Knowing this won’t get seen by many; I really like this game. I have over 1300 matches played and am working on my LASO playthrough on campaign. I’ve spent like 30 clams on mtx, with no quarrels supporting something that I’ve spent so much time with. I don’t empathize with a lot of the negativity about the game not essentially being just a remake of Halo 3.
All that said, holy hell this game is terrible. My ping has been very consistently under 100, most often 35-55ms, yet it feels like I’m playing peer to peer with somebody on another continent sometimes. My PC runs the game very well and I’m the kind of person who is sure to optimize as much as possible, including response times. We all know there’s a tremendous issue with melee registering, but there’s so much more.
In the past couple of weeks in particular, I’m having instances of landing shots, i.e. a mangler shot, 3 or 4 BR shots, etc. When following up with a melee after a fair bit of damage, I typically end up dying while the enemy only receives cracked shields. With something like the BR, I understand it’s tricky to estimate how much damage is really on them because of the burst fire but this SHOULD NOT be happening with the mangler, yeah? After 1300 games played I feel I have a reasonable understanding of the visual representation of an enemy’s general shield health. Yet some games I simply cannot trade a melee kill, and just die in a puddle of tears.
I’m also running into issues with just flat out shots themselves. In about half of my games, I’m losing almost every 1v1. Typically after getting off maybe half a dozen shots, I’m dead with my opponent not even cracked. Again, I know the BR is fairly unreliable on M&KB because of the burst and lack of magnetism (we’ll get to that in a bit) with high sensitivity, but I’m shooting a similar % to other players in most of my games and still getting comically out gunned. In the rare instances I do out perform them in the initial exchange, my headshots absolutely refuse to do more than be a hit indicator. Sometimes I just miss because tracking strafes with a mouse is a tall order, but I feel it in my bones - something is off with this game. Especially when, in these 1v1s, my opponent is as slow to kill me as I am them. I’m very confident I’m landing more shots than the player is receiving.
Grenades and rockets seem to be equally if not more-so hit or miss. Plasma and Spike feel very strong and reliable. Frag grenades, on the other hand, seem to be nukes fired from a Fat Man when they’re near me; while my outgoing grenades can’t even tickle a one-shot player sharing a corner or cover with it. I feel there’s something very wrong about this because shooting a grenade on the ground, such as a remote detonation, is actually really strong and feels more consistent in it’s blast radius/damage output than a thrown grenade. Rockets feel inconsistent but y’all are already driving this one home ahead of me.
To alleviate frustration, I went to play some duo controllers with a buddy. It was humbling after not playing controller for 4 years. However, I also discovered how incredibly sticky the aim assist is. And it should be, tracking would be a nightmare on this game without a strong aim assist. But what seems to be really horrifying is the discrepancy inMagnetism. I was getting headshots with a player’s head on the edge of my reticle, headshots that would almost certainly not count with a mouse. Again, maybe an error as the observer of this, I’m open to being wrong, but it felt way more generous with accuracy. If it is the case, the advantage should stop at aim assist. It is brutally difficult to hit headshots with the seemingly internet related problems as is.
During this adventure with controller players, my friend who is Platinum in that playlist (normally Diamond/Onyx) and myself who was going consistently negative and losing every game, we were getting matched with Diamonds every single time. This was really unpleasant, as I’m not a Diamond skilled player on that input type. I understand matchmaking is being addressed but I’m worried issues like this will persist after the upcoming update.
The lack of anti-cheat could have me paranoid but it seems to be incredibly obvious at times when people are walling. We all know what aimbot looks like but walling is usually a bit harder to tell. Usually; as other times it’s pretty obvious. It feels pretty rotten knowing that at least SOME of these guys really are cheating and there’ll be virtually no consequence. A ban on a free to play game is not substantial prevention, even for whenever in the distant future it happens. I hope I’m wrong but the current state of the situation is pretty rough and I don’t want to spend half an hour (or more ) at a time editing clips into the limited format/size that is able to be uploaded.
I know the mangler has been turning heads and it is going to get muted but sweet jesus these people are using it like it’s (because it is actually) going out of style. The mangler might as well be the starting weapon in the current meta with how available and dominant it is. It’s not fun to play against and I hope this update addresses this properly without nerfing the performance of it.
Last but not least, crashes and disconnects, Xv4 starts. Stability in this game is really rough, for some more than others, and the only thing worse than losing a 3v4 is being the guy that got kicked out. We haven’t gotten any substantial improvement, assuming we’ve gotten some at all, in THREE MONTHS. Games are STILL starting 3v4, having never matched a 4th player on that smaller team to begin with. There is no way to rejoin to compensate for these instances. Pleeeeease, I don’t know how this has not been addressed already. It makes the game unironically unplayable.
In closing I want this game to do well. I want to keep playing it, I want to see what it looks like in a year from now because Halo 5 ended up being pretty awesome with post-launch support; both in customs and in matchmaking. I love Halo and the way this game plays, and it really feels bad to be so frustrated and shorted by these issues, finding it difficult to remain positive when it feels the quality of the in-match experience is deteriorating so quickly.
See y’all out there.