Every Tuesday night a group of friends and I get together for a Halo 5 session.
Nothing special… but numbers can vary (from 4-10) and we cover a very diverse range of skills; from (very) low Bronze to mid-Diamond. As you can imagine it’s very hard to balance teams… so we end up playing a lot of FFA - with very a very predictable leader’s table at the end of each game.
What we need in Infinite is the ability to set custom parameters at an individual level; shields, damage, speed, and even things like radar or jump height. That way we could even out the playing field and make the nights more enjoyable for everyone (I’m sure it gets as boring for the good players as it does frustrating for the bad ones).
It would also be great to limit the ability of players to use particular weapons or power ups (I have already banned my son from using the sniper rifle).
Or better still, some sort of dynamic in-game handicapping system - so that a players shields or scoring (for and against) etc. is proportional to their current K:D. eg. If you are going positive your shields become weaker, if you are going negative they become stronger.
And finally, most maps are naturally built for 4 v 4… so what do you do with 9 players? It would be great to have a bench system where a side can have more than 4 players - and are rotated in/off the bench with each kill. That way we could keep playing objective games on the usual maps without seriously unbalancing everything. Such a mechanism would also mean that we could take our fire-team of six into a social game playlist that is limited to 4 players.
And a system in custom games where mics are automatically muted from the opposition team. At the moment everyone in the fireteam hears every comment - which makes strategising for CTF etc difficult.
Spartans just wanna have fun…