Hello Spartans,
As a player that has spent a good amount of time in game, and has played a sizeable mountain of other games, I feel like I have some amount of experience being able to speak on what I think would be reasonable changes to be made in the short term. So lets get to it!
- The Ultimate Challenge should not be locked behind finishing all 20 “weekly” challenges. This becomes even more of a chore for those of us that finish the BP. XP becomes pointless. My recommendation? There should be 1 Daily, 4 weeklies that rotate, and then a 5th Weekly Ultimate: which is literally the ultimate challenge. But is something you can target and progress min 1 of the server reset. I would see this as a win win because A) It creates a feedback loop where players can log-in and semi-rapidly “earn” a free reward each week (based on past challenges this should take about an hour to an hour and a half). B) Doesn’t gate the cosmetic behind would could be half a dozen or more hours of play… especially if you don’t have challenge swaps.
- Challenge Swaps need to simply “complete” challenges. RNG isn’t good… especially in a system that is sudo payed. If a person is paying $1 for a swap, just auto complete it for the person. And in the long term, the entire challenge system will hopefully be removed.
- FFA Needs to be removed from the challenge rotation. Halo should be looked at as a multiplayer game fist and foremost. its a massive pain to see all these FFA challenges when a good amount of my playtime is with other people.
- Challenge XP should be shared with your party. At least in part. The group I play with regularly has to go through the pain of asking everybody else what they need, and often times only 1 person might need a gametype/mode.
- Expanding on 4, the challenge system is just a bad “mood” for any kind of shared lobby game. I know work is being done to rework this… but in the short term enabling some kind of “challenge linking” or something would be a massive improvement. Where when you are partied up, any challenge completion is counted for everybody, and will remove a random challenge from every party members pool of the same or lower quality. This would be good because A) It would reward players for grouping up and playing with friends B) It would reduce the pain in the butt that the challenge system is right now.
- XP post BP should still reward something. Especially challenge swaps right now.
- All repeat cosmetics need to be quickly re-worked. Lets not pretend that this is any more work then it really is. Small graphics like this are a dime a dozen, and are purely being exploited right now. Padding the “ultimate challenge” system with so many repeats is borderline insulting. We need more variety. And Im sure I’m not the only one that would be perfectly happy with a simple single color skin for weapons… Which I would imagine would take an intern all of 30min to create and test.
- Please, please please. Test other price points in the shop. While $20 and $10 are industry staples… why follow that model? I understand profit is important… but this is MS flagship product. I would imagine finding a balance where your profit margin takes a dip, but you see a larger % of attach rate would make far more sense. The goal should be to maximize engagement with the shop. Doing this will bring more players to the game.
- Part of the weekly system should include a few free challenge swaps for logging in. This is especially made true with how many swaps have been used due to buggy progress, or challenges that flat out more time consuming that most other challenges.
- Challenges need their XP rewards evaluated. Its sill that a challenge that is as generic as “play 3 games”, can have a very similar XP reward as something that is as specific as “win 2 stockpile matches”.
- While challenges exist, matchmaking NEEDS to start creating games based on challenge needs. A person that needs stockpile matches should obviously be placed in stockpile games as a priority. An even easier fix would be to implement a system where players can just directly choose the exact match type they need. Which would also reduce the amount of people quitting.
- BP completion should be worth some amount of “halo currency”. And make completion feel that much more rewarding.
And just a note to the devs at 343. I started playing Halo by hosting or going to LAN parties. The joy of the game is in the gameplay. And the challenge system is robbing me and many other players of that joy. It’s silly how much more enjoyable Halo Infinite is when I’m done with my challenges. Or simply not worried about them. I don’t want or need the extra pressure of “getting a double kill” before the match ends. Or feeling like I “need” to win this CTF game. Or the frustration of playing 10-15+ matches in a row and not even seeing the game type my friend needs (not even an exaggeration). And then to finish the weeks/months of gameplay with not much at all to show for it. And look at your competition. Look at how in a game like Destiny I unlock a shader and it works on EVERYTHING. Guns, ships, sparrow, armor. And the paid skins are entire original models. With many free armor sets and ornaments to be earned. And avenue’s to earn all [most?] of this paid content in game.