Ske7ch343’s latest statement has only proved they are not listening, nor are they going to listen to the criticisms players have with Infinite. I am in no way condoning nor supporting the vitriol, threats and doxxing that has been occurring and that needs to stop immediately. I am talking the valid criticism the company has received for the terrible decisions they have made and forced upon their consumer base.
In his first paragraph, he attempts to ‘be on our side’ as he says he agrees with some of the criticism they’ve received. He doesn’t go into any detail as to what that criticism is, and from previous posts, his only concern has been the progression of the battlepass (quite frankly the least of everyone’s concerns right now). He also attempts to make himself out to be the martyr for the company. His job is to, “come in here and take it on the chin”. No, your job is to listen to the community and make it absolutely crystal clear to the programmers, developers, project managers, and the like as to what the community is saying, and then in turn communicate their response back to the community. We have yet to hear how they are going to fix things (beyond the progression). The player base is not stupid, we understand larger fixes take longer time, but we aren’t hearing what those larger fixes are.
Second paragraph he attempts to address they are talking about the slayer problem. Great! love to hear discussion, now what is involved in that discussion? What is your team deciding?
Biggest first mistake he makes. Feeling they don’t, “Owe” us an explanation of what they are doing or what they’ve done for the last 6 years. Sorry, but yes you do. You heard since last year how the playerbase wasn’t happy with certain features, and you released them anyway. You promised certain things to us that turned out to be bold-faced lies. You absolutely owe your consumers an explanation, and then since you broke our trust, you owe us future explanations of what you are doing and how you are doing it. We may not be the back-end investors of your company or projects, but we are the front-end investors you are trying to get to purchase your product. To play your product and invest their time and money into your product. If you want to shun us out, that’s fine. There’s thousands of other games on the market we can gladly invest our money into. Many of which are releasing games or expansions the same week Infinite Campaign drops.
The next few paragraphs give a light overview of the fact they realize the playlist debacle doesn’t work, but tries to create an excuse behind the UI system and QA testing, as if we don’t realize that games should and do go through testing and quality assurance. The problem is, even with their extensive QA and testing, the game (not gameplay - universally that has been positive feedback) looks as if it was released at least 8 months too early. The number of clipping issues, server desynch issues, crashing clients, etc. is unsatisfatory. I understand, this is a beta and I understand companies can now add content and update content throughout the life of the game, but when you release a game (especially 3 weeks early) and there are this many issues, and the company’s only response is, “Big fixes take a lot longer to take care of.” It means it was released way too early. If I bought a car and it only worked 65% of the time like it is supposed to, and the dealership’s only response is, “well, we are working on fixing that. Give us some time and please be patient.” I would stop buying cars from that dealership. Plain and simple.
Again ske7ch uses global launch and holidays as an excuse as to why they don’t have more time to fix things. Nobody told them to release Infinite multiplayer 3 weeks early globally. Nobody told them to release it for free, disconnected from the campaign. They made this mess, and now they are being held accountable for it by the player base.
Ske7ch goes on to say that he doesn’t like having to queue up 20 games to play 1 game of oddball and maybe win that so he can get credit towards winning 3. Guess what ske7ch, we don’t either. Nobody on this end ever thought a system like that, with challenges set up the way they are, would be a good idea. This is why we want communication as to “whose bright idea” it was and “what have you been doing for 6 years” because things like this make us scratch our heads and wonder what exactly anyone over there was thinking to believe this was a good idea. What makes it even worse, is we were promised challenges would work the way we play the game, and we wouldn’t be forced to play certain ways in order to complete challenges. Fast-forward to launch and we are forced to play specific game modes, get eliminations with specific weapons, win specific matches and all the while, removing the ability to do it in bot lobbies for 90% of the challenges so those of lower skill level have little hope of completing these challenges without the challenge swaps (this is why the player base thinks 343i is forcing purchase of challenge swaps).
He goes on to ask if the weekly reward is worth the strain of the weekly challenges. Short answer for you ske7ch, no. No they are not. Completing 20 weekly challenges should be WAY more than enough to get a weekly reward. In reality, completing 7-10 should be enough to get the weekly reward, and the remaining challenges should be just to get through your progression faster. What is frustrating is ske7ch works for 343i, he has the ears of the developers, of the employees directly responsible for working on this game, and either he isn’t stressing these criticisms enough, he isn’t being listened to, or some combination of the two. Does ske7ch deserve to be blasted? Don’t know, because the problems are being communicated loud and clear from our end, but we are getting no worthwhile information coming back from 343i to know where the problem sits as to why things are the way they are, and how things are going to be changed.
He goes on to lightly touch on the shop and how running a game/servers/company is expensive and this is the business model they chose to make that money. He doesn’t say if prices are going to be adjusted. He doesn’t say why they changed to this business model. He doesn’t go on to explain the reasoning for it. His statement basically boils down to, “this is how we agreed to make revenue so it is staying. Deal with it.”
Finally he closes with that everyone is entitled to their opinion and he understands players are going to leave but he is really proud of the foundation that 343i has for Halo Infinite. What is funny is one of his last statements, “I’d rather have people who are so passionate they’re yelling at us than nobody caring at all.” Problem with that is, people get tired of yelling. Eventually they do stop caring because they aren’t being listened to. How quickly they forget how fast Halo MCC player base left because of problems like this. Because 343i didn’t listen to their players. Now they’ve raised the bar on ignoring their players and basically told us, “if you don’t like it, leave.”
I don’t believe the problems with halo are ske7ch343’s fault, and he doesn’t deserve to get blasted, screamed at, threatened, etc. Neither do any of the developers of Infinite. They do deserve to be held accountable for the parts they played in allowing this to happen to the game. I continue to encourage players to voice their concerns and issues with what is undeniably wrong with the game, and hope that 343i starts to listen. Otherwise, we, as always, will speak loudest with our wallets. Players will stop buying the battle pass. They will not buy anything from the shop. They’ll play a few games for the enjoyment and leave it at that, or they will leave entirely for other games and other companies that actually do pay attention to their player base.
I, for one, haven’t purchased the campaign yet. I haven’t bought anything from the shop, and the only real money I spent was on the battle pass. I will play campaign (thank you xbox gold membership!) and hope it is really great, but I hope they fix the problems we have, and fix them fast. Otherwise, maybe I’ll run into all of you in other games. 
If anyone from 343i actually does come into halowaypoint and read these threads, I hope they take them seriously as to our frustrations from Infinite. The gameplay is fantastic and I applaud them on that, but it doesn’t overshadow or excuse everything else that is wrong with it.