I said it already in an earlier post but I’ll repeat it here. It’s called an over correction. The original challenges were too difficult because they were frustrating and revolved heavily on being luck with the game type and weapons that appeared. That drove people away so they didn’t achieve their purpose of keeping people playing.
Fast forward to now where they have fixed most of the heavily luck based challenges but the challenges are so easy and so short that the average player can smash them out in a couple of hours without even looking at them. This also fails in the goal of keeping if people playing.
There is a middle ground between the two extremes and it’s not unreasonable to hope 343i can find it.
Just do what MCC does with its challenge system already and combine it with the dual-economy system of Rainbow Six Siege.
Let players grind for Tokens as a currency to exchange for cosmetics while also having the option to exchange Credits for cosmetics bundles if they want to pay IRL money to skip the grind.
PROBLEM SOLVED !!!
And just make events extend the Battlepass by 10 tiers or so, with the Fractures Events extend it the most with each week the event happens the battle-pass gets expanded.
I was yelling for a change because the challenges require far too many variables outside of the player’s control.
Get kills with a sniper? Gotta find a map with a sniper (not a skewer) first, because having a team snipers playlist was too much effort apparently. Oops sorry, you got team skewers. Doesn’t count.
Having to roll the dice for a specific gamemode in quick play or btb. Made worse when you need to win and you get a bad team.
Or it’s some -Yoink!- where you have get backsmacks, but Ninjas don’t count because I guess that was too cool or something.
Then factor in the 1 week time limit and the 3-4 challenges at a time crap, and you have a recipe for stupidity.
THAT is why it needed to change.
343 overcorrected by making the challenge piss-easy (complete a match? c’mon now…) and they cut the total challenges by half. Had they done one or the other, we might’ve been alright.
Challenges is why you play the game? That’s just weird to me…I couldn’t care less about most the stuff everyone constantly complains about. Cosmetics, challenges…all just pointless fluff. If THAT’s what keeps you playing the game then you must just not actually like the game that much.
That’s great. It’s probably the healthiest attitude to have but since you need a pool of people to play with and against, things like challenges and unlocks (which are important to a large percentage of gamers) do matter.
I prefer the easier challenges. They give me more options for how to get them, and I don’t have to grind as much. The older challenges were a real chore to get through, and they’d make me feel sick of the game on the rare occasion I tried completing them all.
The challenges are easy because people complained when they were hard. The challenges were reduced from 20 to 10 per week because people complained about 20 being too many each week. The challenges were made less specific because people didn’t like being forced to play in a particular way or a particular playlist when they were specific. Personally, I prefer not having to grind 20 annoying challenges every week like I did back in S1 and S2, and all my friends do too. It makes getting the goodies faster and when I’m done I just keep playing for the rest of the week because it’s a game I find fun to play. I come to Infinite, as well as just about every other game I play, at the end of the day, to have fun because it is a game I enjoy playing even if I have earned the capstone for a week or completed an event, etc. At some point you just have to learn to have fun with the game after you’ve earned whatever thing is available until the next thing to earn drops. Even though you have a problem with this, I think most people much prefer the easy challenges that the Winter Update brought, and the challenges being particularly broad this week I think was just to incentivize people to try out the new playlist because it doesn’t center around a gamemode, and people are going to play certain gamemodes or playlists less if pesky challenges that they can’t whittle away at while in the gamemode they actually want to play. The freedom of having broad challenges is that you can progress them while doing what you want, not what the game tells you that you have to.
I’m all for the easier challenges (though I didn’thate the old system the way others did), but there needs to be more of them, especially for an event.
I say they go back to 20 challenges or make the ultimate harder - get 10K score in BTB, for example.
I think there should at least be 20 challenges during an event week. Ten normal ones and ten tied to the event. Tie the event ones to a play list.
This event should have at least been tied to the new playlist.
The problem is you can’t have a nuanced discussion regarding challenges for some reason.
Challenges on release: tedious and annoying, have to go out of your way to do them, play modes you don’t like or are dictated by RNG.
Challenges now: poorly designed bandaid fix for the aforementioned problem.
However when you mention that current challenges are bad and lazy design-wise because people are getting the same challenge 4 times simultaneously, you are met with a “WELL THE PREVIOUS CHALLENGES WERE TOO HARD NOW THEYRE TOO EASY HALO FANS CANT BE PLEASED”
While the actual issue is that daily/weekly challenges are annoying, people dislike grinding them when they’re too difficult because they’re required for the weekly reward. But they’re also disliked because they’ve been lazily reworked and they’re the only form of “progression” in the game unlike something like a cod game where you’re constantly progressing challenges for playing the game.
tl;dr badly designed system got a badly designed fix but people on either side of the argument are unable to see that the problem lies with the system in its entirety rather than the parameters around it.
I don’t mind the easy events. I think a lack of a progression system is the real issue. An easy event + progression system would make Noble Intention just an extra mode/thing to do. Since it’s really the only form of progression we have since the awful JFO event and decent Winter Update, it seems like trash.
The whole system is bunk because 343 butchered in favor of the F2P model which requires them to squeeze players for money some way somehow.
Gotta sell challenge swaps. How? Make challenges annoying/too hard and force players to want to swap them. Or limit them to only 3-4 active challenges, slowing their progress.
Can’t go giving out items for free, so the commendation system was scrapped. A long-form challenge system that can keep players entertained for years and allows for harder challenges (like get a killionaire) because there is no time limit.
Gotta sell XP boosts. How? Make xp gain super low and limit it to challenge completion (emphasizing the challenges even more). I mean, we had to BEG them for a per-match XP system and that took a year just for a beta, basically. Fill the BP with filler garbage (more boosts and swaps, splitting shoulders between 2 tiers, and emblems between 4) so it feels like it takes longer for you to get an actual item you want.
But the biggest issue is that reworking the whole system might be too much for 343 so they have to settle for patching up this junk they designed.
I seriously can’t understand why people care SO MUCH about challenges and progression. Back in H2 we played thousands of games on guest accounts with absolutely zero form of progression, no stat tracking, not even a skill rank. The game itself was good enough to keep people playing without dangling a carrot in front of their face. Dozens of posts about this, almost daily, yet no one talking about the horrible aim feel compared to any of the mcc titles.
That’s Halo 2. A game from 2004. As much as I love Halo 2, the entire industry moved far off from that. Halo 3, Reach, 4 and 5 all had a progression system. Modern multiplayer games have a progression system. Using Halo 2 as an example isn’t a good one anymore. Halo Infinite has really, really regressed on modern features.
The player base is so low at this point that they’re ensuring everyone who bothers to play will get these items.
Basically the top 2 coveted REACH shoulders are the Emile ones (with the curved blade) and the commando shoulders. People have been wanting these items since 2021 and now that they’re finally acquirable, if 343 made it super difficult to unlock them, the community would lose their minds.
I don’t understand the whole, “it’s too easy” stance. They could’ve charged for this stuff. This 10 tier pass is actually the first one that doesn’t have any filler bs… each level is something good. Being this close to the end of the season (also with other games launching and destiny dlc about to drop), 343 know that mak8ng it too time consuming or difficult is too much currently. Why not just enjoy the easy unlocks? With a game that’s basically done and at the end of its life cycle, might as well just enjoy the free/easy stuff.
I think this is mostly because they have quite a few players like myself: we are HUGE Halo fans, we played the campaign, we haven’t been enjoying the multiplayer that much, but because we like the lore and the armor we come back to complete events and fill out those passes.
If the challenges would actually take a lot of me playing this week, I wouldn’t play at all. Desync is so bad right now, I prefer not to play at all. But since I can hop in and quickly unlock a few things that should have been unlocked on launch (why are we paying to unlock Halo Reach armor for a 3rd time?) I just do that and quickly knock them out. Personally I prefer it this way. Then again, I’d prefer that they actually update the campaign…