Oftentimes, I’ll be in Team Slayer matches where my team is losing by 15-20 points. This happens because maybe 1 or 2 of my teammates and I will be performing fairly well but 1 or 2 of my other teammates will be doing awful and have only a kill or 2. The worse my team loses, the more infuriated I get inside. I don’t throw my controller or anything, but I have a very strong urge to just quit out and find another game in hopes of getting paired with a fully competent team so as to have an enjoyable experience. Sometimes I’ll quit, sometimes I’ll begrudgingly finish the match. Please, give me advice or motivation to resist the urge to quit horrendously not fun matches.
I cannot 
The other day I was playing Anniv. BTB and a game of Headlong came up (3-shot M6 settings). Now though I prefer not to play them, I wasn’t going to quite, I knew the risks of playing the odd non-TU gametype and went with it.
Once the game started I was closest to the Banshee and of course hopped in. I then had 2 teammates pop a couple shots into me with one of them choosing to not stop. At this point because I had already experienced such attitudes in Invasion with vehicles too, I decided that it was more fun to risk the boot for bombing my jerk-teammate than to fight the enemy AND my teammate.
Not sure Reach can have a system implemented that will make things more enjoyable but I do think Halo4 will.
I think that in Halo4 actual “ranked” or “intense competitive” playlists will work as Halo does now. Games are matched up with teams that assume everyone is there to play and win. Quitting punishes players severely because it is a “serious” matchmaking experience.
I would not label them non-competitive, but playlists that are less serious than what MLG or Grifball offer for competitive spirits will probably be drop-in and out. At the very least Invasion and BTB playlists will support drop-in and out play similar to BF/CoD/GoW.
Halo2’s MM-system was revolutionary. Halo: Reach’s MM-system is antiquated. It is part of what is hurting Halo’s “playability.”
That chance for a ‘huge’ credit jackpot is the only reason the devs can give you to stick with it. As for being paired with competent players: unless you’re with a party of 4 - as in a live party so there is no random people playing on your team, I think you can forget getting good teammates from happening. The way it is set up now, I get the feeling that if there are half or more than half good players and afew lousy ones, each team will get paired with 1 who is not so good in order to balance things out. That’s the way it always seems to me when I play.
Stop going into playlists without a full party. If you go random, expect to get random outcomes.
Quitters need to be punished more than a 15 minute quit ban.
OP, the best thing to do is meet new people to play with. You have a forum of Halo players here. Use it to make new friends rather than tell us about your problems. BTW, it is much easier to meet good players on a forum where they are not in a “killing” mode. If you are good enough, you might even find your way into a private group of really good players (does this site have private groups?) I joined a private group on Bungie.net last spring, and since then I have played with many of the top players in the game.
This part isn’t a solution to the OPs problem, but rather a solution to reduce the amount of quitters (because I have the opposite problem and am the guy on the winning team, and hate game after game where people always quit):
I noticed more players quit in Reach than they do in H3. In H3 when someone quit, they lost an xp. This was a permanent consequence. In Reach, you get a slap on the wrist after quitting a few games (15 min ban I think, never had one). This has no long term consequence. I propose implementing a permanent consequence to reduce quitting, and since it is late for Reach this is more aimed at H4. It won’t stop all quitters, but there are plenty of people who would stop, or at least be less inclined to quit.
Another solution is simply a better ranking system. In H3, my team of 50s typically matched other teams of 50s, even in social. So it wasn’t typically blowouts. Now look at my past 30 games in Reach - only one was competitive. You may say, go play Arena. Well, arena has too few players, and at the top ranks (I was 2% onyx the last 2 seasons I played) you actually have to arrange games either with friends on your FL or in our private group. Otherwise, there are no games. We have literally waited over an hour and found no game at prime Halo time. So that playlist is really out of the question for us. That leaves social playlists, which like I said are almost always blowouts. The obvious solution is a ranking system, even if it is only working in the background like in H3. I heard Reach supposedly has one in the background, but it is obviously trash.
Comparing Reach to previous Halo online matchmaking services, there is one key difference that changes how players approach matchmaking. Halo 2 and Halo 3 had incentive to win. There was a reason to actually try and win the game. You had to actually win games to rank up. If you lost games, you went down.
Since Reach uses the credit system for “ranks” players don’t feel the need to even try anymore. They aren’t forced to win games, so why should they have to too. Not to mention that truskill doesn’t work effectively enough given a low population in any playlist. There is nothing 343 can do from the technical side to fix this. Hopefully they will address this and make a new system in Halo 4 that fixes this problem.
It’s all about incentive to win, and Reach has none.
I actually encourage you to quit OP. No point staying in compromised matches. Reach with it’s casual style gameplay and no strict trueskill settings offers a ton of bland and mostly terrible matches. I can’t describe some of the fail I’ve had for teammates. When squad slayer used to exist I’d win a ton of matches. Naturally you’d expect after winning more you’d get better teammates and face harder opponents. nope. instead the reverse happened. I started to get teammates who loved to go -12 and get 1 kill and enemies who were just begging to be decimated.
Quitting is really the only saving grace in this game. It’s not like Halo 3 where players had ranked and social playlists. Now we just have lax social. Its the same with dumb maps and gametypes in reach. Vote for hemorrhage or elite slayer? no problem. I’ll just be leaving the match at the beginning =)
I think the only time I’d quit is if I were reduced to lone wolfing it on a BTB. I find that if the enemy team isn’t sticking together and abusing their numbers advantage, a game of team slayer where you’re down a man or two can actually be beneficial, as there are more enemies to kill and less of your own team to be killed.
That being said it really sucks when you’re down a man or more, and the other team IS organized and sticking together to press that numbers advantage.
Just played a game where I was the only one positive on my team. Two of my teammates were -13 and -22. This is just bad. If there was a 1-50 ranking system, this might not happen.