An issue when going with F2P rout is often the cheating issue. With F2P, people can just keep making new accounts and keep on using whatever cheating software they downloaded to mess with people and ruin matches so you kinda need a fairly fast and efficient punishment system to catch them even mid-match if possible.
However it seems there was no talk about this (unless i missed it), yet it’s a large hurdle many F2P games always face and since this will be cross-play this will affect you folk on console too when some kiddie pays 20 or whatever bucks for his aimbot, makes a quick new account with a new fake adress and then goes ham by perfectly head shooting 12 people in a row in mere seconds, and people in MP PvP can sometimes be so desperate for a win it’s not guaranteed that his team will attempt to stop the cheater, I’ve seen teams in some other games in the past where they’d refuse to kill a cheater or kick him (if a game has votekick) out of their team since they’d get an easy win having him on their side.
A good example of a game that has been a nightmare to play due to this is Team Fortress 2, ever since they decided to push matchmaking lobbies as the go to way to play over dedicated community servers that would at least have admins to ban problematic folk, there’s now been a huge infestation of bots and people using fairly easy to obtain cheating software over the past years, with the past 2 years def. being the worst now. Thankfully at least in TF2 things like community hosted servers still exist despite Valve’s attempt to kill them off with matchmaking lobbies and with how bad matchmaking experience has been they’ve even gotten a bit of a popularity resurrection which is nice.
However in Halo, apart from Halo CE and Halo 2 Vista on PC (+ the fanmade mods like Project Cartographer and Eldewerrito), Halo has been primarily a only matchmaking based game if you wanna play a regular match and earn stuff so there’s no fall back if matchmaking ends up having a huge cheating issue due to poor anticheat security unless you only do custom private games with select groups.
I’m not sure I’ll get an answer from 343 but if someone there is reading this, how serious is this potential issue being focused on for Halo Infinite’s MP ? Because if it really gets out of hand, it could kill the game or at least put off a lot of people from playing it.
Suggestion/Fall back plan
So either we’d need a really efficient anti-cheat or at least a secondary fall back plan like a dedicated browser system for people to rent servers from 3rd party sites, where people could at least moderate their own community for potential problematic people. Considering MCC is now getting a server browser, though a rather limited one where it’s only matches a player is currently hosting and not via dedicated 3rd party server sites that can run it 24/7. I think it’s something that should be considered to be implemented in Halo Infinite too honestly but preferably with the aforementioned possibility to host servers by renting them from a site so they can run 24/7 and even blossom into a community of its own with regulars that go into that server.
Usually games that have XP or batlepass systems while also having browser based servers, tend to have a certain requirement for the server host to be allowed to earn stats and XP so it can’t be exploited, so we could even have XP/Battlepass in those servers or maybe even make officially hosted servers where the company could have a admin hanging in them sometimes to ban the very obvious cheaters.
These were just my two cents and suggestion, about this potential problem this game could and probably will be facing as every other F2P has before.