> 2533274887665513;13787:
> Thank you! It wears me out having to repeat these points. I still stand by what I said, whether you enjoy sprint or not is your opinion, buts its negative impact on Halo is so objectively provable that I don’t consider it a matter of opinion.
Let’s not be too hasty without our claims. When you assert that something is “objectively provable”, you truly need to be able to prove it, or you just end up exaggerating and making your position appear more objective than it actually is.
There are three claims contained in “[sprint’s] negative impact on Halo is objectively provable”. The first claim is that there exists specific, provable effects that sprint has on gameplay. The second claim is that there exists some objective measure of “negative impact”, and the third is that it can be proven that these specific effects have that property of “negative impact”.
When it comes to the first claim, some effects generally attributed to sprint are: separation of movement and combat, increase of map sizes, and lowered difficulty of escaping encounters. If anyone wants to point out more, feel free to. At any rate, of these three effects, none are strictly speaking provable, mainly because we don’t have any strict enough definitions to speak about any of this stuff with the necessary amount of rigor. At most we can conclude that for the first two there exists some pretty compelling evidence. Namely, for the first one that players spend any time sprinting at all when moving from place to place, and for the second some investigations have been carried out by different community members, which appear to suggest that small maps in pre-sprint Halo were generally smaller than small maps in post-sprint Halo. I think it’s fair to say that the existence of these two effects is beyond reasonable doubt, but “beyond reasonable doubt” is not the same as “proven”. When it comes to the third effect, evidence-wise this is on shakier ground than the first two. The “evidence” is mostly anecdotal, and in fact the most compelling reason to believe this are the explanations why it should be the case that sprint makes escaping easier. However, as said earlier, these explanations aren’t rigorous enough to justify calling them “proofs”. They are just arguments that I think are fairly compelling on an intuitive level.
Nonetheless, let us assume that these effects exist. The claim that these effects create a “negative impact” relies on the definition of this “negative impact”. Just saying that there exists a “negative impact” is subjective without further elaboration, because “negative impact” is nothing more than a fancy euphemism for “something I don’t like” that appears more objective than it is. And in fact, there’s no such thing as “objectively bad”. Ultimately you’ll have to get people to agree with you on something on a purely subjective level if you want to covince them that something is bad. For example, my go to is that I want the gameplay of Halo to be deep (coupled with a sufficient working definition of depth that puts the problem on technically experimentally verifiable ground), but if someone doesn’t agree with me on that definition of depth, I might as well try to convince them that chocolate is the best ice cream flavor. So, a priori, there exists no objective measure of “negative impact”, but the problem is possible to reword in more objective terms, but not everyone will agree with you on what is fun.
Finally, suppose we’ve formulated the argument in more objective terms than “negative impact”. I’m going to use the gameplay depth here because that’s a fairly common line of reasoning, and one that I’m familiar with. Again, there exist some arguments for why the effects discussed above would decrease the depth of gameplay which I think are quite compelling, but these arguments are, again, not proofs. When it comes to evidence, there’s none that I know of, mostly because depth as a cooncept turns out to be highly intractable, and difficult to test.
So, in summary, there is nothing about the “negative impact” of sprint that is in any way “objectively provable”. Generously speaking, there are compelling reasons to believe that we are not just taking all these antisprint arguments from thin air, and that there exists some compelling reasoning for why sprint should make gameplay shallower. However, this is as much as can be said. Nothing has been objectively proven, and the “negative impact” of sprint on Halo (when worded precisely this way) is definitely entirely subjective.
