip MCC’s Matchmaking and Playlist functions out and paste it into Infinite, and just change the variables to comply with Infinite’s.
I don’t know what they had to do to the game engine to make it do what it does but it shouldn’t have been that destructive to its ability to add the Slayer gamemodes to an array and call it a playlist.

But it is possible… stupid and riddled with oversight, but possible.

It doesn’t give me much hope when content is found missing from the game and people say things like: “where’s mission select?” and then 343 quickly chimes in “oh, don’t worry, that’ll be added in soon…” It really makes you wonder how much of this game was not ready for launch.

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