Things are valuable only when lacking or lost

Games Other Halo
1

Read the title? Before I go on: Exclude ‘Crap’ from the list, please.

Now, on to what I want to say.

Things are valuable only in 2 situations: Before you get it and after you lose it.

I learnt this the hard way; As a chinese, I get money for my birthday instead of socks. (Har har). At first, before I got it, I was happy. Microsoft Points for me! Then when I got it, I really had no use for it other than socks and school.

Oh, wait! That’s not the hard way. I’m still pretty satisfied about the cash. The harder way was Halo: Reach! My First ever Halo game! After watching about half a years worth of Halo commentators and gameplay, I decided to get the game. Game 1: 0/31. Yeah! Dat k/d!

So for a month, I had a k/d of 0.1 or less. Then, one day, I realized: I found skill. I was better at the game. But wait! I had a 0.1 k/d! Bungie.net users picked on me!

So I played. And played. And then, after a year of playing, I got from 0.1 to 1.2.

But that was also a very easy way. Wanna now the REAL hard way?

Halo 3. About 4-5 months after I got Reach, and realized it was only really good for Customzzz and Forge. And theater.

Rank. Ugh, the rank. it was hard for me to rank up! I had gotten Halo 3 far past it’s prime time. Plus the fact I’m chinese, there was only really 1k players on when I played. So hard to even get a game in Team Slayer? I got to level 32 at max, and I’m still sad. It was Soooooo fun trying to rank up. It kept me stuck to the game, glued to the screen, and…

Wait, what?

You mean a number, a little thing called ‘Rank’, something which was valuable to me when I lost it, or when I didn’t get the next one, and wasn’t valuable to me when I got it because there was a better one to achieve, kept me glued to the game?

NO WAY!

And that probably explains why Halo 4 lost 3/4 of it’s population 1 1/2 months into the game.

2

I’m literally the exact same.

Well, except I’m not chinese… Anyway:

My first real halo game was Halo 2, but I didn’t have live. So when I finally got a 360, and reach, I had pretty bad stats. About, 6 months in (so about 8 months ago) I started getting more an more competitive.

I went from a 1.0 K/D and now I’m around 1.4 and rising fast, it gets better everyday.

So, I jumped on to Halo 3 (after I got ODST) and remembered rank systems. The first couple times I played, I think the most I got was a 23 in Team Slayer. I stopped playing for a while.

Went back, and after a long time playing MLG and Snipers in Reach, I found myself ranking up a lot faster. Got to something like 33 in team slayer before I got nothing but de rankers for team mates.

My highest this far is 43 in lone wolves, and still going.

But I remember everyday since I went back to playing, I was driven saying “Alright, today I’m going to get my 50, today I’m going to get my 50.” and it kept me driven to play. Teammates had mics, and there were people playing to win.

You don’t see that in reach, or Halo 4. No body really plays to win, because there is no incentive to. Whenever ranks get up, people always say “Oh, you just need a number beside your name.” and thats actually fairly true. It keeps you driven to play and to get the next number.

But Halo 4’s version of that doesn’t reward the better player. There’s no reason to get better, there’s no reason the even attempt to play well, because the game rewards you anyway. The ‘reward all’ mentalilty of the game is part of the thing that’s killing it, and a lot of games out there.

It was fun to rank up, to see how far you can go, and to see how well you could play. I was driven to get better and better, and I had so much fun doing it.

Now there’s just the exp rank system. There’s no incentive to rank up, because there’s no way to rank down. There’s no “Dang, I didn’t play well enough that game, Hope I don’t lose a rank.” It’s just “Oh, what? I lost that game? lolk, I still gets my exp.”

I’m not entirely certain this even makes sense to the topic at hand anymore, but thats pretty much my jumbled thoughts on it (can’t think straight today, been up late the last couple of nights.)