Ranked FFA should reflect and mirror the competitive ffa settings at hcs events. Myself and those players included could not legitimately practice for tournaments outside of customs which is already hard enough to get going in this game. If you want 6 man ffa then rumble pit should be the playlist that is altered for your campy 6 man ffa settings where non competitive players can play to their liking. After all there are only 3 ranked playlists and they should be the competitive playlists at the end of the day til they ultimately add more in the future for less competitive players.
8 players is not too chaotic. 6 felt way too campy and was definitely not the way to go for ranked ffa. I will say that with 8 players that radar should be added just like the old H2 MLG Settings had back in the day.
I’m not saying one team/player or the other has a disadvantage in a large FFA game, I’m saying that the game settings that 343 (or the party leader in customs) can set up can be poorly thought out.
Imagine zombies in Infection. Swords, no shields, but instead of increased speed and jump height, they were slow and unable to jump. They’d just be fat targets for the survivors with ranged weapons. Being a zombie would suck, and no one would want to play that mode.
EDIT: A better analogy is 343 original attempt at “Rockets and Repulsors”. It was an FFA mode that was removed because “matches kept being resolved by the clock running down”. The reason for this? It was an Oddball mode with rocket spawns. Basically the carrier was helpless to defend from other players, so no one could really gain many points. As we’ve seen with the recent Social Slayer playlist, “Rockets and Replusors” works much better as a slayer mode.
tl;dr: Bad settings turned a good mode into a bad mode.
Going back to FFA (and a less extreme analogy) some maps just weren’t designed to have large lobbies, and that’s ok. Not every mode needs to be played on every map. If people want 16 player FFA on Live Fire, let 'em. It’ll be chaotic, but chaos isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But should the standard Halo experience be “chaotic”?
Far enough, but I would exactly call teams of those sizes “big”.
Yeah, that’s something 343 needs to fix. Customs shouldn’t have those sorts of limitations.
I agree 100%. And that’s part of why I feel the way I do about the weapon sandbox in infinite. It seems everything is dictated by it’s TTK rather than how it actually behaves on a map.
Indeed, game settings can be whatever and sometimes ruin a mode, at least for some people. To me it’s not that much of a problem if there’s lots of servers choice. This is what choice used to feel like (picture of a very informative custom game browser):
You’d look at all the available information and even filter and sort for what you like, such as max players, map, game mode and rules and decide if that’s for you. You could join a server marked as “classic” if you’d like a more standard Halo experience without any of the game mode settings modified. Imagine if Infinite had managed to appeal to all the 256,619 players that it once managed to reach ( https://steamcharts.com/app/1240440 ). That custom games browser could have thousands of servers to satisfy any taste.
Unless the stewards of the game made all the right choices for us, an abundance of choice seems the better way for this game, even if that would mean that you’d stumble upon 24-player Aquarius games. My opinion of course.
I’ll give you an example. I consider the new KoTH to be a problematic mode compared to the classic one where the Hill moved away every 30 seconds or so and appeared elsewhere. So they’ve thought about it and decided that it is more “balanced” this way and discarded the old recipe. I think it’s quite the opposite, because they have also decided that 4 vs 4 matches should be the main focus of this game (well, until Forge manages to change that with plenty of new BTB maps).
So in a 4 vs 4 KoTH game, it is often the case that you will lose a couple of team mates and while they are spawning far away from the Hill, the two left of your team will have to take on four opponents defending their Hill (and if they aren’t stupid they won’t be waiting inside the Hill all together). Thus, you will either wait for the rest of your team to assemble and lose precious seconds awarded to the opponents, or proceed to face them and possibly get killed because you are at a disadvantage… and then spawn far away again and the loop continues until the enemy team scores. Whereas if the Hill was not stationary until capture or if you had a bigger team to help you out, this wouldn’t have been an issue.
Another example. They’ve decided that most maps will be played as 4 vs 4 matches (again, until Forge manages to change that with more BTB maps), and that the motion tracker will have a smaller range and that it will be less reliable (it doesn’t register walking Spartans anymore?), and that you will be sprinting and that you can have a grappling hook. All these allow someone to close the gap between them and their enemy really fast and go undetected.
Now add into the mixture the ability to lock on your opponent with any weapon whatsoever - not just energy swords - and melee lunge them from a small distance (i.e. you have an aimbot for melee attacks), and as a result it makes it pretty reasonable for someone to run towards you to melee you out of existence, instead of, you know, taking cover or dodging? So now you can’t be on your own and easily focus on gunfights with 2 or more opponents from the enemy Team while sidestepping and taking cover, because with utmost certainty someone will try to come close and melee you while his friends are shooting you from a distance. The way all this plays out, makes you be veeery much dependent on your team’s help. Which is just a team of you and three others. If any of them are loafing around it can ruin your game. Whereas in 8 vs 8 games that wasn’t a big deal - even if two of your team mates were loafing around, 6 could still fight 8. Although 1/4 and 2/8 is the same percentage, 6 players engaging can cover and control more area than 3 players.
tl;dr: 12 vs 12 (total of 24 players) being underutilized and the main thing being just 4 vs 4 (total of 8 players)… I don’t think it works well as a standard Halo experience for a variety of map and game mode combinations, and without some middle ground available (good old 8 vs 8 perhaps ?).
BTB team FFA with 24 players and a finite number of kills (i.e. if sir kills-a-lot is racking up a 80 person kill streak and is level 15 dual sabre wielder with grapple hook and infinite grenades, the rest of his team will be level 3 nothings with just a commando and no shields).
Ranked settings have always been a middle ground between casual player and actual competitive play that has a little bit of both mixed together.They do this to ease people into the inter of competitive instead of tossing them in and hoping for the best they adjust. Which will have a significant better chance of gaining more traction for the competitive scene. If ranked was meant to be competitive in it’s most pure form they would never need to host competitive matches, tournaments and so forth through third party means.
FFA with 6 players only , BR start only , ranked playlist HCS.
FFA with 8 players. AR + BR only… ranked playlist.
having a playlist ranked should not force it to be HCS setting.
i was playing team sniper , and i was waiting for FFA ranked… i got so sad about the FFA without BR i stopped to play completelly the game ( i was playing team sniper before at each 2 days i would say)… but the decision of making the ranked playlist without AR make me too sad to continue to play the game.
8 is way too many, dear God. Did they play test this? The number of times I died because I was third partied as opposed to losing a gunfight is ridiculous. There is no room to breathe, at all.
Spawn in, die. Spawn in, kill, die. Yeah, FFA is chaotic, but this is just ridiculous. It’s certainly not competitive at the moment. Just spam.
If you have a difficulty with that, may I remind you that it once was 16 players? You ARE supposed to die, often, and you are supposed to develop cat-like instincts. Maybe the spawn points are the real issue here.
Specifically for Ranked FFA, the change to 8 players is awful. With BR starts and 8 players on these maps, getting killed off spawn is a massive problem.
You don’t feel it anywhere near as much in unranked because AR starts limits your range.
They need to revert Ranked back to 6 players and keep 8 players for Rumble Pit.
My opinion of course.