Just my opinions on how hard it will be for MLG to make a half-decent gametype and keep competitive players on Halo
If MLG fail to make a decent playlist with a game that hardly warrents competitiveness, I can see 10-15% of the players leaving for something else
Positives and negatives for competiitive settings listed below IMO
Positives for Halo 4 -
A few more precision weapons (Light Rifle, DMR, BR, Sniper, Carbine, Railgun)
Being able to throw the oddball (pretty cool and will be very strategic once they bring in respawn times)
Negatives for Halo 4 -
Instant respawn,
No true skill system (will have to search as a team or risk being teamed up with a bunch of 5 yr olds),
No good connection seaching system (Skill is no factor when it take 5 DMR bullets for 1 guy and 7-8 to kill the other guy),
In the game lobby can’t tell if the other team are actually a team or just a bunch of randoms,
Randomm ordanance drops (one guy gets a needler from his personal ordnance and the other gets a binary rifle, seems fair)
Asymetric maps (there is only one perfectly symetrical map [Haven] on the whole game until new DLC comes out)
Forge world is worse then on reach (Kind of hard to make decent competitive maps when the forge world is so problematic and very noob orientated)
Lots of bullet magnetism (which shortens the skill gap),
lots of no skill / noob weapons that shorten the skill gap (The OP Boltshot, SAW, Scattershot, Shotgun, Needler, Storm rifle, Surpressor, Assault rifle)
Sticky grenades available at loadout (seriously WTF, If you hav’nt experienced a game where every player on the other team just runs at you and kamakazi throws a sticky grenade right at your face then you are lucky as all -Yoink-)
Auto-Pick up for the flag, stupidest -Yoink- ever (you can turn it off for oddball but not the flag WTF!!!)
There’s actually a show called the Halo Refinery on the MLG website. Their goal is basically to make competitive MLG settings. Some of the issues in your list have been addressed to some degree but I’ll go through them anyway.
Positives:
I agree with these.
Negatives:
-Instant respawn is definitely a problem. I’d rather remove it from MLG altogether.
-Halo 4 does have a true skill system. It’s just not visible like the ranks in Halo 3.
-Agree with this.
-Also agree with this. It’s a pain in the ‘yoink’.
-The guys on the Halo refinery actually came up with a good counter for this. Game changing weapons such as the sniper, rockets and CQC weapons only appear as timed drops in the game (much like classic halo). Power weapons which require more skill to use and don’t impact matches as much (such as the sticky det, railgun and SAW), are the only ones players can call in as personal ordnance.
-Asymmetric maps can be balanced. Remember Lockout?
-Don’t know what you mean by this.
-I agree to an extent with this but I doubt it will be changed.
-The only weapon you mentioned that could be considered nooby is the boltshot. I think it needs to be nerfed or removed from starting loadouts for competitiveness. The others you mentioned are power weapons (which by their very definition should be easy to get kills with) and automatic weapons (which won’t appear in MLG at all).
-I don’t know about this one. They’re pretty easy to dodge when you see the person throwing them at you but it can be annoying.
-I think that the auto pickup for the flag will probably be removed. Don’t see any reason to include it in MLG.
That’s my take on things. For Halo 4 to do well in MLG, it needs to keep as many core game mechanics as possible. Reach’s MLG was almost like playing a completely different Halo game which just deters people from playing it.
> MLG should make their own game instead of trying to make alternate settings on games already made.
Heh. With how much MLG has diverged from stock Halo in recent years, I often think the same thing. They’ll never get all the customisation they crave from Halo, and they’ll always have massive arguments about what the settings should be, and they’ll always alienate a huge section of their potential audience with their sweeping changes straight away. It’s silly.
> MLG should make their own game instead of trying to make alternate settings on games already made.
Well they’re being a bit more open minded this time around. From the look of the current settings, it looks more like a fun alternative way to play (A mix of old and new) than a stripped down game like it was before, with little appeal or was just plain repetitive to many players.
Spawn slide. Different lengths equal different spawn times.
Instantly spawn at the top of a slide that funnels you into a telleporter.
Two teams = two or more slides and two teleporters
Biggest negatives is building these spawns under the map so the spawn system still respects the locations of enemies, teammates and where a person was killed.
Spawn hallways work too but you need a kill boundary to urge players through the telleporter
They have fixed a couple of your concerns. Spawn times are longer and Forge maps are pretty dang good. It shouldn’t have to be so many Forge makes though, 343 insists on large asymmetrical maps.
Your complaints on the matchmaking system are all dead on though.
Where I think your wrong is in the connection. The hit registration is really good in this game from what I see. I have been a huge MLG fan since H2 and watch a bit of streams on twitch.tv; I don’t see connection problems on their streams either. This is actually one of the better things about the game I think.
Again, a lot of this comes back to matchmaking. That is enemy #1.
> > MLG should make their own game instead of trying to make alternate settings on games already made.
>
> Heh. <mark>With how much MLG has diverged from stock Halo in recent years</mark>, I often think the same thing. They’ll never get all the customisation they crave from Halo, and they’ll always have massive arguments about what the settings should be, and they’ll always alienate a huge section of their potential audience with their sweeping changes straight away. It’s silly.
They wouldn’t have to if “stock Halo” still resembled Halo. The only thing their changes have done is make the game more closely resemble classic Halo.
> … and they’ll always alienate a huge section of their potential audience with their sweeping changes straight away. It’s silly.
They’re trying to avoid doing that with Halo 4. I’m not a hardcore MLGer, but I do watch some streams every now and then, and they mention over and over how they’re trying to avoid alienating newer players via drastic changes. One reason Reach MLG didn’t attract as many newer players was because the gameplay was incredibly different from your out-of-the-box settings, which scared away a lot of players, as they didn’t want to learn what was essentially a new game to them. Halo 4 is different; they’re keeping a lot of the base gameplay elements, such as ordnance drops, but they’re giving them a slight tweak to “increase the competitive nature of the game”.
That’s not to say Halo 4 MLG will have some differences from standard Infinity Slayer, but the changes won’t be quite as drastic as they were in previous games.
> > … and they’ll always alienate a huge section of their potential audience with their sweeping changes straight away. It’s silly.
>
> They’re trying to avoid doing that with Halo 4. I’m not a hardcore MLGer, but I do watch some streams every now and then, and they mention over and over how they’re trying to avoid alienating newer players via drastic changes. <mark>One reason Reach MLG didn’t attract as many newer players was because the gameplay was incredibly different from your out-of-the-box settings</mark>, which scared away a lot of players, as they didn’t want to learn what was essentially a new game to them. Halo 4 is different; they’re keeping a lot of the base gameplay elements, such as ordnance drops, but they’re giving them a slight tweak to “increase the competitive nature of the game”.
>
> That’s not to say Halo 4 MLG will have some differences from standard Infinity Slayer, but the changes won’t be quite as drastic as they were in previous games.
Not true, they tried using armor abilities and other things from the default settings for an entire year before the title update, and it still didn’t attract players because Reach was garbage when it came to competitive merit. Skip ahead to v7 no sprint no bloom settings and we have Dallas, one of the most successful Halo events in years. Trying to work with the default settings isn’t going to attract players because of the negative stigma MLG has attached to it, it only serves to alienate the community they already have.
They should make a MLG playlist and then wait a week and ban everybody that got on everyday of the week.
fat mlg players/9 year olds(everybody that plays mlg) are the cancer killing Halo, if we do this it will get rid of ALL cancer. I have done a similar method on a forum of mine and the quality rose greatly. I am experienced in this, 343 is not.