This is in response to the latest development blog about the Anti-cheat “Arbiter” and the removal of Red Reticle on PC.
What was the removal of red reticle meant to do? Why did you speak to it but not other aspects of anti-cheat before this?
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“We’ve heard the calls for it to be reinstated because there are cheaters in the game anyways, but other cheats existing does not mean we should lower our guard in other areas. We’ll continue to keep an eye on this, but we still believe this is the right decision for the health of the game as it stands right now.”
I can’t personally speak for everyone but I think this statement is a cop out. PC players aren’t asking for the bar to be lowered for RR to be reintroduced; we are asking 343 to RAISE their own bar to give us back a core feature of Halo. You created Arbiter inhouse and have quiet clearly shown it can’t keep up in its own goal. To say your own Anti Cheat can’t detect a trigger bot should be clear that your work is not done and needs to be improved upon.
Personally, RR isn’t a make or break for this game. Would it be nice to have? Absolutely. Have I been playing this game nearly everyday since launch with out it? Also yes. I’m also not the only one to do so. We’ve adapted but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a wanted feature. The benefits of RR are huge in this game especially with the introduction of effective ranges for each weapon. The RR would tell us, in a single moment whether or not we are in the intended effective distance of the weapon we are using. Since I play on controller I can figure that out pretty fast with the amount of aim assist I receive at different ranges. But MnK players are completely left out here. They have nothing to fall back on if they take a fight outside of their weapons range and because RR isn’t here they can never know that they were out of the effective range until after the fact.
343, we aren’t asking you to make a “worse” title or Anti Cheat. We are asking for the BARE MINIMUM. The community shouldn’t need to explain that this isn’t asking for the “Bar to be Lowered” asking for Red Reticle back, this should be obvious.
I understand what they’re saying to an extent. Why would a dev just up and unravel a safeguard making their game more vulnerable to cheaters as it already is?
That’s a risky move. You don’t just take out a feature that’s existed for 20 years for no good reason. Regardless of how pessimistic some may feel about 343’s intelligence.
On the other hand, why is this a problem on Infinite and not MCC? Furthermore, what is being done to fix the issue and when can players expect RR to return?
I get where you’re coming from. But I also think it shouldn’t be a question of increasing the risk if they have truly done everything they possibly can with Arbiter. Like I originally said, I don’t want the bar lowered for RR to come back. I want the bar to be higher so a standard of the previous games remains the standard. I also understand the risk of PC play as it’s where the vast majority of cheats both originate and are used from. And Xbox players are suffering from that just as much as we are. It is a fine line to walk but I think it’s important that we all agree we as a community aren’t asking them to lower their own bar.
I can only assume that the reason is due to traditional anti-cheat software having years of compounded roadblocks in place that stops more common issues such as RR botting.
Easy Anti-Cheat or other passive kernel programs like it (not to be confused with Riot’s boot level kernel system) rely on a vast algorithmic database that transcends a plethora of titles over many years of functionality. Based on what we saw with Infinite, it can be speculated that the AI system first implemented didn’t have a database as robust (or even at all) right off the bat due to the response from the Devs to take matters into their own hands rather than let their system work out the kinks.
I want a reticle that I can customize so that I can see where my shots will go, rather than guess where in this giant space my shot will go (br) or have the thing I am shooting at completely obscured (shock rifle). Let players at least choose from a range of crosshair options if not a full custom reticle system. And let me choose my reticle color, white is really hard to see against certain backgrounds.
RR also exists to hide bullet magnetism giving you hits when you aren’t on target, and I hate that mechanic too. AA for controllers, I can understand, but magnetism just punishes the people who actually have good aim. So no, I’m actually pretty cool with RR going away.
As for triggerbots, I don’t see how disabling RR does anything, as someone could just set it to shoot on the enemy outline/shield colors they set.
The red reticle system is built to obscure the fact that the game is magnetising missed bullets onto a target. When the reticle turns red, that is letting you know that the shot fired will hit, whether or not the target is actually in the center of your crosshairs.
That’s one of the reasons all the crosshairs are so stylized; the size of the reticle correlates to the effective degrees of magnetism. If you made all reticles a dot this would be very obvious, as you would see many instances where that dot is not at all close to the target, yet still turns red.
By tying player expectation to the red reticle indicating a shot will hit, you train the player to ignore the actual placement of the center of the reticle (it helps when this is open space so the centerpoint is further obscured) in favor of the easier to spot color change.
This isn’t a secret, 343 literally showed it off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVQ4Bp7vlwc&t=180s
So first, you can clearly see that the crosshair is big, turns red about as soon as the model is within the large circle, and that single shots fired with the center crosshair way off target are still landing. But notice in the debug view they show the little indicator of where the shot is actually going? Pay attention and you’ll see that as soon as that thing snaps to the player model, the reticle turns red.
And they go on about how if they do their job right the player doesn’t notice and just feels like a badass. I’m not saying this, they are. The point of this system is to obscure the fact that you’re missing shots and being rewarded with hits.
And I’m not a fan of that style of design in a game trying to be a competitive shooter, because it cheapens the value of actually spending the time to get good at aiming.
It’s called being a console first shooter designed around player mobility over holding RT on the head. If there was no AA then Halo would have never taken off as it would have been too difficult for many weapons to be viable in the campaign and MP since joystick is just not a precise input method.
Dude, plenty of games have aim assist, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the magic bullet effect that gives you hits without having to be on target.
Which isn’t just on consoles btw, that crap is in the kbm lobbies too. There’s literally no escaping it. And believe me, it’s super noticeable on pc when you know you missed and the game gives you hits anyway. Because there is no RR on pc to obscure the fact that the crosshair is centered in the air over someone’s shoulder and the game decides that’s good enough, headshot. It doesn’t make me feel good for getting the kill, it’s annoying because I know I didn’t earn it.
You don’t need to literally aim for the player just because they’re on sticks (and especially not when they’re on mouse), there are loads of ways to help with making precision adjustments while still requiring the player to be the one to actually hit the shot. Which is typically the point of AA; you don’t want to track the target for the player, you want to increase the precision of their input so they can do it themselves.
A game trying to be a competitive shooter should not be literally aiming for the player.
Seriously, there are actual aimbots, the kind that get you banned, that don’t softlock you as hard as the magnetism in Infinite does.
The whole point of AA to increase the ability of players to track targets while bullet magnetism allows weapons like the AR to exist with a cone of spread that magnetizes within a certain range. Both are key parts of Halo’s design and are both required.
You don’t need magnetism to make an assault rifle. The point of the bloom is to range restrict the gun by guaranteeing x% shots missed at y range. It also makes the gun easier overall to use, as the large bullet spread means that you can still get some hits while off target. The magnetism in effect just reverses part of this effect by re-correcting z% of bloom inaccurate bullets that would otherwise be on target.
Unless, of course, you have bad aim, in which case you get a few extra random bloom shots that weren’t on target to hit because they were within the minimum angle to get magnetized the rest of the way. This is a big part of why having the ar be so strong is bad for the game; it’s fundamentally a crutch weapon for new players, meant to become less useful as you get better and encourage sandbox interaction as you start wanting more rewarding guns.
Halo doesn’t require magnetism. Even if it did, it definitely doesn’t need to be this strong. It was fine back in the H3 days because the netcode was wonky and everything was peer to peer, so the lag was always insane and hit detection was all over the place anyways. In modern games, it’s just going to drive players away, because it’s not rewarding to players (including controller players) who actually have good aim.
Considering if you don’t jack up aim assist to compensate, you nullify the entire point of the AR by not making it easy to use.
Which has nothing to do with magnetism but instead damage and accuracy
Magnetism is a key part of Halo back to it’s roots, magnetism does not punish good aim because weapons that require good aim will not have huge magnetism angles, rewarding good aim is not an issue of magnetism but an issue of weapon balance.
Good find and thanks for sharing. Whatever the “cone” is they’re using now in infinite for controller, it’s smaller on KBM. Be very interesting to see the debugging running between the two inputs to see how much of a difference the circles are between controller and KBM. Granted KBM has no aim assist but more so with the circle that indicate the bullet mag.
Removing Red Reticle was so stupid. Yes, I think this topic is worth bringing back up, and I think PC players should be a bit more vocal on this issue. Going by 343’s argument of blocking triggerbots, they left the front door wide open with the player outlines. As a result, the 99% of legit players lose red reticle while the cheaters still have an avenue to use. So… what’s the point of losing red reticle?