Every single game has their battle pass progressed through participation and challenges. 343i today had done a solid job bringing Halo Infinite’s BP Progression system and rates up to par with other games with its personal benefits and downsides. Progressing a battle pass with time gates and drastically slower progression by normally playing the game is very normal in games as services. Hell, even MCC’s system is like this. When people think of a BP system that rewards performance, they think of Warzone’s, however people don’t realize that Warzone’s BP is very barely influenced by performance, but it is ultimately influenced by time played in a match. Challenges and Double XP tokens also don’t contribute anything to the BP, hence why there’s a third “Double Battle Pass XP” system that exists in that game.
That being said, the mistake 343i had done is make the battle pass the central progression system. Battle passes as a whole are not substantial enough to be the center grind of an entire game, especially if it’s entirely cosmetic oriented. There really needs to be an alternate, overarching ranking system that people can show off. Rewards can be minimal, but they have to be significant enough for people to want to care about it.
Progression feels lackluster by multiple ways; all of our rewards are locked and limited to armor cores, so much content was gutted out of the battle pass to be resold in market (this is the biggest offender in my opinion), there aren’t much for us to work with if we don’t put in time to the time gated system, the battle pass itself is very lacking in content, and there’s no true social aspect of our customization with the lack of a proper lobbying system. There’s quite a handful of issues contributing to what we feel that extend beyond EXP gain from challenges and matches, it’s important to recognize them so we can move beyond this pit of challenge discussion.