The betrayal boot system is archaic, inconsistent, and unfair. It punishes players for self-defense, doesn’t count if the betrayer doesn’t finish you off, and allows griefers to avoid boots by doing non-deadly things like destroying vehicles or hoarding power weapons. The question is, then, are there any other systems that would work for Halo?
I’m going to go through a couple of games I’ve played before to discuss how their systems might play out if implemented into Halo, what drawbacks would come with them, and the effects it may have on the community.
Counter Strike ‘damage’ system: Counter Strike uses a damage-based boot system that automatically kicks a player if they’ve done a significant amount of damage to a teammate. 3 kills on any teammate, 400 damage dealt (players have 100 health), or one kill in spawn gets you instantly booted from the game. This would obviously stop the abuse the current system gets where betrayers pop their victim’s shield and let the enemies kill them, but then we run into the issue of players intentionally getting hit by teammates to get them booted (which happens in CS:GO mainly with fire grenades) and with Halo’s many explosive weapons and high-damage weapons like snipers and gravity hammers, it might be too easy to run in front of a victim to get them booted instead. One way to counteract this is with a smart system, one that makes dealing damage to the enemy team immediately before or after detract from this friendly fire ‘score’, thus making accidental grenades less impactful than blasting teammates with rockets as they spawn. Often, serial betrayers will betray their teammates from a place of relative safety. Popping their shields from a distance with a DMR or lobbing a grenade at them while they leave spawn. This means they won’t always have quick access to enemies they could use to abuse this system, and it may be one way to stop such a system from intruding on normal gameplay.
Team Fortress 2 votekick system (yes I play a lot of valve games): TF2 uses a votekicking system where any player on your own team can call a vote, and your team votes whether or not to kick you. There is a cooldown afterwards where no votes can be called, after which the process can be repeated. (the player who called the vote must wait slightly longer, which stops players from abusing the system by calling the vote every time the cooldown is over to prevent the vote from getting called on themselves) This would give players the ability to kick teammates who do things like: destroy vehicles at the start of the match (usually because they’re faux-puissant who don’t like it when other people grab them first), or hoarding power weapons and hiding in some random corner of the map, or are generally being a nuisance to the entire team. Of course, this system works on the honor system. If the community is too toxic, people might start doing things like: purposefully voting out ‘bad’ players, calling votes on people you simply find annoying, or griefing by calling a random vote at the beginning of a round and accusing the person of hacking. So the question really is “Do we trust halo players with this power”
Other systems include a ‘smart engagement’ system, where the game tries to detect whether or not a player is engaging in combat with the enemy or with their teammates by trying to discriminate between attempts to shoot at enemies and attempts to shoot at allies. Fire too many shots in the direction of your teammates that aren’t also in the direction of the enemy, and that teammate gets the option to boot you, whether you hit them or not. This would stop people from griefing players by following them around and shooting constantly while only occasionally popping shots into their back, and also stops the other forms of griefing by their nature. Also biasing this system with ‘first shot’ detection that weighs shots fired at people with ‘bad engagement scores’ much lower. Essentially, if your karma is bad, shooting at you won’t lower someone else’s karma very much.
I’m sure 343i could come up with a better system than I can, but the question is if we as a community care enough about griefing to MAKE them do so. Now that infinite has been announced as a free-to-play title, I think they need to take in-game booting more seriously. Banning consistently -Yoink- players won’t be enough when they can make a free alt account and jump right back in, and the system we have now for booting players is laughably ineffective.