This huge debate over sprint has caused a massive schism in the Halo community. I see many players advocating the split of playlists to satisfy everyone. But sometimes you have to bite your lip and just do what is best for the community and the future of Halo. The solution is making all standard playlists (TS, Obj, TD, FFA etc.) non sprint.
1. The majority rules
From what I’ve seen in the forums in posts and polls most players dislike sprint or any perks for that matter. I’m going to make a stab in the dark and say that many of the people arguing against sprint have played most of the previous Halos and those arguing for it have just played Reach. Those that have played previous Halo games know that Halo doesn’t need sprint. Furthermore if sprint is taken out the pro-sprint players will forget Reach (lolpun) within a few games and they too will realise sprint is not neccessary for Halo. Thus we can focus on improving the game without the constant debate of sprint.
2. Maps fit for a Spartan
It is incredibly hard to make maps catered to both sprint and non sprint. Reach proved this where some maps worked better with sprint than others. All of the forge world maps that were introduced to the TS playlist (chataeu, uncaged, atom, kingdom, synapse and precipice) were built for Reach’s gameplay because they were built for AAs. They were open and large. If you added those types of maps for H4 they would be terrible. Other maps in Reach play better without sprint and higher movement speed (zealot, countdown and asylum). These maps are tight, medium sized and have lots of cover which is what previous Halo maps consisted of.
3. 343 had a dream
If 343 ‘solves’ the divide with the predictable compromise of making playlists with and without sprint we will have yet another Reach fail on our hands. Reach had too many divides over AAs, bloom, TU etc which in turn spread players throughout many playlists with a sparse number of players in each playlist. With Halo not as popular as it used to be 343 needs to make a small number of playlists which will give them stong populations which will make games easier to find and give us better connections.
4. What have we learned?
Thus it is obvious that if we have several playlists with and without sprint the community will be divided and the horror that was Reach will occur yet again. Judging from the reveal of the H4 video sprint is obviously in H4. Fine, I can deal with that. Just don’t split the population over several playlists and leave it in custom game settings.