I want to add my voice to those who are disappointed by the removal of the Firefight Limited playlist. I know it was the playlist with the smallest population, but quantity is not quality.
I’m really kind of surprised it was removed. I can’t see that it was hurting anything, and the people who played it regularly were pretty serious about it. More important, I find the lack of a four-person “normal” Firefight playlist to be a peculiar void in the playlists. With its removal we are left with only one option for groups of three or four people who want to play together, and it’s a game type that presents no challenge or incentive to work together as a team.
Why I prefer Limited over Arcade:
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Limited encourages teamwork. It’s in everyone’s best interest to beat the game both for the personal satisfaction and to maximize the credit payout, and that’s far more likely to happen if people work together as a team than as four lone wolves trying to outscore one another, which is what Firefight Arcade games end up being. Arcade games are no-brainers. Infinite lives mean they never end early. Just play until they end and collect your credits.
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Limited requires skill and strategy to complete the game. Arcade games have infinite lives, overshields, infinite ammo, and power weapons. There is no challenge. I played a game of Arcadefight in Firefight doubles recently in which the other person died 28 times. Where’s the skill in that? Frankly, I don’t really know how you can die 28 times in a game where you have overshields, infinite ammo, and power weapons, but he did it.
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Limited is far more social. Because it’s the only Firefight playlist that encourages teamwork, it’s also the only one where people are likely to be using mikes and communicating. I’ve also found the regulars to be a different kind of player. It’s not a playlist for kids who just want to goof around and rack up a bunch of credits. A substantial majority of the people on my friends list are people I’ve met in Firefight Limited games.
Killing the Firefight Limited playlist was the easy way out. Tweaking it to give it a broader appeal would require some effort, but I think that’s the better option as there really should be a 4-player Firefight playlist that offers a more classic Firefight experience.
Here are some changes I think would improve it and make it more popular:
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Increase the credit payouts. If you beat Limited, the payouts seem roughly equivalent to those for Arcadefight, but the Limited game took ten minutes longer and a lot more skill and teamwork. I think this disparity in reward for time and effort invested is a big reason the Arcade playlist is more popular. Firefight Arcade has the reputation of being the way to get easy credits. Whenever someone has started a thread on the Bungie forum asking the fastest way to earn credits without cheap tricks, “play Firefight Arcade” and “complete the challenges” are the stock answers. Since an Arcade game runs 20 minutes and a Limited game runs 30 minutes and is harder, it should pay out 50% more credits.
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Tweak the games to make them a little bit easier to complete and reduce scenarios where even good players working as a team will get overwhelmed. It’s particularly frustrating to be swarmed by a drop pod of Elite Ultras that not only wipe out your entire team, but then they hang out in your crib so you have to spawn somewhere else and then face them with your stock weapons. In my experience, trying to take down two or three Elite Ultras hot on your butt with a DMR and an assault rifle is an exercise in futility. All of the Firefight Limited game types should, in my opinion, be tweaked to make them a little easier to complete.
People who want a more serious challenge can play Legendary Ltd, which almost no one played in the old playlist because it was too difficult. I never played a game of generator defense where we beat the game, and most of them didn’t last 10 minutes. I think the difficulty level was another reason the playlist was less popular than it could have been.
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Offer Firefight Limited-specific challenges. For example, this week’s weekly challenge (complete four sets in a co-op Firefight game) can be completed in less than 18 minutes with the right custom game. A much better challenge would have been to complete four games of Firefight Limited.
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Make it so players can stockpile a few good weapons for tough situations. One of the more frustrating aspects of these games is that good weapons despawn, sometimes only seconds after you’ve swapped them for another weapon. For example, I dropped a fully loaded FRG last night in a doubles game of Limited to use the Target Locator, and when I was done, the FRG was gone. This is particularly problematic when there are only two players as you often want different weapons for different enemies.
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Allow more rounds of voting so we’re less likely to get stuck playing less popular maps like Waterfront.
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Fix the bug on Outpost were DMRs and Spartan Lasers dropped on the roof of the main building can’t be picked up again.
On the one hand I know it seems late in the life of Reach to be tweaking gameplay in Firefight, but since Halo Anniversary will be using the same Firefight gameplay and adds a new Firefight map, it would make sense to tweak it to offer a standard Firefight playlist for everyone who wants to play Firefight.
