Tl;dr: Parties are broken.
First off, I want to thank the team at 343 for the tireless hours they have put in since launch addressing the numerous problems that have accompanied that launch. When searching for games it now takes an average of less than a few minutes when I go into a game alone, or even with a party when someone doesn’t get kicked out or the process fail entirely. This is an inconvenient, but entirely acceptable period of time. I don’t want you to spend any more time with the improvement of an inconvenient feature when there are so many gamebreaking features still present.
The foremost among these is the party system. My group of 3 – 6 people has averaged less than 1 game per hour played since launch. This was spread out over multiple days, at multiple times, in different combinations, across every playlist, including customs, and when we get a game it puts us on different teams that have an unbalanced number of players. Halo has always depended on teamwork, and an uneven number of people leads to a one-sided slaughter in almost every case. This is not acceptable. This is what you should be working to fix. When I found out that you deliberately made the teams unbalanced to help with the matchmaking times I knew that you needed me to come here and spell out the difference between gamebreaking and inconvenient explicitly.
The caliber of game that results from enduring the hour-long -Yoink- dance of joining a game with a party is deplorable. Whether it takes 5 minutes or 10 minutes at a searching screen is inconsequential compared to the 30 minutes prior where we tried to join the same lobby with a functioning chat. When party members get lost in the searching process or the game freezes after the match incompleted (definitely completed) , and we are required to repeat the nearly impossible task of joining each other before and after almost every game we eventually get, it is extraordinarily inconvenient. When I have to spend an hour to play a single game of 8v5 slayer on warlock in a 5v5 playlist against 2 of the people I went in with, it is unacceptable (actually happened).
But for 11 days I have endured this madness with too little improvement. I watched as the servers were overloaded on launch night by a previously unfathomable number of players. I stood by as SWAT, rumble pit, and halo 4 were removed because there weren’t enough people playing the game to support that many playlists in the days that followed. I built up my hopes for a weekend patch that turned into the foundation for a patch that would be released the following Wednesday (Thursday). Now I have seen that patch turn into the foundation for a future fix with the promise of future improvements to the same set of problems. I could not, in good conscience, sit here and wait to see what you would butcher next to slice matchmaking times by another sliver while ignoring what is actually wrong with the game.
Don’t tell me that it’s broken. I can see that it’s broken. Tell me why it’s broken.
Don’t tell me that I deserve better. We both know I paid for a functioning game that has yet to be made. Even the campaign still has serious problems.
Don’t apologize while you continue to -Yoink- me with promises you can’t deliver. Accept that this will take time to fix, set an appropriate priority for the gamebreaking aspects, and realistic deadlines for when those fixes are released. This should be common sense, and we wouldn’t be here now if you had already done this.
I love the game when it works. I just can’t understand why that has to be such a small percentage of the time.
Here’s a start to get it to playable:
- Party system
a. Don’t split parties in games.
b. The party doesn’t stay with the party leader when backing out of games.
c. The party kicks players or disbands completely for reasons no one understands constantly.
d. Can’t join using any built in join or invite feature with any reasonable degree of success. Have to use the xbox party options.
- Unbalanced teams
a. Don’t split parties in games.
b. Require an even number to start.
c. Restore the player cap (Seriously, how is cramming more people into one game making those same people who still had to be found and matched get a game any faster?).
- Matchmaking
a. Don’t split parties in games.
b. Game freezes often after displaying the final score. I’m just assuming that has something to do with restarting matchmaking.
c. Bring back swat and rumble. I can live without halo 4 for a while. Fix the halo CE playlist (I’d hate to see how bad it was if you considered it broken).
d. Individual team members will be sent to their own searching lobby despite no one losing connection. Just put up a failure message, and keep them together so the process can be restarted in a reasonable amount of time without having to constantly take an inventory of who is or is not still in your group.