The Ultimate Halo 4 Sandbox Disscussion! Your views on everything, Make yourself heard!

Games Other Halo
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Introduction
Okay so hello again, for anyone who don’t know me I’m Blaze a independent Game Developer and much more importantly a long time Halo fan and competitive Halo player, Now this thread is really to help express your views in a compiled form to give a better amount of guidence to the developers at 343 on what we would like to see in the next Halo installment.

What is the "Sandbox"
Let’s keep it short the Sandbox contains the following:

  • Weapons & Weapon Balence
  • Armor Abilitys
  • Player Movement
  • Utilitys, Grenades

Seeing as maps and map layout is just as important we will also be covering that in this post. Along with Ranking and Playlists.

RANKING & PLAYLISTS

Overall Gameplay & Ranking
So when talking gameplay perticually Mutiplayer there are two main views “Competitive” and “Social/Fun” now we can all go and say for example “Multiplayer needs to be more competitive or fun” but and the end of the day we can have both so my personal view is to have two hoppers like on Halo 3 “Ranked” and “Social”,

Ranked
The Ranked playlist would run accelerated True Skill Ranking, I have experimented around with the formulae and found by accelerating it to “100” instead of “50” we will have the following benefits:

  • Better player matching
  • More competitive game’s
  • More accurate player ratings

It may seem a little odd, Please understand you’ll need to understand advanced maths before you’ll get whats going on with Trueskill, If you have studied advanced maths or and equivalant then check this out you may undestand it better than me:

Also note in a ViDoc Bungie had stated that in Halo 3 the Trueskill was poorly intergrated and was not used to its full potential I will look for a link,

Now we all know Trueskill had problems like deranking, account smurfing, and boosting, The soloutions are simple

  1. Reset Trueskill ranks monthly like the Arena but keep the Highest Skill permanantly. This will make account smurfing, deranking completely pointless as after a month the player has a new slate to try and make a better Highest Skill for themself.
  2. No regional filter, Allow players to play with eachother no matter what country they are in to stop players changing their country setting and matchmaking for their friends, This is already implemented in Reach,

Important notes:

  • No Custom Map or Gameplay Variants
  • Only Small/ Medium Size Maps
  • Playlists (4v4, 2v2, FFA, 1v1)

Social
The main difference with social is that social only has larger team sized playlists avaliable custom map variants and no Trueskill Ranking,

Ranking and Rewarding Players
To keep players playing the game we need to reward them for playing, I think we should keep the current Reach EXP ranking system but tie it into the Trueskill sytem to acheve certain ranks you will need enough “EXP” and a high enough “Highest Skill”. This will reward the competitive community more yes I know but without it working this way it is functioning the exact same as Reach, Anyone who wants to argue this look at the competitive playlist population on Reach and tell me it has not declined. My belief is that decline is caused by the lack of reward for competitive players. I mean whats the point of putting in the extra effort to play comptitively if there is no bonus over playing no competitive games.

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SANDBOX

Weapons & Balence
If you have not already read my earlier post on a Dominant weapon adding a skill factor please read it, The same principle applys to whatever weapon 343 decide to put into Halo 4 here’s a link
http://halo.xbox.com/forums/games/f/7/t/22323.aspx

In my opinion the best way to produce a more competitive Halo is to have a dominant primary weapon such as the BR was in Halo 3, However that has the downside that there is less weapon use diversity. I really want your opinions on this,

So two choices.
More Competitive Gameplay > Wepon use Diversity or Wepon use Diversity > More Competitive Gameplay

If you don’t know what weapon use diversity is, Less wepon use diversity means everyone starts to use the same weapons and other guns become obsoliete.

Armor Abilitys
So it’s like Marmite to any of our UK readers, If your from the US or elsewhere here’s what I mean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHbpTrFPc7Y (May not be sutable for really really young readers)

So with AA’s as we call them you either Love them or Hate them, So whats your opinion?

  • Do you want them removed?
  • Do you want them to stay?
  • Do you want them remastered, reimagined, recreated?
  • Do you want equipment back?

Player Movement
Okay so we’re playing a Spartan II again so it would probably be best to reset it back to the faster movement, and higher jump height, Boosting the game speed and making gameplay faster and more competitive, with no side effect to the social community.

On the other hand it would render Sprint less useful, Again your opinion wanted…

Utilitys and Grenades
Okay so I think I speak for 95% of the Halo Community when I say stop the freaking grenade spamming!
So put the distance cap back onto the grenade damage radius should do the trick…
Again your opinion.

MAP LAYOUT AND DESIGN

Maps
Okay this is simple lets give some inspiration for maps by giving your top maps that you enjoy most and a brief description of why you like them.

YOUR VIEWS AND OPINIONS

So…
Just post your opinions thanks for reading… as usual no flaming myself or other members it gets you nowhere.

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I want ranked games back! and playlist’s like Snipers/Swat/Objective should be in there.

Regarding the ranking system, i think the 1-50 system can be fixed somehow…two ways to stop “de-rankers” would work like this:
When you hit these levels 10/20/30/40 your rank is “locked”, meaning that when you rank up to level 10 you can’t drop down below it, but everywhere between 1-9/11-19/21-29/31-39 is dynamic.
Also you should be able to “prestige” when you hit level “50”, so you can start over again in that playlist, that would be great to stop people with 2nd accounts.

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I would like to begin by saying that I truly appreciate it whenever anyone (meaning you, Blazingstar97) takes the time to write out a well thought idea or solution. I appreciate it even more when those ideas/solutions are open to constructive criticism. So…

  1. Ranked: Plenty of threads about this around here. The bottom line is that the Reach ranking system IS superior to the H3 TrueSkill system, except for the majorly important fact that the Reach system does not take teamwork into account. Increase the season time from 30 days as that is not really long enough to solidify a skill range, especially if the cap is increased from 50 to 100 in a grind. As far as the team sizes I only disagree with the 1v1 on the grounds that if two players are equally skilled then it is a race to the PW’s. I disagree on not allowing custom maps, but that ties into the social playlist which I will explain later. The current system , I believe, really just needs some fine tuning in the following areas;

1a) Implementation of teamwork variables. A players singular actions go far for themselves, but when teamwork is damn near punished this system is now broken. Assists count for alot, but when a whole team is putting shots on an enemy that’s still not enough.

1b) Actually place people in games with similarly ranked players either by individual or team average. H3 did this well IMO, as I played more games that came down to a 5 point difference than in Reach.

1c) Account for other players globally when ranking. Currently the ranking occurs in-game, which means you can still be a great player, but if you are doing worse than the leading man you’re not getting much. It becomes a race for more kills.

As far as the EXP system, are you suggesting we (competitive community) need to hold the cash to rank up? Or just meet a certain credit rank before we can earn a certain competitive rank? Or are we hailing back to H3 where you needed to reach a certain amount of actual EXP for performance before advancing? I believe your idea needs elaboration. As a side note, from what I can tell on these forums, the competitive players don’t care much for a bonus they just want a clean fair fight.

  1. Social: I agree for the most part. Social should be allowed to be more free with the options, it’s about having fun after all.

2a) Ranking should not be accounted for whatsoever (unless specified by the Reach filter).

2b) I believe that credits (this is simply my opinion and suggestion if credits are implemented in H4) should be lowered for in game performance, but increased for the jackpot; this way people can’t use it to farm credits but don’t feel like they are getting screwed because they don’t wanna be competitive. Also this further drives the idea that your in game performance on a social playlist does not mean as much, it’s just for fun.

2c) Custom Maps should be allowed in Ranked playlists but only after being heavily tested and tweaked in the social settings. If it’s for fun then people are going to mess around with it, find the glitchy spots, abuse the PW’s, stress test the sandbox etc.

  1. Weapon Use Diversity: So far what seems to play the best is to have that dominant primary weapon (such as the BR or DMR) but not as a spawn weapon. This causes players to go get this weapon, entering the field of battle. Also this causes players to become more proficient and efficient with the start weapons to defend themselves with. Basically it’s not a power weapon, but if you want it you need to earn it. This also keeps the rest of the weapon sandbox in place because if every other weapon in the sandbox is even just a tiny bit more powerful/accurate/reliable/faster than the spawn weapons, this also increases the Weapon Use Diversity. Perhaps I am wrong on this but this makes sense to me in what I have experienced.

  2. Armor Abilities: My opinion differs with the choices. If they decide to keep the idea of AA’s then one or two new ones would be nice, but more importantly they need to fine-tune the existing ones to be more balanced with each other and the sandbox in general. Any new AA’s need to be seriously scrutinized before finishing the game. Implemented as pick-ups would be a welcome change, but how the community will accept that is very hard to say. If they decide to ditch them altogether, I am very comfortable with that. All we wanted was to be able to run anyway

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5) Player Movement: With this in mind, AA’s were the reason movement in Reach was dumbed down alot. Obviously to make Chief just as slow would be a back step in game experience and for the sake of cannon. So far the only complaint I have heard about the movement in Reach is the strafing. Sprint may be less useful, but anyone would give their ability to shoot to dodge that splash damage.

  1. Nades: Yes. Nerf that.
    Maps will come later.

FYI: If I seemed aggressive I apologize, I somehow tend to type that way haha.