Is sprint REALLY a problem?

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

I’ve been finding it odd that much of the community is against having the basic sprint ability in Halo. They’ve given good reasons, but some people have proposed easy fixes to the problems. Yet still, the “anti-sprint” community doesn’t want to hear it. The three main arguments are:

  1. Players use sprint to simply escape from conflicts.
  2. Maps have to be scaled bigger to accommodate sprint.
  3. Base player speed has to be decreased.

I’ll start with the second one. Are slightly bigger maps REALLY an issue, and do maps have to be scaled THAT much bigger? I truly think the maps in Halo 4 were just poorly designed and that 343 just went overboard on the sizes. I could imagine maps like Haven, Adrift, Longbow, and Exile being about 10% smaller. Even if I’m wrong and maps do have to be scaled much bigger, it only really affects 4v4 matches on small, arena maps. There could be variants with some areas blocked off, or the player count could be upped to 5v5.

For the fleeing problem, well, escaping when you know the odds are against you is a viable strategy (I’m not supporting fleeing; I’m just saying you can’t really blame others for doing it). 343 could make it so that being shot at slows down sprinting speed, duration, and rate considerably (more than Halo 4). Some have suggested that sprint be disabled completely when shot at (seems a little extreme to me, but whatever). Besides, the fleeing issue is mostly prominent in long-range battles; at closer ranges, it is more difficult to escape.

As for the decrease in base player speed, I don’t see how that’s a problem if jump heights and other such things are left unchanged. Plus, you can sprint now, so is this really an issue?

These are just my opinions. I actually made a sprint post before, but I see so many people against it for seemingly trivial reasons that I feel the need to reiterate my position on the controversy. I feel that people mostly hate sprint simply because it was in Halo 4 (a bad Halo game), and they want nothing to do with any “new” systems that supposedly ruined Halo. But I think sprint has a place and can work in Halo, if given a chance. Feel free to support sprint or prove me wrong in your comments.

2

I personally don’t think sprints a problem, I very much enjoy it and i agree with your statements. Pity about half of the community disagree with you :confused:

3

It decreases the skill gap and it’s just a very annoying feature. Actually, I’ll take any other random and annoying feature in Halo 4 over sprint.

4

My personal opinion? I like Sprint - if done correctly - but frankly this game is broken with sprint because of network lag.

Maybe it’s the current population, but I regularly get games with terrible network lag. (Thanks guys for removing regional/good connection options - game is unplayable about 60% of the time for me.) I’m talking guys insta-killing me with needler around the corner terrible, unloading your entire BR into a guy and him not dying then he turns around and 4-shots me, people ghosting around the screen and assassinating you from behind. Let’s just say I tend to fire a lot of medium to long range shots because close range is entirely unpredictable.

I know for a fact that a lot of these games are with people in other countries, 343. I can f*****g hear them.

With sprint, it’s just even worse, I’m dead before I even see the radar as guys sprint around the map with their shotguns and swords and overpowered shotgun pistols. You can’t even properly time melees to meet them most of the time. Shotgun is worse because it’s got a ridiculous range.

The fleeing is very annoying, and guys can get out of tough spots behind cover when they are injured. And you can never track a guy down.

The other thing is as you shoot someone sprinting they very gradually slow down, they don’t instantly lose momentum. This might be a little more realistic, but it often gives your opponent just enough time to find that corner to run around, and we all know how terrible chasing people in this game is when your loadouts include a friggin shotgun weapon.

With dedicated servers and some changes to the sprint mechanics (only allow sprint when 100% shields and hp) I could see sprint being useful to move around with your team and try to gain map control. But honestly in a multiplayer setting with any sort of normal latency it’s horrible.

5

> It decreases the skill gap. I’ll take any other random and annoying feature in Halo 4 over sprint.

Can you give me an example of how it decreases the skill gap?

6

Based on what i’ve seen,

  1. My problem is not players escaping conflict, it’s the fact that I can die and immediately sprint back to a location to clean up a kill (made worse by instant respawns, but it was still a problem on maps like power house in halo reach). But the other thing is, with medium to long range precision weapons in loadouts, i don’t have to sprint back to the location I died…I only have to go to a good vantage point, aim and fire once or twice to clean up the kill.

  2. I don’t know what else to say other than they have to be bigger…if I can sprint to a mid point of any map from a base/side, it’s too small (above reasons in #1 contribute to the problem).

For larger maps, sprint isn’t an issue for me.

  1. No comments, no issue

All of that said, the problem I see isn’t just dependent on sprint. It’s a combination between sprint, map layout, instant respawn, respawn locations, precision weapons and hit scan.

As for the classic skill gap argument that others may use, I will say hit scan is more of a problem for skill gap than sprint, but that’s an off topic argument.

7

> Based on what i’ve seen,
>
> 1) My problem is not players escaping conflict, it’s the fact that I can die and immediately sprint back to a location to clean up a kill (made worse by instant respawns, but it was still a problem on maps like power house in halo reach). But the other thing is, with medium to long range precision weapons in loadouts, i don’t have to sprint back to the location I died…I only have to go to a good vantage point, aim and fire once or twice to clean up the kill.
>
> 2) I don’t know what else to say other than they have to be bigger…if I can sprint to a mid point of any map from a base/side, it’s too small (above reasons in #1 contribute to the problem).
>
> For larger maps, sprint isn’t an issue for me.
>
> 3) No comments, no issue
>
> All of that said, the problem I see isn’t just dependent on sprint. It’s a combination between sprint, map layout, instant respawn, respawn locations, precision weapons and hit scan.
>
> As for the classic skill gap argument that others may use, I will say hit scan is more of a problem for skill gap than sprint, but that’s an off topic argument.

Fair points. Thanks for staying respectful and level-headed.

8

> > It decreases the skill gap. I’ll take any other random and annoying feature in Halo 4 over sprint.
>
> Can you give me an example of how it decreases the skill gap?

  • Everyone can escape from any situation now. There is no outsmarting anyone anymore.
  • You don’t even have to position yourself good, because you can just sprint away anyway.
  • Because the maps have grown bigger there is going to become more long ranged battles (which requires less aiming skills + and in long range battles there can not take place any outsmarting).
  • On bigger maps there will be less team work and less power positions overall.
  • Not only will they become fewer, but the Power positions are also useless with sprint.
  • Several weapons have become significant easier to use, like the shotgun and sword.
  • With sprint, every weapon like for example the rocket has to get a faster bullet travel time and bigger explosion. It’s just way to easy to use.
9

I think the rocket launcher would be easier use if you COULDN’T sprint away.
Sprint doesn’t diminish the value of teamwork; it may increase it.
Long range battles are going to happen either way, and that’s only if people pick up a long range gun on the map.
I’ve proposed solutions to the escaping problem.
I respect your opinion, but I don’t think sprint gets rid of skill.

10

> I think the rocket launcher would be easier use if you COULDN’T sprint away.
> Sprint doesn’t diminish the value of teamwork; it may increase it.
> Long range battles are going to happen either way, and that’s only if people pick up a long range gun on the map.
> I’ve proposed solutions to the escaping problem.
> I respect your opinion, but I don’t think sprint gets rid of skill.

No. You don’t understand. Do you see a difference between the rocket launcher in Halo 4 and reach and H3/2/1? Isn’t the rocket launcher in H4 a lot more powerful?

Long range battles happens a lot more on bigger maps, maps increased in size because of sprint.

11

> 2) Maps have to be scaled bigger to accommodate sprint.
> 3) Base player speed has to be decreased.

  1. Very real problem for me. You think the maps could be designed smaller and more intimate than they are, but I think that with sprint in these proposed smaller maps you get the equivalent game play to if Starcraft were nothing but zerg rushes. Whoever swarms the fastest wins!

  2. This is a problem because it hurts strafing viability. How many degrees per second you can move in your opponent’s field of view (along with acceleration) is what determines strafe effectiveness. This is also part of the reason that the open play areas are a problem. When everything is a mid to long range BR fight, skill gap decreases because auto aim and bullet magnetism are much more powerful when compared to strafe.

I don’t buy that you HAVE to reduce base movement speed when you add sprint, but that one criticism being off base (imo) doesn’t change the very real problems I see

12

> > > It decreases the skill gap. I’ll take any other random and annoying feature in Halo 4 over sprint.
> >
> > Can you give me an example of how it decreases the skill gap?
>
> 1 - Everyone can escape from any situation now. There is no outsmarting anyone anymore.
> 2 - You don’t even have to position yourself good, because you can just sprint away anyway.
> 3 - Because the maps have grown bigger there is going to become more long ranged battles (which requires less aiming skills + and in long range battles there can not take place any outsmarting).
> 4 - On bigger maps there will be less team work and less power positions overall.
> 5 - Not only will they become fewer, but the Power positions are also useless with sprint.
> 6 - Several weapons have become significant easier to use, like the shotgun and sword.
> 7 - With sprint, every weapon like for example the rocket has to get a faster bullet travel time and bigger explosion. It’s just way to easy to use.

  1. Disagree. For example, on longbow…one of my favorite tactics to do is to sprint to one of the tall square pillars (have to be near it to begin with) near sniper spawn (in ctf), start running around the pillar if enemy is chasing…then just jet pack straight up…enemy is usually expecting you to be running still or to be cowering crouched on ground…I then proceed to slaughter them from the air and get a good laugh out of it. It seriously happens at least once every time I play ctf longbow (common in big team skirmish).

  2. Agreed

  3. Agree/Disagree, people do tend to stay more long range in this game, but I would say that’s because you can spawn with dmr/light rifle and just shoot half way across ragnorak (literally).

  4. Disagree, it’s easy to provide long range support thanks to comment number 3.
    And I hate to say it, but one guy sneaking to the other side while his team distracts the other team in long range battle is a viable strategy in ctf (hate those crouch walking active camo guys along the edge of maps :smiley: )

  5. Agreed

  6. Agree/Disagree, Agreed that some weapons are easier to use than ever…pretty sure you already know what weapons I will say based on comment #3, disagree on the shotgun just because people are dumb enough to sprint with it from medium distances and get put down by br/drm/ar with ease (common occurrence in my play time).

  7. Agreed, This is likely one of the main reasons hit scan was added to the game (and lag).

13

Obviously I don’t want to get the drop on someone and have them run around a corner and bait me into dying because I can’t handle situations that move faster than my reflexes.

I don’t want to get better at the game by dealing with multiple variables, I just want everyone to remain static and fight primarily in 1v1s because that would be more skill based.

14

> I’ll start with the second one. Are slightly bigger maps REALLY an issue, and do maps have to be scaled THAT much bigger? I truly think the maps in Halo 4 were just poorly designed and that 343 just went overboard on the sizes. I could imagine maps like Haven, Adrift, Longbow, and Exile being about 10% smaller. Even if I’m wrong and maps do have to be scaled much bigger, it only really affects 4v4 matches on small, arena maps. There could be variants with some areas blocked off, or the player count could be upped to 5v5.

That’s the thing, it affects small 4v4 arena maps.

How many playlists take place in 4v4 arena? Most of them. So those maps are the ones that are going to be used the most, and are very important for this reason. With Sprint, things like Power Positions (which are advantageous positions on the map that offer better offensive or deffensive possibilities in comparison to most other places) become significantly harder to design, as you have to build them around both sprint and walking speeds.

Along with upsized maps, we have to increase the range on the default spawn weapons, which decreases the usefulness of sprint (because it’s far easier to shoot someone at long range than it is at close).

A power position that is elongated in order to accompany the sprint speed (so let’s say it takes 1.37 seconds to kill with the BR. The power position must then be designed in such a way that without proper teamwork, the person on top has the advantage and can kill them in 1.37 seconds before the opponent has time to move up.

Basically, let’s say I’m standing up on a high point with a bit of cover. It would take approximately 2-3 seconds for them to cross under my high point and get out of my line of sight. With sprint, they can now do that in half the time, which means that my power position has been largely invalidated. To account for this, they increase the distance the player has to run by enlongating the map. Now it takes them 2-3 seconds while sprinting to cross that. But without sprint, that area is now a deathtrap.

So now a player is left with the option to charge under me without being able to shoot back and thus leaving me with a significant advantage (as in previous games without sprint he could challenge me and lower my shields or kill me at the same time) or walk and attempt to root me out of my position while being largely exposed to the rest of the map.

See the problem?

There’s also things like distance between cover to take into account, how wide the cover is in comparison to grenade explosion radius, how big the gaps are between walkways, distance to flag spawn and all that fun stuff.

Sprint upsizes a lot of these things, which makes power positions very difficult to create in order for it to be fair. That’s why there really are no power positions in Halo 4, and the ones we do have are very broken.

Take Top Mid on Abandon for example. That’s a power position, but so long as your team stays on the back side of the map, the opponents will continue to spawn on the beach and in a VERY open position, allowing for easy defense. If a powerweapon spawned down there it may bring things back up to balance, but in default Infinity settings there is no powerweapon.

Then we have the bases on Adrift, which are very defensible and very difficult to attack if the enemy team knows what they are doing.

Haven on the other hand is a very well designed map, but there’s no power positions. There’s no real flow to the map except following the enemy team spawns.

Sprint also makes map remakes significantly more challenging to pull off, among other problems.

It just seems like a lot of negatives for a temporary speed boost.

15

Sprint is here to stay, sorry to break it to you anti-sprint guys. There are much bigger problems than sprint in my opinion like jetpack and personal ordnance. There are too many people who hate sprint based on nostalgia for the old days. Its 2013 folks, not 2004. Now I loved halo 3 but going back to play it is awful, its so slow. It was good back in the day but not now. We live in culture where we want everything fast fast fast, and taking sprint out would be one step backwards in the evolution of Halo. And everyones reasons for hating sprint are just silly. People run away when they get shot at (wouldn’t you, or do you want people to mindlessly charge at you so can get an easy kill). I like the fact that we are faster and more agile, it makes sense since we play as super soldiers. If Mario could do it in the 80’s why cant Master Chief. We have to move forward not backwards. If you cant keep up with the speed of other players then you just have to adapt. Halo 4 is not a perfect game, it has its problems, but sprint is not one of them.

16

Sprint is not that big of an issue. It was perhaps an issue in Reach but that is a stretch but in Halo 4 it works fine.
Most of the problems that people have with sprint are not sprint’s fault. They are the fault of instant respawn, long range weapons being the default, and an inexperienced multiplayer team at 343.

I can agree that spirit ruins small scale Slayer gametypes (4v4 or less), but that can be fixed in Halo 5 by disabling it for those gametypes. Object gametypes are a whole different story. Sprint has enhanced those gametypes. Capture the Flag plays much better now, with sprint enabling last second refreshes that can turn the tide in a match. Without sprint Ricochet would not work. Players must move across the map quickly and if sprint were removed that would be impossible.

Increasing base player speed would also cause huge issues. Aiming, kill times, much increased auto aim, etc. Halo is already pretty fast for a console shooter make It any faster and you would have major issues using a controller to aim.

17

> Sprint is here to stay, sorry to break it to you anti-sprint guys. There are much bigger problems than sprint in my opinion like jetpack and personal ordnance. There are too many people who hate sprint based on nostalgia for the old days. Its 2013 folks, not 2004. Now I loved halo 3 but going back to play it is awful, its so slow. It was good back in the day but not now. We live in culture where we want everything fast fast fast, and taking sprint out would be one step backwards in the evolution of Halo. And everyones reasons for hating sprint are just silly. People run away when they get shot at (wouldn’t you, or do you want people to mindlessly charge at you so can get an easy kill). I like the fact that we are faster and more agile, it makes sense since we play as super soldiers. If Mario could do it in the 80’s why cant Master Chief. We have to move forward not backwards. If you cant keep up with the speed of other players then you just have to adapt. Halo 4 is not a perfect game, it has its problems, but sprint is not one of them.

We live in a generation where people want their games to be as easy as possible. It has nothing to do with it being fast paced in itself but by making it “Cod fast-paced” the game also becomes easier.

343 is trying to make Halo as easy as it can be, wherein one of the major factors which helps to make this possible is: Sprint.

18

It all comes down to the amount of time it takes to kill somebody. Sprint works in other games because of the faster kill times. Try and imagine a game like CoD without sprint… it ain’t pretty. Sprint is necessary in those games as it actually allows people to run around the map without dying every 2 seconds.

Halo has shields, meaning more effort and skill is required to get a kill, meaning sprint is giant pain the -Yoink- when you want to shoot someone from far away. They can literally just sprint around a corner and avoid any confrontation.

It was thrown in just because other games have it with no thought to how it would effect the Halo experience.

Halo isn’t some generic copycat like most FPS games these days, it’s actually unique and the unique aspects of the game that separate it from the others should be respected… 343 failed to do that.

I don’t have a problem with maps being bigger to accommodate sprint because it’s a huge fail anyway. A big part of Halo is map control and that’s no different in H4, so most of the time people are fighting in the same place throughout an entire match, often leaving other areas on a map completely untouched. On Longbow I could seriously stay in one spot for the entire game and not die once because everyone’s running to the lifts to battle it out on the upper level.

Sprint is just pointless in a game like Halo.

19

> It was thrown in just because other games have it <mark>with no thought to how it would effect the Halo experience.</mark>

And that is the problem. That it is in other games doesn’t make it a bad mechanic for Halo. It still is though.

20

> Increasing base player speed would also cause huge issues. Aiming, kill times, much increased auto aim, etc. Halo is already pretty fast for a console shooter make It any faster and you would have major issues using a controller to aim.

Not really, a player with speed boost travelling at 150% movement isn’t particularly much harder to hit than at default. Halo 4s aim assist is more than ample. Increasing base movement speed does of course aid staffing but not by as much as you may think. This is due to the ice skating effect. Acceleration is constant, meaning if you increase the top speed of a player it will also take longer to reach that speed and longer to slow down from it. This means it will take 50% longer to change direction at 150% base movement speed.

Whist I maintain 125% movement would have been preferable to the introduction of a Sprint mechanic I do appreciate that it is probably here to stay and that it is not as big a of a pressing problem as it is being made out to be. But I do think it does need some tweaks.

-It is pretty incompatible with instant respawn considering Halos kill times and shield mechanics. I think it should be a 5 second delay.

-I think it should be a 50% speed boost not 65%. This essentially means at 110% movement sprint would be the same speed as it is at 100%.

-The raise gun delay I believe should be made much shorter than it is currently. If you catch someone of guard sprinting yes I think you should get a 1 or maybe 2 shot lead but not 3 like it is currently. If you start missing shots I think the sprinter should have a chance to come back at you and punish you for it.

  • Kill times need to stay fairly fast. No 5 shot BRs please.

  • The Magnetism angle needs to be reduced a bit to aid strafing, aim adhesion I believe is fine as is in Halo 4 however.

  • Stopping power bleed through. If you get shot before sprinting that should hinder your initial acceleration for a moment. As it is stopping power only effects players already in the process of sprinting.

  • Loader footsteps when sprinting.

  • Bring back health so sprinters can carry the wounds of a close call and can be cut off before they reach a health pack.

  • Small increase to crouch speeds.

  • Reduce radar radius.

  • 5 second shield recharge delay.