It’s been pointed out to me that Limited was removed because 343 was running up against a hard limit on the number of playlists and Limited was the playlist with the lowest population (contrary to what we were told in the new update announcing the removal).
Speaking to 343: You should address the underlying reason there’s a hard limit on the number of playlists. That’s just dumb, another case of taking the easy way over the right way.
I would also argue that the logic to remove the smallest playlist was flawed. Firefight Limited was the only real 4-person Firefight playlist. Arcade is for kids wanting to goof around and earn easy credits, not what Firefight was created to be. Limited had some issues, but as a matter of principle there should be a normal firefight 4-person playlist, just as there should be a co-op campaign playlist (which by the way is almost as small as Firefight Limited was; there were 61 people playing at one point last night).
It would have been much better to remove Arcade and make the games in Limited easier, or combine Limited and Arcadefight into a single 4-person Firefight playlist (as is done in Double) where voting would decide which you played same as we have in Doubles. That way if three of your friends want to play limited you can go in as a party and all vote for it. We don’t even have that option now.
Or, you could get rid of Squad Slayer and let the people who played it play Team Slayer or BTB. 5v5 really deserves a separate playlist from 4v4?
Of course the best option is to remove the limit on the number of playlists, or at least raise it to a reasonable maximum.
On a separate note, the difficulty of Limited games needs to be dialed down a notch. Limited with four decent players was beatable on any map. I’ve played with a group that beat it on Legendary (and my only death was 20 seconds before the end of the game), but it was on Corvette and we spent virtually all our time in the safe room. In general no one wanted to play Legendary because it was too difficult. Neither of the generator defense games seemed to be survivable on any mapped I played them. Lowering the difficulty level 10-15% or so would make the whole playlist more popular.
Something else what might be helpful would be changing from a pool of shared lives to a smaller number of lives per player. This would address the problem of random kids who run out and waste all the lives, ending the game for the rest of the players. You’d still be motivated to keep your teammates alive so they could keep playing, but if you got some idiot who was dying every 45 seconds he wouldn’t end the game for everyone.
Limited Doubles is very intense, with nearly the same challenge in terms of enemies as when 4 people play.
The lack of a 4-person Firefight playlist strikes me gaping void in the playlists, one I hope 343 will see fit to fill once they have some time after the release of Anniversary, which I’m sure is consuming all their energy right now.