Low expectations.

Games Halo Infinite
1

Given their record with the last shooters they’ve worked on, this will either save the series or make me want to play the old version of No Man’s Sky. Let’s start with Reach:

  • Nobody asked for Title Update, I prefered the regular over it to be honest. Not exactly good that it’s in all Reach gamemodes except Invasion on MCC. In the original, this drove me away from those gamemodes and kept me in Invasion which they ruined with those forge maps no one asked for. - When CEA launched, they brought back the “6 best multiplayer maps in the series”. That’s a load of crap because Ridgeline, Solitary, and Penance were never even brought back once. The others weren’t even that good except High Noon. - Removed half the gamemodes to “improve connections”, but all this did was act as Reach’s final nail in the coffin as for a lot of people, their favorite gamemodes were no longer available. - By the time H4 was about to release, Reach’s PVP population dropped from 180k-220k down to 12k-20k. I highly doubt everyone else was in custom games.
    CE Anniversary:

  • Campaign was very enjoyable, it was nice being able to play it again since I no longer had the original. - Missing CE PVP was very disappointing (I don’t count that Reach knock off as it). Probably a good thing though considering how inconsistent CE on MCC is and how the spawns are so bad you’ll be lucky if getting spawnkilled doesn’t make up half your deaths (how about spawning on top of a grenade in front of 2 enemies about to pick up Overshield?).
    Halo 4:

  • Copying COD in so many ways it wasn’t even funny. - Rough start since skinned weapons counted as their own weapon. Leveling may have been fast, but when the other guy has a BR or a Lightrifle (which if used right could 4 tap) and your only viable weapon is a magnum that can’t hit anything beyond 30 ft. - Weapon tuning. My favorite weapon (the Lightrifle) became useless because the BR was killing in 4 shots unlike it usually did in H2 and 3 because of hit registration and/ or bullet speed. - Armor abilities weren’t very good. Hologram was still easy to tell apart, Camo was extremely easy to see, Thruster was almost useless, Jetpack got a huge nerf compared to Reach, Hardlight Shield was easy to counter, Regen field was slow, and the Auto Sentry couldn’t kill anything. The only good one was Promethean Vision, and all that said about the user was they needed wall hacks or were abusing a feature. - By the time MCC was announced, the PVP population was a little over 10k. I highly doubt people just grew bored of it.
    MCC:

  • Really bad search times and overflowing lobbies for the first month. 12 people on a map made for 2-8? How did that make it past testing? - Hit registration is worse on each game. - Slower projectiles. - Very limited customization for years. - Missing content such as DLC armors/ weapon skins in H4. - Unpatched multiplayer glitches like punching your teammate and committing suicide resulting in them betraying you even if they never retaliated. - Hit registration is low on the fix order. Do they not play their own game? That’s a lot more obvious and frequent than a teleporting projectile. - Cross-play between Xbox and PC? Unless hit registration is as accurate as H5, framerates are updated, FOV/ gun sliders, and weapons are made hitscan or connections are improved significantly, this had better not be included in PVP. - Rather than fix their games, they instead want to add Reach, ODST (no one asked for them, but decent additions nonetheless), add customization options, fix bugs no one cared about like equipping locked emblems/ nameplates, make these games backwards compatible even though H3 at least was “improved” on MCC, and I could go on. - Took YEARS before improvements were announced and put in, most of which should’ve been low priority. - Progression=participation. A player who goes 30-0 will get the same XP as a player who goes 20-10. - Really, the only things that made MCC worth buying were H2A, 3 other games being included, H5 beta, and Halo Nightfall.
    Halo 5:

  • Maps suck, spawns are almost as bad as CE. - Announcer and power weapon timers basically just promote camping them. - Radar is almost useless, still almost never detects anyone until they’re about to shoulder charge you (I pay VERY close attentionto it). - REQ packs are beyond expensive, too many REQs to unlock (do you really need 200+ armor pieces, 200+ helmets, 20+ skins for each weapon, 3-5 of each vehicle and weapon, 500+ emblems, 100-ish visors, etc? Especially since unless it’s cosmetic has no place out of Warzone?) - Warzone, the only gamemode I was looking forward to was a let down in so many ways. - Sniper glare doesn’t belong in games with high mobility. - Insanely slow leveling. - Pay to win! - If it was a good idea to add and keep people zoomed in if they get shot in H4, why remove it in 5?Reach was amazing until it wasn’t.
    H4 was decent, got worse.
    MCC was nothing but flaws for the longest time.
    H5 sucked and hasn’t improved since I last played a year or two ago.

Follow my example. Set your expectations really low for Infinite. That way, if it sucks, returning it won’t be an issue. This is basically their last chance at a good Halo game.

2

Having a rough day?

3

Great post, you have definitely highlight some of the drawbacks of 343’s Halo titles. I agree with you mostly, plus it looks like Infinite may have sprint which does not bode well with much of the communities hopes and expectations. Time will tell, tomorrow to be honest.

4

I will say this: almost EVERYBODY wanted Reach’s gameplay tweaked in some way, if only to nerf Armour Lock and make Bloom manageable. Most players were very happy with the Title Update, mainly because of the aforementioned changes. Saying nobody asked for the update is just plain false; people were asking for since day 1.

5

My expectations are way high. Can’t wait…

6

> 2533274892901745;4:
> I will say this: almost EVERYBODY wanted Reach’s gameplay tweaked in some way, if only to nerf Armour Lock and make Bloom manageable. Most players were very happy with the Title Update, mainly because of the aforementioned changes. Saying nobody asked for the update is just plain false; people were asking for since day 1.

Pacing your shots was easy. Armor lock? That was more of a “SURPRISE” ability than anything. In almost every case I was in, all they accomplished was delay the inevitable. Even if what I said was false, it would’ve been better if they didn’t add it to more than half the playlists and instead make a new one for the most popular playlists.

7

> 2533274830340056;1:
> Given their record with the last shooters they’ve worked on, this will either save the series or make me want to play the old version of No Man’s Sky. Let’s start with Reach:
> - Nobody asked for Title Update, I prefered the regular over it to be honest. Not exactly good that it’s in all Reach gamemodes except Invasion on MCC. In the original, this drove me away from those gamemodes and kept me in Invasion which they ruined with those forge maps no one asked for. - When CEA launched, they brought back the “6 best multiplayer maps in the series”. That’s a load of crap because Ridgeline, Solitary, and Penance were never even brought back once. The others weren’t even that good except High Noon. - Removed half the gamemodes to “improve connections”, but all this did was act as Reach’s final nail in the coffin as for a lot of people, their favorite gamemodes were no longer available. - By the time H4 was about to release, Reach’s PVP population dropped from 180k-220k down to 12k-20k. I highly doubt everyone else was in custom games.

Going to disagree with your take on Reach as before the title update it was a mess that most people were not happy with.

  1. People were absolutely asking for the title update. The game had an unplayable amount of bloom, Armor Lock was extremely OP and ruined every firefight, damage bleed was a feature from previous games and was non-existent in Reach, active camo was way too long, sword blocking made swords useless and the magnum was useless.
  2. You’re right on this, the maps were bad in reach’s sandbox as they were not made with it in mind.
  3. What modes were removed? I’m genuinely curious because from what I remember and from what I’ve read they didn’t remove any playlists so if they did remove any they removed playlists that were so minor that they didn’t matter at all.
  4. Where did you get your numbers from? I’d love to see them since I’ve not been able to find any stats on the player numbers from any search engine outside of a forum post from January 2012 by someone with no connections to Bungie. Since there are seemingly no results/studies on the population I will use this post as reference so I need to emphasize that the numbers below COULD BE INCORRECT.

Info regarding the data collected by the author:

I use a simple copy and paste from Bungie’s REACH project page around noon local time. Not all values were collected at exactly that time. Occasionally collection could be off by several hours. I only guarantee that I have made no willful misrepresentations by deliberately skewing collection in such a manner that poor conclusions or comparisons could be made or that any numbers presented are anything other than attempts to collect data from Bungie.
Draw conclusions at your own risk.

In this post he claims that at the start of January 2012 the number of unique players was ~540k and by the end of the month it was ~400k with the peak player count of the month being ~600k. The Title Update began implementation in September of 2011 and was fully implemented by February of 2012. Let’s look at what happened in January, a pretty big month for the implementation of the TU.

Date Games Played Unique Players
January 1, 2012 1,206,817 537,140
January 2, 2012 1,202,405 548,657
January 3, 2012 1,129,350 540,306
January 4, 2012 912,248 466,355
January 5, 2012 826,839 443,688
January 6, 2012 834,251 440,819
January 7, 2012 1,059,523 539,049
January 8, 2012 1,290,695 588,511
January 9, 2012 1,020,055 517,671
January 10, 2012 789,485 419,835
January 11, 2012 809,657 422,753
January 12, 2012 778,300 422,797
January 13, 2012 832,922 439,099
January 14, 2012 1,107,833 555,796
January 15, 2012 1,377,907 594,595
January 16, 2012 1,252,136 574,239
January 17, 2012 1,015,112 516,033
January 18, 2012 759,403 417,509
January 19, 2012 772,028 418,761
January 20, 2012 772,836 420,030
January 21, 2012 1,100,170 544,035
January 22, 2012 1,420,243 607,853
January 23, 2012 1,120,234 530,898
January 24, 2012 809,809 427,617
January 25, 2012 739,634 414,341
January 26, 2012 701,281 402,860
January 27, 2012 706,742 404,378
January 28, 2012 1,104,247 547,250
January 29, 2012 1,344,498 597,420
January 30, 2012 1,023,835 517,638
January 31, 2012 704,350 407,128

January 10th is when The Arena, BTB, and Team Objective were all updated to the TU. As you can see, this update didn’t have any major impact on the population numbers with peaks of ~600k on the 22nd and the 29th. By this point, the game had been out well over a year and seems to have a very healthy population. When the update was fully implemented on February 7th, the slayer mode received an update that allowed lobbies to choose launch slayer or TU slayer which should, theoretically, keep both sides happy. Again, unless you have an actual source on the player count, I will consider these to be somewhat accurate and healthy for a game that age with a sequel looming in the not so distant future.

I haven’t been able to find a spreadsheet comparing player count between Reach and 4 but I did find a graph for hours played that contained pretty insightful data from Halo 4’s launch to 26 weeks after. At the start of the graph, or Halo 4’s launch, Reach was estimated to have ~1M hours played for that day. Since I don’t have player numbers, I’m going to make an assumption by comparing to the MCC player numbers and hours played on Halo 3 since I can’t get data from the launch of Reach on pc. Halo 3 on it’s first day had a player count of ~54k people with approximately ~800k hours played. From this we can make a decent guess that Halo Reach had a population of ~70k, a very healthy population for a game that is over two years old and just had a sequel release. This is well above your 12k-20k number, however, the numbers could very easily be proven wrong with the official numbers if they are available somewhere on the internet though I haven’t had any luck in my search. Multiple graphs from previous years coincide with this guy’s player count results for January 2012 and the graph comparing Reach and 4 matches many other graphs regarding hours played and population.

8

> 2533274837760922;7:
> > 2533274830340056;1:
> > Given their record with the last shooters they’ve worked on, this will either save the series or make me want to play the old version of No Man’s Sky. Let’s start with Reach:
> > - Nobody asked for Title Update, I prefered the regular over it to be honest. Not exactly good that it’s in all Reach gamemodes except Invasion on MCC. In the original, this drove me away from those gamemodes and kept me in Invasion which they ruined with those forge maps no one asked for. - When CEA launched, they brought back the “6 best multiplayer maps in the series”. That’s a load of crap because Ridgeline, Solitary, and Penance were never even brought back once. The others weren’t even that good except High Noon. - Removed half the gamemodes to “improve connections”, but all this did was act as Reach’s final nail in the coffin as for a lot of people, their favorite gamemodes were no longer available. - By the time H4 was about to release, Reach’s PVP population dropped from 180k-220k down to 12k-20k. I highly doubt everyone else was in custom games.
>
> Going to disagree with your take on Reach as before the title update it was a mess that most people were not happy with.
>
> 1) People were absolutely asking for the title update. The game had an unplayable amount of bloom, Armor Lock was extremely OP and ruined every firefight, damage bleed was a feature from previous games and was non-existent in Reach, active camo was way too long, sword blocking made swords useless and the magnum was useless.
> 2) You’re right on this, the maps were bad in reach’s sandbox as they were not made with it in mind.
> 3) What modes were removed? I’m genuinely curious because from what I remember and from what I’ve read they didn’t remove any playlists so if they did remove any they removed playlists that were so minor that they didn’t matter at all.
> 4) Where did you get your numbers from? I’d love to see them since I’ve not been able to find any stats on the player numbers from any search engine outside of a forum post from January 2012 by someone with no connections to Bungie. Since there are seemingly no results/studies on the population I will use this post as reference so I need to emphasize that the numbers below COULD BE INCORRECT.
>
> Info regarding the data collected by the author:
>
>
>
>
>
> I use a simple copy and paste from Bungie’s REACH project page around noon local time. Not all values were collected at exactly that time. Occasionally collection could be off by several hours. I only guarantee that I have made no willful misrepresentations by deliberately skewing collection in such a manner that poor conclusions or comparisons could be made or that any numbers presented are anything other than attempts to collect data from Bungie.
> Draw conclusions at your own risk.
>
>
> In this post he claims that at the start of January 2012 the number of unique players was ~540k and by the end of the month it was ~400k with the peak player count of the month being ~600k. The Title Update began implementation in September of 2011 and was fully implemented by February of 2012. Let’s look at what happened in January, a pretty big month for the implementation of the TU.
>
>
>
> Date Games Played Unique Players
> January 1, 2012 1,206,817 537,140
> January 2, 2012 1,202,405 548,657
> January 3, 2012 1,129,350 540,306
> January 4, 2012 912,248 466,355
> January 5, 2012 826,839 443,688
> January 6, 2012 834,251 440,819
> January 7, 2012 1,059,523 539,049
> January 8, 2012 1,290,695 588,511
> January 9, 2012 1,020,055 517,671
> January 10, 2012 789,485 419,835
> January 11, 2012 809,657 422,753
> January 12, 2012 778,300 422,797
> January 13, 2012 832,922 439,099
> January 14, 2012 1,107,833 555,796
> January 15, 2012 1,377,907 594,595
> January 16, 2012 1,252,136 574,239
> January 17, 2012 1,015,112 516,033
> January 18, 2012 759,403 417,509
> January 19, 2012 772,028 418,761
> January 20, 2012 772,836 420,030
> January 21, 2012 1,100,170 544,035
> January 22, 2012 1,420,243 607,853
> January 23, 2012 1,120,234 530,898
> January 24, 2012 809,809 427,617
> January 25, 2012 739,634 414,341
> January 26, 2012 701,281 402,860
> January 27, 2012 706,742 404,378
> January 28, 2012 1,104,247 547,250
> January 29, 2012 1,344,498 597,420
> January 30, 2012 1,023,835 517,638
> January 31, 2012 704,350 407,128
>
>
> January 10th is when The Arena, BTB, and Team Objective were all updated to the TU. As you can see, this update didn’t have any major impact on the population numbers with peaks of ~600k on the 22nd and the 29th. By this point, the game had been out well over a year and seems to have a very healthy population. When the update was fully implemented on February 7th, the slayer mode received an update that allowed lobbies to choose launch slayer or TU slayer which should, theoretically, keep both sides happy. Again, unless you have an actual source on the player count, I will consider these to be somewhat accurate and healthy for a game that age with a sequel looming in the not so distant future.
>
> I haven’t been able to find a spreadsheet comparing player count between Reach and 4 but I did find a graph for hours played that contained pretty insightful data from Halo 4’s launch to 26 weeks after. At the start of the graph, or Halo 4’s launch, Reach was estimated to have ~1M hours played for that day. Since I don’t have player numbers, I’m going to make an assumption by comparing to the MCC player numbers and hours played on Halo 3 since I can’t get data from the launch of Reach on pc. Halo 3 on it’s first day had a player count of ~54k people with approximately ~800k hours played. From this we can make a decent guess that Halo Reach had a population of ~70k, a very healthy population for a game that is over two years old and just had a sequel release. This is well above your 12k-20k number, however, the numbers could very easily be proven wrong with the official numbers if they are available somewhere on the internet though I haven’t had any luck in my search. Multiple graphs from previous years coincide with this guy’s player count results for January 2012 and the graph comparing Reach and 4 matches many other graphs regarding hours played and population.

The PVP numbers (not hours played, but player population) are by memory from launch until TU, then near the launch of H4. As for H4 numbers? Last I saw before MCC was released, the most populated playlist had a little over 1k. If there’s anyone else who played Reach regularly back then, I’m sure at least one of them remembers the numbers. As for the playlists removed? Let’s name the ones that stayed that I remember.
FFA
Team Slayer/ Arena/ MLG
SWAT
Snipers
BTB
Infection
Invasion
Action Sack
Grifball.
Anniversary BTB/ Team Slayer.

There were well over 20, close to 30 playlists before they were removed. They essentially removed every playlist that wasn’t a core part of the game.

9

> 2533274830340056;6:
> > 2533274892901745;4:
> > I will say this: almost EVERYBODY wanted Reach’s gameplay tweaked in some way, if only to nerf Armour Lock and make Bloom manageable. Most players were very happy with the Title Update, mainly because of the aforementioned changes. Saying nobody asked for the update is just plain false; people were asking for since day 1.
>
> Pacing your shots was easy. Armor lock? That was more of a “SURPRISE” ability than anything. In almost every case I was in, all they accomplished was delay the inevitable. Even if what I said was false, it would’ve been better if they didn’t add it to more than half the playlists and instead make a new one for the most popular playlists.

Not sure what version of Reach you were playing, but Armour Lock was possibly the most overpowered thing in the game before the update. It didn’t just “delay the inevitable”, it allowed the user to survive what should have been a lethal hit and allowed them to recharge their shields while it was up, with the enemy unable to do anything about it except wait it out, and possibly get attacked by another enemy in the process. If that happened then the Armour Lock user could just pop out of Armour Lock and two-time their attacker. This is what happened in roughly 70% of the times I encountered Armour Lock pre-Title Update.

After the update you could actually do something about Armour Lock, as throwing a grenade next to it dropped its charge to near zero, or you could kill the user outright by sticking them when they were around half-charge. Not to mention, when you broke it this way, you were usually safe from the EMP.

Pacing your shots is fine at long range, but you should at least be able to consistently hit at medium range without bloom causing your shot to completely miss when your redicule is right over the target’s head. The Needle Rifle had it the worst: it was a full-auto, rapid-fire precision weapon that wanted you to slowly pace your shots by NOT firing full-auto. That’s just bad design right there (though 343 may have over-corrected a bit by removing bloom from the NR entirely). Whatever Bungie intended with bloom, it didn’t seem to have worked the way they wanted it.

Splitting the community is never a good idea in any game, as it usually leads to playlists and gamemodes becoming underpopulated, which always equals the death of the playerbase. You don’t half–Yoink- an update like this: you whole–Yoink-, no–Yoink-, or at the very least 95%–Yoink-, the third being what 343 did. They kept the updates out of Team Slayer, Living Dead and Invasion, 3 of the most-played playlists, and applied them to everywhere else. Personally I would applied it to Team Slayer as well, but whatever.

The Title Update was probably the best thing to ever happen to Reach, purely because of these 2 changes, and most players you talk to will agree.

10

You can’t exactly say the population dropped due to updates and such, other games were coming out at the time. 2010 was when COD really became mainstream with Black Ops releasing a few months later after Reach and for Halo 4, Black Ops 2 released a few weeks later. As for MCC, yeah it was really rough.

As for Halo 5, it wasn’t really pay to win since Req really only affected one category of the game that being Warzone. In Arena, it was leveled playing field with the only difference between players was cosmetic and skill. I never found the spawns to be bad at all and I’ve sunk a good chunk of time into the game. Radar is as useful as it always has been. I think Halo 5 is the one I disagree with the most.

In the end, I’d say 343 has had a few bumps in the road with Halo but they’ve done a lot of good too. Halo 4’s campaign is great, Halo 5’s post launch was really cool, Halo Wars 2 is really fun and a great sequel to Halo Wars, brining Halo to PC is awesome. They’ve taken risks and sometimes it doesn’t pan out well but that’s reality. Really excited for the campaign/gameplay reveal!

11

Can’t really blame 343 for Reach. That was Bungie.

343 just updated the game for MCC. The game was left as Title Update because that was what people wanted from Reach back then.

Everyone can have their own expectations for today. Good or bad, I’ll still be playing Halo Infinite. Halo’s been around since I was a kid, I’ve made many memories.

Sometimes you just have to enjoy a game for what it is. If you come in with a negative state of mind towards Halo you’re only ever going to look for faults. Keep an open mind and take it for what it is.

12

> 2533274830340056;8:
> > 2533274837760922;7:
> > > 2533274830340056;1:
> > > Given their record with the last shooters they’ve worked on, this will either save the series or make me want to play the old version of No Man’s Sky. Let’s start with Reach:
> > > - Nobody asked for Title Update, I prefered the regular over it to be honest. Not exactly good that it’s in all Reach gamemodes except Invasion on MCC. In the original, this drove me away from those gamemodes and kept me in Invasion which they ruined with those forge maps no one asked for. - When CEA launched, they brought back the “6 best multiplayer maps in the series”. That’s a load of crap because Ridgeline, Solitary, and Penance were never even brought back once. The others weren’t even that good except High Noon. - Removed half the gamemodes to “improve connections”, but all this did was act as Reach’s final nail in the coffin as for a lot of people, their favorite gamemodes were no longer available. - By the time H4 was about to release, Reach’s PVP population dropped from 180k-220k down to 12k-20k. I highly doubt everyone else was in custom games.
> >
> > Going to disagree with your take on Reach as before the title update it was a mess that most people were not happy with.
> >
> > 1) People were absolutely asking for the title update. The game had an unplayable amount of bloom, Armor Lock was extremely OP and ruined every firefight, damage bleed was a feature from previous games and was non-existent in Reach, active camo was way too long, sword blocking made swords useless and the magnum was useless.
> > 2) You’re right on this, the maps were bad in reach’s sandbox as they were not made with it in mind.
> > 3) What modes were removed? I’m genuinely curious because from what I remember and from what I’ve read they didn’t remove any playlists so if they did remove any they removed playlists that were so minor that they didn’t matter at all.
> > 4) Where did you get your numbers from? I’d love to see them since I’ve not been able to find any stats on the player numbers from any search engine outside of a forum post from January 2012 by someone with no connections to Bungie. Since there are seemingly no results/studies on the population I will use this post as reference so I need to emphasize that the numbers below COULD BE INCORRECT.
> >
> > Info regarding the data collected by the author:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I use a simple copy and paste from Bungie’s REACH project page around noon local time. Not all values were collected at exactly that time. Occasionally collection could be off by several hours. I only guarantee that I have made no willful misrepresentations by deliberately skewing collection in such a manner that poor conclusions or comparisons could be made or that any numbers presented are anything other than attempts to collect data from Bungie.
> > Draw conclusions at your own risk.
> >
> >
> > In this post he claims that at the start of January 2012 the number of unique players was ~540k and by the end of the month it was ~400k with the peak player count of the month being ~600k. The Title Update began implementation in September of 2011 and was fully implemented by February of 2012. Let’s look at what happened in January, a pretty big month for the implementation of the TU.
> >
> >
> >
> > Date Games Played Unique Players
> > January 1, 2012 1,206,817 537,140
> > January 2, 2012 1,202,405 548,657
> > January 3, 2012 1,129,350 540,306
> > January 4, 2012 912,248 466,355
> > January 5, 2012 826,839 443,688
> > January 6, 2012 834,251 440,819
> > January 7, 2012 1,059,523 539,049
> > January 8, 2012 1,290,695 588,511
> > January 9, 2012 1,020,055 517,671
> > January 10, 2012 789,485 419,835
> > January 11, 2012 809,657 422,753
> > January 12, 2012 778,300 422,797
> > January 13, 2012 832,922 439,099
> > January 14, 2012 1,107,833 555,796
> > January 15, 2012 1,377,907 594,595
> > January 16, 2012 1,252,136 574,239
> > January 17, 2012 1,015,112 516,033
> > January 18, 2012 759,403 417,509
> > January 19, 2012 772,028 418,761
> > January 20, 2012 772,836 420,030
> > January 21, 2012 1,100,170 544,035
> > January 22, 2012 1,420,243 607,853
> > January 23, 2012 1,120,234 530,898
> > January 24, 2012 809,809 427,617
> > January 25, 2012 739,634 414,341
> > January 26, 2012 701,281 402,860
> > January 27, 2012 706,742 404,378
> > January 28, 2012 1,104,247 547,250
> > January 29, 2012 1,344,498 597,420
> > January 30, 2012 1,023,835 517,638
> > January 31, 2012 704,350 407,128
> >
> >
> > January 10th is when The Arena, BTB, and Team Objective were all updated to the TU. As you can see, this update didn’t have any major impact on the population numbers with peaks of ~600k on the 22nd and the 29th. By this point, the game had been out well over a year and seems to have a very healthy population. When the update was fully implemented on February 7th, the slayer mode received an update that allowed lobbies to choose launch slayer or TU slayer which should, theoretically, keep both sides happy. Again, unless you have an actual source on the player count, I will consider these to be somewhat accurate and healthy for a game that age with a sequel looming in the not so distant future.
> >
> > I haven’t been able to find a spreadsheet comparing player count between Reach and 4 but I did find a graph for hours played that contained pretty insightful data from Halo 4’s launch to 26 weeks after. At the start of the graph, or Halo 4’s launch, Reach was estimated to have ~1M hours played for that day. Since I don’t have player numbers, I’m going to make an assumption by comparing to the MCC player numbers and hours played on Halo 3 since I can’t get data from the launch of Reach on pc. Halo 3 on it’s first day had a player count of ~54k people with approximately ~800k hours played. From this we can make a decent guess that Halo Reach had a population of ~70k, a very healthy population for a game that is over two years old and just had a sequel release. This is well above your 12k-20k number, however, the numbers could very easily be proven wrong with the official numbers if they are available somewhere on the internet though I haven’t had any luck in my search. Multiple graphs from previous years coincide with this guy’s player count results for January 2012 and the graph comparing Reach and 4 matches many other graphs regarding hours played and population.
>
> The PVP numbers (not hours played, but player population) are by memory from launch until TU, then near the launch of H4. As for H4 numbers? Last I saw before MCC was released, the most populated playlist had a little over 1k. If there’s anyone else who played Reach regularly back then, I’m sure at least one of them remembers the numbers. As for the playlists removed? Let’s name the ones that stayed that I remember.
> FFA
> Team Slayer/ Arena/ MLG
> SWAT
> Snipers
> BTB
> Infection
> Invasion
> Action Sack
> Grifball.
> Anniversary BTB/ Team Slayer.
>
> There were well over 20, close to 30 playlists before they were removed. They essentially removed every playlist that wasn’t a core part of the game.

Are you talking about Halo 4 or Halo Reach with that list?

If you’re talking about Reach the only playlists that were ever removed were Squad Slayer (just 5v5 Team Slayer), TU Beta (just a test for the Title Update), several special event playlists and at least one other I can’t remember. All of the playlists you have listed there are still in the game, and most are still populated.

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> > 2533274830340056;8:
> > > 2533274837760922;7:
> > > > 2533274830340056;1:
> > > > Given their record with the last shooters they’ve worked on, this will either save the series or make me want to play the old version of No Man’s Sky. Let’s start with Reach:
> > > > - Nobody asked for Title Update, I prefered the regular over it to be honest. Not exactly good that it’s in all Reach gamemodes except Invasion on MCC. In the original, this drove me away from those gamemodes and kept me in Invasion which they ruined with those forge maps no one asked for. - When CEA launched, they brought back the “6 best multiplayer maps in the series”. That’s a load of crap because Ridgeline, Solitary, and Penance were never even brought back once. The others weren’t even that good except High Noon. - Removed half the gamemodes to “improve connections”, but all this did was act as Reach’s final nail in the coffin as for a lot of people, their favorite gamemodes were no longer available. - By the time H4 was about to release, Reach’s PVP population dropped from 180k-220k down to 12k-20k. I highly doubt everyone else was in custom games.
> > >
> > > Going to disagree with your take on Reach as before the title update it was a mess that most people were not happy with.
> > >
> > > 1) People were absolutely asking for the title update. The game had an unplayable amount of bloom, Armor Lock was extremely OP and ruined every firefight, damage bleed was a feature from previous games and was non-existent in Reach, active camo was way too long, sword blocking made swords useless and the magnum was useless.
> > > 2) You’re right on this, the maps were bad in reach’s sandbox as they were not made with it in mind.
> > > 3) What modes were removed? I’m genuinely curious because from what I remember and from what I’ve read they didn’t remove any playlists so if they did remove any they removed playlists that were so minor that they didn’t matter at all.
> > > 4) Where did you get your numbers from? I’d love to see them since I’ve not been able to find any stats on the player numbers from any search engine outside of a forum post from January 2012 by someone with no connections to Bungie. Since there are seemingly no results/studies on the population I will use this post as reference so I need to emphasize that the numbers below COULD BE INCORRECT.
> > >
> > > Info regarding the data collected by the author:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I use a simple copy and paste from Bungie’s REACH project page around noon local time. Not all values were collected at exactly that time. Occasionally collection could be off by several hours. I only guarantee that I have made no willful misrepresentations by deliberately skewing collection in such a manner that poor conclusions or comparisons could be made or that any numbers presented are anything other than attempts to collect data from Bungie.
> > > Draw conclusions at your own risk.
> > >
> > >
> > > In this post he claims that at the start of January 2012 the number of unique players was ~540k and by the end of the month it was ~400k with the peak player count of the month being ~600k. The Title Update began implementation in September of 2011 and was fully implemented by February of 2012. Let’s look at what happened in January, a pretty big month for the implementation of the TU.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Date Games Played Unique Players
> > > January 1, 2012 1,206,817 537,140
> > > January 2, 2012 1,202,405 548,657
> > > January 3, 2012 1,129,350 540,306
> > > January 4, 2012 912,248 466,355
> > > January 5, 2012 826,839 443,688
> > > January 6, 2012 834,251 440,819
> > > January 7, 2012 1,059,523 539,049
> > > January 8, 2012 1,290,695 588,511
> > > January 9, 2012 1,020,055 517,671
> > > January 10, 2012 789,485 419,835
> > > January 11, 2012 809,657 422,753
> > > January 12, 2012 778,300 422,797
> > > January 13, 2012 832,922 439,099
> > > January 14, 2012 1,107,833 555,796
> > > January 15, 2012 1,377,907 594,595
> > > January 16, 2012 1,252,136 574,239
> > > January 17, 2012 1,015,112 516,033
> > > January 18, 2012 759,403 417,509
> > > January 19, 2012 772,028 418,761
> > > January 20, 2012 772,836 420,030
> > > January 21, 2012 1,100,170 544,035
> > > January 22, 2012 1,420,243 607,853
> > > January 23, 2012 1,120,234 530,898
> > > January 24, 2012 809,809 427,617
> > > January 25, 2012 739,634 414,341
> > > January 26, 2012 701,281 402,860
> > > January 27, 2012 706,742 404,378
> > > January 28, 2012 1,104,247 547,250
> > > January 29, 2012 1,344,498 597,420
> > > January 30, 2012 1,023,835 517,638
> > > January 31, 2012 704,350 407,128
> > >
> > >
> > > January 10th is when The Arena, BTB, and Team Objective were all updated to the TU. As you can see, this update didn’t have any major impact on the population numbers with peaks of ~600k on the 22nd and the 29th. By this point, the game had been out well over a year and seems to have a very healthy population. When the update was fully implemented on February 7th, the slayer mode received an update that allowed lobbies to choose launch slayer or TU slayer which should, theoretically, keep both sides happy. Again, unless you have an actual source on the player count, I will consider these to be somewhat accurate and healthy for a game that age with a sequel looming in the not so distant future.
> > >
> > > I haven’t been able to find a spreadsheet comparing player count between Reach and 4 but I did find a graph for hours played that contained pretty insightful data from Halo 4’s launch to 26 weeks after. At the start of the graph, or Halo 4’s launch, Reach was estimated to have ~1M hours played for that day. Since I don’t have player numbers, I’m going to make an assumption by comparing to the MCC player numbers and hours played on Halo 3 since I can’t get data from the launch of Reach on pc. Halo 3 on it’s first day had a player count of ~54k people with approximately ~800k hours played. From this we can make a decent guess that Halo Reach had a population of ~70k, a very healthy population for a game that is over two years old and just had a sequel release. This is well above your 12k-20k number, however, the numbers could very easily be proven wrong with the official numbers if they are available somewhere on the internet though I haven’t had any luck in my search. Multiple graphs from previous years coincide with this guy’s player count results for January 2012 and the graph comparing Reach and 4 matches many other graphs regarding hours played and population.
> >
> > The PVP numbers (not hours played, but player population) are by memory from launch until TU, then near the launch of H4. As for H4 numbers? Last I saw before MCC was released, the most populated playlist had a little over 1k. If there’s anyone else who played Reach regularly back then, I’m sure at least one of them remembers the numbers. As for the playlists removed? Let’s name the ones that stayed that I remember.
> > FFA
> > Team Slayer/ Arena/ MLG
> > SWAT
> > Snipers
> > BTB
> > Infection
> > Invasion
> > Action Sack
> > Grifball.
> > Anniversary BTB/ Team Slayer.
> >
> > There were well over 20, close to 30 playlists before they were removed. They essentially removed every playlist that wasn’t a core part of the game.
>
> Are you talking about Halo 4 or Halo Reach with that list?
>
> If you’re talking about Reach the only playlists that were ever removed were Squad Slayer (just 5v5 Team Slayer), TU Beta (just a test for the Title Update), several special event playlists and at least one other I can’t remember. All of the playlists you have listed there are still in the game, and most are still populated.

I specifically said “the ones that stayed”. I’m talking about Reach.

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> > > I will say this: almost EVERYBODY wanted Reach’s gameplay tweaked in some way, if only to nerf Armour Lock and make Bloom manageable. Most players were very happy with the Title Update, mainly because of the aforementioned changes. Saying nobody asked for the update is just plain false; people were asking for since day 1.
> >
> > Pacing your shots was easy. Armor lock? That was more of a “SURPRISE” ability than anything. In almost every case I was in, all they accomplished was delay the inevitable. Even if what I said was false, it would’ve been better if they didn’t add it to more than half the playlists and instead make a new one for the most popular playlists.
>
> Not sure what version of Reach you were playing, but Armour Lock was possibly the most overpowered thing in the game before the update. It didn’t just “delay the inevitable”, it allowed the user to survive what should have been a lethal hit and allowed them to recharge their shields while it was up, with the enemy unable to do anything about it except wait it out, and possibly get attacked by another enemy in the process. If that happened then the Armour Lock user could just pop out of Armour Lock and two-time their attacker. This is what happened in roughly 70% of the times I encountered Armour Lock pre-Title Update.
>
> After the update you could actually do something about Armour Lock, as throwing a grenade next to it dropped its charge to near zero, or you could kill the user outright by sticking them when they were around half-charge. Not to mention, when you broke it this way, you were usually safe from the EMP.
>
> Pacing your shots is fine at long range, but you should at least be able to consistently hit at medium range without bloom causing your shot to completely miss when your redicule is right over the target’s head. The Needle Rifle had it the worst: it was a full-auto, rapid-fire precision weapon that wanted you to slowly pace your shots by NOT firing full-auto. That’s just bad design right there (though 343 may have over-corrected a bit by removing bloom from the NR entirely). Whatever Bungie intended with bloom, it didn’t seem to have worked the way they wanted it.
>
> Splitting the community is never a good idea in any game, as it usually leads to playlists and gamemodes becoming underpopulated, which always equals the death of the playerbase. You don’t half–Yoink- an update like this: you whole–Yoink-, no–Yoink-, or at the very least 95%–Yoink-, the third being what 343 did. They kept the updates out of Team Slayer, Living Dead and Invasion, 3 of the most-played playlists, and applied them to everywhere else. Personally I would applied it to Team Slayer as well, but whatever.
>
> The Title Update was probably the best thing to ever happen to Reach, purely because of these 2 changes, and most players you talk to will agree.

To each their own. I preferred regular gameplay, others preferred TU and Zero Bloom.

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> You can’t exactly say the population dropped due to updates and such, other games were coming out at the time. 2010 was when COD really became mainstream with Black Ops releasing a few months later after Reach and for Halo 4, Black Ops 2 released a few weeks later. As for MCC, yeah it was really rough.
>
> As for Halo 5, it wasn’t really pay to win since Req really only affected one category of the game that being Warzone. In Arena, it was leveled playing field with the only difference between players was cosmetic and skill. I never found the spawns to be bad at all and I’ve sunk a good chunk of time into the game. Radar is as useful as it always has been. I think Halo 5 is the one I disagree with the most.
>
> In the end, I’d say 343 has had a few bumps in the road with Halo but they’ve done a lot of good too. Halo 4’s campaign is great, Halo 5’s post launch was really cool, Halo Wars 2 is really fun and a great sequel to Halo Wars, brining Halo to PC is awesome. They’ve taken risks and sometimes it doesn’t pan out well but that’s reality. Really excited for the campaign/gameplay reveal!

I’d like to know what gamemode you’re playing because my radar almost never seems to pick up anyone until they’re just out of charging distance. Don’t answer that, I don’t see myself playing H5 any time soon.

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*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

THE DAMAGE FALLOFF IS CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS. THAT WAS MONUMENTAL IN WHY H3 WAS AMAZING. SLIGHT LEAD IN YOUR BR SHOTS OOOF.