Long post, a little heated after reading todays post from the community manager but i want to try and not overreact.
The cycle begins once again
343 say a million and one things to hook players, and then release a half baked product with a million and one problems instead
Players fight over number company bad or good and they learn almost nothing from release to release
Such is the 343 cycle.
it really feels like no matter how many fixes or changes happen with 343 and halo they somehow manage to forget everything and restart from scratch everytime.
Halo fans have always been divided, its our nature like the humans and covenant, to fight amongst eachother like the nerds we are, but never has the community been in such a bad place and been met with such a cold and telling response from a 343 employee, except maybe one other time, when they called us âchildrenâ for being concerned about the balancing of warzone and the obvious pay-2-win system designed for it.
Not only does ske7ch and uni give a different tall tale about why slayer and basic playlists werent available, but we can basically confirm from ske7chs heated post that 343 are once again trying to reinvent the wheel and model the game around a specific monetization system, its basically warzone and req packs all over again except now its challenge swaps and xp boosts.
Slayer needing time for data collection sounds ridiculous, the idea that to stop player divide they would instead force gamemodes onto those whod rather not play them is ludicrous, especially when the excuse given is about player population while the game is at peak population.
There is almost not excuse that sounds plausible enough that someone could give me as to why we dont even have a slayer playlist, ui constraints? If your struggling with your ui this far into development isnt that a sign that maybe something is wrong?
Playlists are one of the three biggest problems in the game right now, releasing like this hurts the game population.
My thoughts on monetization are that they can be good for a game, and CAN be good for the player if done right, and at the moment 343 offers armour at far too high a price, coatings at far too high a price, and are stingy with armour constraints to push for further spending, it is as anti player as it gets, the battlepass is no better, with a grind long and bad enough to make any player feel like they are numb after trying for 4 hours to nab 10 energy sword kills (completely rng based)
The message that ske7ch provides in terms of halo and its monetization is that this is something not changing very much, and that if your a legacy player upset by this then that sucks but isnt a concern to 343 as a whole, further conveyed by the locking of half the halo reach armour behind a paywall despite originally being planned for the battlepass. There is âchangesâ that could be made to value of items but the whales are already spending and it might be too late for any of that to change at this point.
His post also doesnt provide anything in terms of time framing for when fixes are happening, as if 343 dont understand what âresponding to feedbackâ properly looks like, yes we know you are listening, its impossible for you to not be, we want to know what you plan to do about the feedback, we dont need every plan to every minute detail but at least something would be appreciated, players are so heated and angry because they feel like they are screaming into a vacuum only to be met with the same automated âwe hear youâ every post
It really seems like we are doomed to repeat the halo 5 cycle until the end of time, that game turned out to be really fun after 4 years of waiting for all the content, lets hope we dont have to wait that long this time for a solid finished product and for 343 to get their act together
(And we all agree the campaign looks good right? No one can deny that, its honestly what might just carry the game alltogether imo)