That was a short honeymoon period. I’ve been loving the gameplay since release, but several days of slogging through 24/7 Slayer has worn me ragged.
Did I say 24/7 Slayer? I meant Quick Play. Not that you could tell Quick Play had other game modes, since the only one people actually play is Slayer.
Look, snide remarks aside, there absolutely needs to be some short term (or immediate) changes to the MP client, beta or not, to improve the game experience for everyone.
1: Playlist Overhaul/Diversification
First thing’s first, Quick Play (and maybe Ranked?) need tweaks to their playlist. I’m all for mosh pit playlists and all that, but throwing in Slayer has resulted in the default mode of the player base being 24/7 Slayer mindsets regardless of the actual mode being played. Breaking Slayer out of the Quick Play and into its own playlist would definitely split the community, but would give objective players a more enjoyable experience by reducing the number of lone wolf/slayer types in matches. Heck, you could even do a CoD style selector where players can toggle which modes they want to play, or exclude modes entirely. Seeing as how we’re kicked back to the queue screen after every match anyway (instead of the glorious old lobby system of yore), it seems like a smart option to include.
2: Reporting Players
As it currently stands (on PC anyway), reporting a player looks like this: open the scoreboard (usually post match), find their name, open their results pane, then select View Profile, then choose Gamercard, THEN click Report/Block, and finally choose Report for the standard XBL report process.
This is ridiculous.
Instead of making us jump through so many hoops to report bad actors, just give us the ability to report via Scoreboard directly. CoD Cold War does it smartly: open scoreboard, choose player, choose report, choose the reason, enter any notes, and click submit. Voila, you’ve screamed into the void and lowered your blood pressure even as XxCrackSmoker1337xX refuses to even look at the objective, and all in the span of the 8 second respawn timer to boot.
3: Stiff Penalties
I’m just going to be personally blunt and subjective here: if you’re making a team game but NOT penalizing players for refusing to play as a team, then you’re no better than the teacher who knowingly stood by as one person did the work of four people on their team project while the rest screwed around and contributed nothing of value. Players who feed kills in Slayer are no better than players who refuse to guard or capture the objective in team games. Throw in Ranked play and it’s exponentially worse.
I know this is mostly screaming into the void since literally no other company cares about such a concern, but I’d really like 343 to consider penalizing non-team players in team games. If someone isn’t at least defending their flag, attacking the ball carrier, or standing on a stronghold point a few times per round, then why should they be rewarded with XP just like the players actually contributing to the team’s success? Why aren’t players who only contribute to their team’s failure penalized accordingly?
For Quick Play, I’d suggest a strike system that starts with gentle nudges (mandatory post-game screen discussing how objective game modes work, encouraging you to be a team player, etc), escalates to light penalties (locking out PvP playlists/objective playlists for an hour or two, forcing the player to complete Player v Bot objective modes to confirm they understand how objectives work), and eventually to stiff punishments (day/week bans from PvP, rolling back Battle Pass progress or adding an XP ‘penalty bar’, or locking out challenge rewards for X amount of weeks). You could even use this as a sort of “safety valve” to disable Ranked Play entirely for someone who doesn’t play by the rules in Quick Play, thus reducing bad actors in Ranked.
For Ranked, the “gentle nudging” should be skipped directly in favor of bans. It’s safe to assume ranked players - especially those who have finished their placement matches - know better and don’t have any sort of deniability. Chalk it up as deliberate griefing and go right for temporary bans, with the maximum punishment being a permanent ban for the season and revoking all received awards from the profile. I’d also suggest integrating a gatekeeper function to prevent Ranked Play until at least X number of Quick Play/PvP matches have been completed, to discourage new accounts/smurfing (since HI is F2P), which would also give bad actors a higher chance of being caught and banned before entering Ranked via the Quick Play strike system.
Closing Thoughts
These are my recommendations based on way too many years of FPS online gaming, going all the way back to UT/Q3A. It’s great to want to combine the community with larger playlists like Mosh Pits, but there’s also a sizable chunk of the community who just want to grind out games in the mode of their choice, be it DM or Objective modes. Catering to both groups isn’t particularly difficult, but it does involve giving them the tools to either police themselves, or putting in transparent systems of discipline for rule breakers and those violating the spirit of the game. 343 would be taking a unique stand in the industry by policing and punishing non-team players, particularly in objective modes, and help build a stronger, healthier community as a result.