People are finishing the battle pass and have no reason to play consistently so they are turning the game off.
That’s it. That’s the big core issue here. They banked on the Battle Pass being the only real progression and it has backfired royally on player retention. Weekly challenges can literally be tanked in one play session a lot of times. Events are the same way.
Ranked is the only side attraction currently, since you can indefinitely climb the ladder based on how well you do. But a hard 80-90% of players don’t even touch ranked, or at least stop after their placements.
And the funny part is, every Halo just about has made the same mistake. It took years for MCC to do what it took years for Halo 3 to do…add ranks based on progression.
I think Reach had about the best concept and application of that concept. It should have been the model. You play, you get points, you spend those points on cosmetics, AND EVERYONE IS OK WITH THAT SYSTEM.
I’d play a lot more if I still had things to unlock even if it was just a number or title. I still play for fun - but I’d play more and it would be more fun.
You’re somewhat right, but I think there are plenty of people who were never drawn in by the BP in the first place. I very reluctantly bought the first BP and after finding that it didn’t even include all the Reach armor, I got pretty annoyed and didn’t buy the second one. I don’t have much interest now in paying for cosmetics when there is still plenty of armor I could unlock. Mostly, I want more campaign or PVE, but without that and any MP content aside from armor there doesn’t seem much point in playing, I’ve probably been off for a month or two now.
For me, I’d play more often even after the weekly challenge has been completed if it wasn’t for the fact that outside of challenges, there isn’t much there beyond it. Thankfully, when forge comes out, I could spend hours just messing around and making my own maps, even if they end up being more about set pieces or trying to make rollercoasts or little play areas to mess around with. Plus the custom games thing would just explode.
Gee, imagine there was this thing called “spartan companies” where, say, 100 players could get together in this company and they would have challenges or commendations to knock off collectively in addition to their individual challenges or commendations to knock off… what a concept! What a great idea to improve the social and fun aspect of playing Halo and having some laughs with other players! I think I have seen this somewhere before but I just can’t place my finger on it… maybe this is something 343 could look into…… Hmmmmmm….
Because they made this games multiplayer F2P. So unlock a couple things from playing/events/etc. but keep most other things locked behind paywall and they hopefully get you FOMOing into buying something from the shop.
I remember being addicted to Warzone in Halo 5. It was a slow grind to win credits to buy the packs for unlockables, but it did feel like I was making “progress”.
With Infinite, once you’ve done the weekly challenges and/or Battle Pass, it does feel like there’s nothing tangible as a reward to keep playing. Sure, games should be about playing for fun, but then, I’ve got so many other games I could play instead…
Fun fact: I paid for the Season 2 Battle Pass, and quit playing before the Entrenched event. Haven’t played once until today. Saw the depressing lack of content in the drop pod, uninstalled again.
If you like how your Spartan looks, don’t care about other cores, or don’t care about customization at all, then no amount of new cosmetics will keep anyone playing a game with nothing to do and isn’t fun to play.
I’ll check back in December and hope Forge creators bring a ton of new maps and modes.
That’s me. I was already satisfied with Heroes of Reach stuff, so all these is just fluff to me. With subpar stability, a terrible User experience and the fact we’re still playing the same few maps we have been playing for almost 12 months now, I’ve stopped playing Infinite altogether.
I wish there were commendations and overall progress tracking. In reach, you could achieve mythic by playing a lot. Ranked was a separate progressions. There were daily, weekly, and monthly challenges.
the lack of a progression system with personal rank and such is clearly the issue regarding population issues. The choice of not implementing this was a huge miss. I don’t know how anyone from dev could’ve let this one slide through the cracks
Also the Commendation System. It’s a long form challenge system that takes a long time to complete, but it’s unintrusive and can keep player ingaged if they so chose.
Never cared about the battle pass, the reason I stopped playing is pretty simply: I am not allowed to choos what I want to play, the same few maps over and over and over again, no rewarding rank system and desync.
Is the ADHD outbreak this bad. Do people really need keys jiggled in front of them to play a game? The “Keys” in this case are the progression/unlock system. Damn. I wanna quite retirement and get back to work. This era of gamers is killing gaming for me.
Truth be told there is not A clear and simple reason for the drop of players. There are about ten or so dozen clear and simple reasons with about a hundred more not so clear and simple reasons. This is just a single slice of an olive on the “why players are leaving” pizza.
It is just super weird that you can only unlock ONE free cosmetic per week, but BUY somewhere between 10 and 40 (depending on the week).
There should be simply dozens and dozens of cosmetics to unlock for free. Like unlocking weapon coating X for getting Y amount of kills with that weapon. Unlocking X armor coating for winning Y amount of games in playlist Z. Pretty basic for FPS games.
