Discussion Thread
Keep it Clean
~Superintendant
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I liked a lot of what I read.
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I mean, I guess this is all good. I can’t help but picture this update won’t land on it’s feet for me. I still haven’t finished this season’s battle pass. The progression is snails pace slow. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but it seems as though it was designed to push players into purchasing more credits to speed through the levels.
Not cool. Just a guy trying to get a proper modern, but faithful, Halo experience and I haven’t received one.
Welp, fingers crossed.
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I still gotta process it all, but it sounded decent for a first update. But it should likely improve from there, which is exciting for the long term of this game. But we’ll see.
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More of the same…largely underwhelming and mostly either “work in progress” or “release some time this year” or “in future updates”. Meh.
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Everything sounds good, just wish that we didn’t get that classic “sometime later” attached to 90% of these changes
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Pretty much: Coming soon™
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If only “soon” meant “May 2nd, 2022”.
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Ok, I have been extremely critical of 343 for quite some time now.
But this + the past blog really surprised me.
It sounds like they actually WANT to implement changes, they just can’t do it fast for some reason.
I’m gonna post what my thoughts are but I have to type it all up, lol
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Enabling customization across different armor cores has been the largest point of feedback when it comes to customization. We agree that there is room to have better customization by lifting core restrictions where possible. For right now, we’re pursuing options that will allow players to use certain customization items on different cores. Due to the way the core system was initially built, getting items to work on various cores will take time, may not even be possible for all items, and will likely require us to do it piece-by-piece. As we investigate what expanding to cross-core customization would require from a tech perspective, our initial focus is on enabling as many helmets, visors, and armor coatings across different cores as possible. In short, our goal is that we will be incrementally moving to a model that has coatings and visors working across all cores; with helmets and chest gear working across canon cores as our first focused changes to make in the system.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSS.
Ok, now that I have that out.
I am really excited for this, I really want to use the Yokai helmet with my MK. VII spartan.
Similar to the point above, players who unlocked a Kit (e.g. Noble Team Spartans or HCS Team Kits) wanted to be able to use the individual items within that Kit with other customization content to create unique combinations.
Kits were meant to give players the feeling of becoming a character (Noble Team) or wearing a team’s uniform (esports), but we understand the desire to use a Kit’s specific items in other customization combinations. In a future update, we’ll be changing the Kit system so that it will allow players to sport individual items from their Kits to use on their own personal Spartans.
I didn’t buy the premium pass so this doesn’t really effect me, but I know a lot of people had issues with it.
Using multiple armor attachments, weapon model changes, or vehicle model changes, when they don’t overlap with one another is also asked for frequently. Our focus is currently set on cross-core customization and Kits, but we wanted to acknowledge this, and we’ll see what we can do.
Not exactly a confirmation," Yes, we will do this." but at least they will look into it.
As I don’t spend money on f2p games (usually) I won’t comment on the shop section.
A Career Progression system is in the design phase right now. We want to nail it out of the gate and that’s going to take some time.
Glad to hear it!
Additionally, we know there’s a desire for per-match, which also leverages performance, to plug into this system as well as the Battle Pass. Per-match XP is on the way and will land this year.
Yes!
Glad to hear that it will be coming this year
For S2’s Battle Pass, we want to focus on improving the value we provide to the players on both the free and Premium tracks. To do so, the free Battle Pass will contain even more customization content than S1’s – including the Lone Wolves armor core early on the in the track. As for the Premium track, we’ve added Credits as another reward tier and will allow players to earn up to 1000 CR.
Really happy to hear this, and with the work on crosscore customization and more valuable weekly rewards, free players are looking to get quite a bit of quality content.
We’ve been doing our best to address Challenges that end up being too situational, misconfigured, or confusing whenever feedback pops up around them. Please continue letting us know when specific ones don’t meet your expectations. Anytime you believe you should’ve made progress on a Challenge, but didn’t, please report it to us using. The Support team has been tracking reports of various Challenge-related issues and brings them directly to us for evaluation. Lastly, as of this week, we’ve removed the Killjoy Challenges from all challenge decks, and you won’t be seeing it again anytime soon.
“Doing our best” is kind of a stretch. You could’ve just given us generic challenges, " get x kills, get x assists, win x matches, complete x matches, ect"
Ultimate Rewards, which are earned by completing all your Weekly Challenges and the Ultimate Challenge, have seen highs and lows throughout the season. The feedback here has been heard and we’re happy to say that Season 2’s Ultimate Rewards will feature rewards at a higher and more consistent quality bar. That means they will focus on content like coatings, visors, and stances, and no longer have emblems or backdrops, throughout the course of the season.
For example, here’s the first five weeks of Ultimate Rewards in S2:
- Week 1: Sentry Stance
- Week 2: Battleship Haze MA40 AR Coating
- Week 3: Alabaster Cognac Razorback Coating
- Week 4: Amber Yesterday Visor
- Week 5: Spring Mountain Stance
Not too shabby.
I will say, I’m not extremely hyped about “stances” but they are better than emblems and backdrops, that’s for sure.
I mean, I don’t think people were super upset about emblems, it was just that, you had to get it 4 TIMES OVER.
All in all, I’m just happy I’m getting more weapon/vehicle coatings, I am severely lacking in that department as a f2p player
Double XP Boosts utilizing time is a little more complex than it may appear on the surface. We’ve seen the recommendations to use Halo 5’s Double XP Boosts, which work on a per-match basis. However, since Halo Infinite currently leverages Challenges for XP (though per-match XP will be landing later this year), there’s a chance a player could not meet the requirements for the Challenge in that game, and therefore not get any rewards for a per-match boost. Since you don’t know when you may complete that Challenge, we instead opted for time-based boosts to make sure players could knock out multiple Challenges or get a handful attempts to knock out a specific one. Based on feedback from last year though, we did end up bumping the Double XP Boost timers from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and then doubled it again from 30 minutes to 1 hour. Although it isn’t perfect, we do think this is a fair approach for the time being.
Longer term, however, we do agree with moving away from time-based XP boosts – especially with per-match XP coming in a future update. We’ll have more to share on both of these at a later date.
I think you could have double XP weekends, that would be a great way to draw in players to the game.
Also, I think an overhauled daily challenge system would be great.
More daily challenges for me to complete would be great.
This Season we’ve had Events end and their mode’s time in matchmaking end with it. The feedback around this approach was not unexpected, but we wanted to give it a try to see if it could help spice up events. Now that we’ve given it a try though, we will be doing a better job of making Event content available in the normal matchmaking rotation starting in Season 2. The MP Team shared more about playlists in [last week’s blog] as well.
Glad to hear it.
Can’t wait to play Attrition when S2 comes around.
We did take steps to reduce how often Weekly Challenges could get in front of Event Challenges, but there’s still more we can do here. Down the road, we want to have separate Challenge lists so that Weekly Challenges aren’t blocking Event Challenges and vice versa.
Again, glad to hear it.
As for Tenrai, we’ve seen positive results overall with this recurring event. We increased the amount of progress players could make in a single week which has helped quite a bit. Even though we’ve seen some players believe repeating events can get stale, many appreciate the opportunity to catch up on weeks when they have more time to play. We like this Fracture format as it stands right now, but we will continue to look at ways to improve it even further.
Ya know, you could just have the events add content permanently instead of having it be time limited.
Overall, a decent blogpost, a lot less “we know better, f you” from this one.
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I might have overlooked it, but I didn’t see any acknowledgment of Challenge XP not going towards anything on a maxed out BP?
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Don’t forget Halo is like everyone else now and joined the live service modern gaming model. It’s hard to predict how this will be without seeing how the pricing schemes are implemented. Perfect example, see what happened to Gran Turismo. I mean, it’s live service so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like an armor customization kit = 19.99 usd. Armor core swap? 24.99 usd. Multiple color options? 29.99 usd.
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I think it’s worth giving 343i some credit here. Directionally, the changes incoming are almost all good IMO. It would’ve been better for this game, its players, and 343i and their business if these aspects of the game weren’t so bafflingly botched in the first place, but that ship’s long since sailed.
Removing cross core customization restrictions is such a huge W. Again, it was a very questionable design decision to have those restrictions in the first place, but absolutely it is hugely appreciated that they’re working on this. Also, it’s great to hear that they’re still plinking away on the overarching “career” (not Battle Pass) progression system for the game. When that comes, as long as it’s thought out decently well, I think it will give this game immensely larger legs than it currently has.
A couple things that I think could backfire or are “cop out” answers are S2 Weekly Ultimate rewards being high-value “exclusive” cosmetic items and the answer around 2x XP boosts being timed rather than applied on a per-match or matches basis. Also, the ability to earn cR capping off at 1000 for the Season 2 battle pass (especially if that’s on the premium track) is just a piddling amount of value as the shop prices stand today. Still an improvement over not being able to earn any cR in-game, but not going to fix people’s problems with that system at all IMO.
Regarding weekly challenges, it’s great- imperative, really- to try to make ultimate rewards feel substantial and consistent on a week to week basis. That said, making the rewards high value cosmetics is a questionable move for me for a few reasons. First, I don’t believe for a second that these items will remain indefinitely exclusive. At the bare minimum, they’ll be recycled as weekly rewards (which, to be fair, wouldn’t devalue them much, and I actually strongly feel that players who missed a reward but want it should have other opportunities to earn it) - but I think as time and seasons go on, they’ll be viewed as recyclable assets to apply to one-off event passes or “throwback” store bundles. I could be wrong about this, but as far as I can tell, every cosmetic asset in this game is going to be leveraged for as much as possible in terms of player engagement and purchases.
As soon as 343i feels enough time has passed to minimize outrage for those who earned these cosmetics in weekly ultimate challenges, and they sense any palpable amount of demand for them, I’m confident they will provide avenues for players to buy or grind for them again later.
As for the timed XP boost issue, I think fewer players (at least who I’ve talked to) have an intrinsic problem with it being a timed system, and more an issue with the fact that the clock is constantly ticking down including during intermission between matches, browsing the store or UX, etc. , rather than purely counting time that the player is playing the game and can take advantage of it. That’s just outright stealing what would’ve been actionable XP boost time from the player. I don’t know if there’s a technical reason that starting/stopping the countdown on these to correlate with whether or not a match is actually in progress is extant, but to brush this aspect of the problem many players have with this setup under the rug feels disingenuous.
Anyways, all said, it sounds like things are moving in the right direction. I don’t doubt that the state of all of this stuff will steadily improve over time and will eventually be a system that’s a nice enough compromise between players’ desire to get great value and enjoyment from their money and time and 343i’s imperative to monetize the whole thing as tidily as possible. However, I think that version of the game economy is several iterations ahead and there will be a lot more growing pains in the meantime.
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Happy to hear - when I get a date for this arrival… I’ll start playing again… as long as it goes beyond Multiplayer…
But feeling hopeful.
I can imagine when they implement a career progression system it will contribute towards that system.
Also in the mean time with a 3 month BP season and an extended progression pass. The gap between BP’s will be far less than this seasons experience.
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Interesting post on this from John Junyszek on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Unyshek/status/1512224938878406657
“Just to make sure we’re on the same page, earning 1000 CR allows you to get the next Premium Battle Pass without needing to buy any more credits. If you complete the BP, you’ll have earned all of its customization content and all of your credits back. 1/2”
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For I who doesn’t like to shop… and content in my old rags. This was very much my first thought.
Apart from the on going development of the career progression system. Best news of the update!
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Cross-core is a huge W. Helmets, visors, coating and shoulders are the main things that should be cross-core IMO and they mentioned most of those.
Kits were meant to give players the feeling of becoming a character (Noble Team) or wearing a team’s uniform (esports)
I don’t understand this logic. If I wanted to look like Emile, I’d just equip all of his armor pieces and coating. That’s what we did in Reach. (Yeah I know his shoulders aren’t in the game yet, but they should’ve been). Same with the E-sports skin. All of them were Mk. 7 and Agathius shoulders. Which I think used to be default. It’s not even a hard look to copy. But the point is that all kits really seem to do is expedite the customization process by only requiring one toggle instead of having to open and search each menu.
The only thing I want to point out here is that while they are improving the value of the BP, that doesn’t mean its price won’t go up. Although they implied it will still be $10 since they are putting 1000 cR ($10 USD equivalent) in the BP, and BPs traditionally at least give players back their money so they have enough to buy the next BP if they choose to save it.
Idk how I feel about the new core being free. It’s a foot in the door tactic. Give us the core for free then try and sell us red for a fourth time.
So glad Killjoy challenges are gone. Now they need to abolish Guardian Angels. But all they have to do is make them more broad. They didn’t mention allowing us to progress all challenges at once instead of this 3-4 at a time crap. So that sucks.
For example, here’s the first five weeks of Ultimate Rewards in S2:
- Week 1: Sentry Stance
- Week 2: Battleship Haze MA40 AR Coating
- Week 3: Alabaster Cognac Razorback Coating
- Week 4: Amber Yesterday Visor
- Week 5: Spring Mountain Stance
I’ll take stances over Emblems any day, but they also need to make emblems 1 item and stop pretending they are four. Also I want to highlight that we may be getting the “coating version” of the same problem. Week 3 is the "Alabaster Cognac Razorback Coating. Then week 6 could be the “Alabaster Cognac Rockethog Coating” etc. Again, better than emblems, but as they say: “Out of the frying pan into the other frying pan…”
Dailies should be where they put earn-able emblems.
Agreed.
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Yeah we need that. Even something simple as “Every 5000 XP earned gives a free swap”. (5000 XP can be earned ever 5 days if you play just 6 games. So, 1 swap per week, which I think is fair).
Credits are on the premium track from what I understand. BP is $10 USD and you get that equivalent back in the form of cR. Standard BP stuff. But they can’t give out too much stuff or no one will bother with the store. So idk what the solution is right now.
In general they need to just do away with time-sensitive unlocks. It makes them stressful to grind for frustrating to ignore. I recently thought of an idea that uses a 2-week, double unlock system.
Basically you have two weekly rewards. Say, a coating and a visor. During the first week you have 20 challenges and a capstone (just like we have now). If you complete them all, you get both items. If you come up short, you can try again next week, with new challenges. If you miss it a second then you just miss it and have to try again at a later date. And maybe if you finished in the 1st week you can do the 20 challenges anyway and get a free swap on the 2nd week. It’s not perfect does still utilize FOMO, but it at least gives some leeway for less skilled/unlucky players.
I feel like next the season should be enough time. But that’s just me.
100% about the XP boosts. God forbid your game crashes or you have to get up to water your plant during that hour. And by the way described their dilemma…
However, since Halo Infinite currently leverages Challenges for XP (though per-match XP will be landing later this year), there’s a chance a player could not meet the requirements for the Challenge in that game, and therefore not get any rewards for a per-match boost. Since you don’t know when you may complete that Challenge
…It just further shows why a RNG, challenge-based progression system was a bad idea.
I believe once the game becomes more player friendly player may decide to open their wallets more. Right now the game make you feel like a chump for daring to support the game. And so it’s created an air of apathy toward any purchases, not matter how reasonable (like the Campaign).
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They haven’t said how long season 2 will be. This doesn’t me S2 will be 6 months, but it also doesn’t mean it won’t. Just a heads up.
343 definitely needs to sweeten the pot with campaign. Feels like a one-and-done game. Some campaign challenges for XP would be nice, or even owning campaign allows player to unlock free cR. I bet many people would campaign just for that ability.
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