Title Update Discussion

> > Ah, interesting, I never knew that, thanks for the heads up. I don’t remember seeing my own gun fire after my death, if at all, in H3, so what’s the difference that makes it more common with Reach? Is it the hitscan? Cause as I said I didn’t play H2 online extensively enough to speak for whether it happened there, I was too wedded to my beloved Pistol :P.
>
> Off the top of my head, I might be able to say. The AR, BR and Sniper of Halo3 weren’t hitscan and maybe because of their projectile nature, if your shot occurred after you died according to host, then maybe the shot never gets rendered. Reach being hitscan and having a window of hit-trade to simulate bullet travel AND make up for connections on the internet, things appear as they do.
> To me, it is just as weird as Halo2 but without the “What the heck, I killed him and I died?” Because now both parties die when neither ensures a proper and clean kill. Meaning in Reach, sloppy kill tactics and strategies are usually to blame for dying when you kill the enemy, not the game.

I see what you’re saying, but I often dislike the ‘clean kill’ approach. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect plenty of kills between highly skilled, or even just equally skilled opponents, to come down to a split second. Expecting each kill to having upwards of half a second slack over the person doing enough damage to kill you back as well is unrealistic imo, and doesn’t account for the incredibly split second nature of Halo, exactly the root of its competitive brilliance imo.

I’m also a little confused about where you say it’-Yoink!- scan and then that it has a window of trade to simulate bullet travel. Seems pretty contradictory to me at least, or at least redundant as a mechanic seeing as ‘simulating’ something that doesn’t exist within the mechanic just adds complications and has no real benefit in terms of smoothing play. If it helped results appear more logical to the player then that’d be something, but as I stated it ends up doing the opposite by even giving players the kill after they’ve died. I’ve had this happen on my own host as well, so it’s not even just discrepancy between host screen and my own. I get what you’re saying about it not being the tracer, but in terms of mechanically implemented trade-windows, I just don’t see the point.

Also, more opinions on the OP points would be much appreciated. I want to keep the meat of these points alive, especially the extra custom options and Banshee balance ones. More custom game options would really diversify and solidify this game imo, and it kind of mystifies me when Bungie throw new gametypes our way like the ones we’ve just gotten without addressing the major requests in terms of additions to custom gametype offerings, ie. some more depth in manipulating the core mechanics. Sure they’re cool and all, pretty damn fun even, but it’s like being given candy when you’re starving for some bread. Tasty? Sure. But what you really need? Not so much. Also I want to make the point that if the Banshee was balanced properly then removing them from Breakpoint wouldn’t have been necessary, tbh if it was really balanced then you wouldn’t even need the plethora of power weapons currently there to counter them, and even those didn’t work tbh. Good to see Falcons getting some proper use though, I do like that.

> I see what you’re saying, but I often dislike the ‘clean kill’ approach. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect plenty of kills between highly skilled, or even just equally skilled opponents, to come down to a split second. Expecting each kill to having upwards of half a second slack over the person doing enough damage to kill you back as well is unrealistic imo, and doesn’t account for the incredibly split second nature of Halo, exactly the root of its competitive brilliance imo.

I too would like my minute and twitch moves to be rewarded. But connections being what they are make such things almost impossible. A game designed for LAN only doesn’t have to take latency into account. Without the “clean kill” approach, host and connection to host become more of a deciding factor than skill with online games.

It’s like thinking of CoD’s kill cam. You now how you can enter a room, walk 5 steps, see someone, and then proceed to empty half a mag. into that person, only to die while the enemy lives? And when you see the kill cam, you see that you were actually shot and killed at the entrance way, not 5 steps into the room? Well as far as I can tell, Reach has it so that within a certain time, both players will die, rather than the person closest to host (or host themselves) getting the kill alone.
It’s a lesser of evils IMO. As with many things in Reach, for online play, Reach has many systems that are the lesser of many evils.

> Also, more opinions on the OP points would be much appreciated.

I understand. But what can I tell ya, I rarely see a reason to debate differences of opinions if the differences still recognise the same facts. I’ll argue against something that I know is non-factual, not something I feel is derived from experience. For instance, I won’t argue that a person doesn’t like bloom. I will argue with a person who feels the system is uncontrollable.
A person is allowed to not like how a system works, they however are not entitled to claim the system has no way of being monitored when the tools to monitor the system are very blatant.

It is a pleasure reading your posts when they are made BTW. I like how you don’t resort to the usual disagreement tactics.

But to stay on topic after all of that; I don’t think that bloom needs changing. It doesn’t reward spamming, it rewards good map position and teamplay. The speed at which it can be reliably shot is determined by distance and I find outright spammers only beat me when I have been caught in a battle or in the open, with my back turned. Those that alter their pace and/or rhythm according to the battle at hand win a heck of a lot more often than those that outright spam.

I feel most players, in the heat of the moment, can’t distinguish the difference between a spammed DMR and a paced DMR. And by paced, I don’t mean waiting to shoot each shot with a completely rested bloom. I mean pacing so that the bloom covers 90-100% of the enemy with each trigger pull.

I do not subscribe to the idea of “if all other factors of randomness and luck are removed from the game, the weapon can still be used to get a lucky kill and therefore is based on luck.” To me that is paraphrased: “If you play the game improperly and use the weapon improperly, you can still get a kill.” And all I can say to that is “A stopped analog watch is right twice a day. It’s wrong for every other second of said day.”

KT’s need to be faster.

This has been a community adressed issue since Halo 2, and it needs fixing.

As quoted by iZealot:

Wan’t to know why we have complained about EVERY new Halo and dubbed it to be worse than the last? Well here’s a pretty good idea.

CE - Great game, big skillgap, fast killtimes and loved by all
types of players.

Halo 2 - Kill times and Melee strength decreased. Fixed somewhat but still not as good. Community complained.

Halo 3 - Kill times increased AGAIN, movement speed slowed down and randomness added into bullet registration and beatdowns. Never fixed. Community complained.

ODST - Firefight and decent campaign. Not complained about because it wasn’t a full new game.

Reach - Kill times brought to ridiculous lengths due to random bloom being added to precision weapons. Grenades and Beatdowns buffed considerably to compensate. Movement and jump speed increased to promote use of AA’s, most of which are defensive and one in particular just being completely stupid. Community complains.

TL;DR

Bungie : Here’s Halo CE!
Community : This game is -blam!- great
Bungie : Lets increase Kill times for Halo 2!
Community : Meh, it’s fun but not better, you shouldn’t do it again.
Bungie : So you want us to Increase kill times again? Heres Halo 3!
Community : Great this game is even worse.
Bungie: Oh so you wan’t even longer Kill times with a little bit of randomness added in? Lets go for it!
Community : o_0

Please don’t try to make the 1-7k people that play the Classic playlist seem like the the majority of the community.

It’s not that the other players are in total disagreement with what you feel ( I bet a lot, but not a majority, of “default” players would agree with some or many of your views), it’s that the fanbase is so diverse that making a blanket statement that includes all of us is the worst thing to do to support it.

But here is a video that shows the “differences” between Halo3 and Reach’s weapon firing mechanics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObzTzwPTs8k

If I had a capture card, I would do my own Forge comparison of actually shooting the enemy at varying ranges just to show that Reach, if anything, is as quick, yet more efficient than Halo3 as far as kill times go. Sure, 1 or 2 analogies might be slightly slower, but there are also 1 or 2 analogies that kill much faster.

Machima has a great series called “Halo Reach: Weapon Test.” Clever title it is. It’s a series of videos that compares the weapons at a range where bloom isn’t considered an influece. It shows the kill times of all the weapons that are not 1-pull, 1-instakill and without any interference. The videos even helped me remove a few misconceptions that I apparently had too. I love learning new things about things I already know :slight_smile:

Totally agree with you on the Banshee tricks, they are over spammedand render lock on from the Rockets, PP and Plasma Launcer useless. The tricks should drain the boost bar, that would be balanced. Maybe even if the Banshee was 10% more resistant to weapons, but the evade spam needs nerfed.

From what I understand 343 is going to take over Reach at some point and time. Anyone else hearing this? What can we expect to happen to matchmaking? Anyone care to speculate what’s going to happen?

> From what I understand 343 is going to take over Reach at some point and time. Anyone else hearing this? What can we expect to happen to matchmaking? Anyone care to speculate what’s going to happen?

From my understanding that is already the case. Bungie is just doing MM stuff and Stats as of now.
Here’s a interview with 343’s Frank O’Conner that kind of explains the current state of things.

343 please save Halo Reach from its misery and release a Title Update for the game.

this is pathetic. its almost 7 months since reach was released and not even a hint at a title update. so much potential wasted. im getting tired of playing blackops every day and i would like to play reach for over an hour and not get pissed off or bored.

> this is pathetic. its almost 7 months since reach was released and not even a hint at a title update. so much potential wasted. im getting tired of playing blackops every day and i would like to play reach for over an hour and not get pissed off or bored.

funny, that’s what happened when i played black ops. black ops is so bad it convinced to never waste money on CoD games again.

On topic: reach desperately needs a TU and i think the community just needs reassurance that there is one coming. come one 343, all we need is a simple yes or no.

I hope someone soon sheds light on the Title update sitaution. Maybe i was too optimistic, it was never going to happen.

just really saddends me that this game could have been the greatest halo and xbox game of all time. But bungie lazy gluteus maximuses that they just implented campaign maps for multiplayer, armor abilities could have been pick up, bloom could been better, grenades nukes with promotes frustration nade spamming, etc…

sigh…

it’s never going to happen. halo reach will die and they’ll try to save it with halo 4 (or whatever they will call it)

I don’t remember hearing/reading any official news about a TU in April for Halo: Reach. When was this announced? Can you link it please?

There is no need for a title update.

There isnt any fixes needed that require a title update. Sure, there will always be you guys and the minority complaining about the game, but it’s just fine the way it is. A lot of people want it to be just like Halo 3. Well, I for one already own that game and don’t just want a repeat.

Leave the game alone.

The game is made the way it was intended. I find some things happen at random of course (ghosts in the code) But compared to my previous 2 Halo MP experiences, I am not experiencing nearly as much yoink!y-bull as I once did.

The gameplay is much less random in my experience.

> The game is made the way it was intended. I find some things happen at random of course (ghosts in the code) But compared to my previous 2 Halo MP experiences, I am not experiencing nearly as much yoink!y-bull as I once did.
>
> The gameplay is much less random in my experience.

I agree completely.

If this game doesn’t get a TU then it will probably go down as the worst Halo title and will definitely make a decent amount of the fanbase unhappy with 343. This is really their first true test in my opinion: I understand they’re making a new game, but I don’t want to be stuck waiting for Halo 4 with the current pile of blam that Reach is alone to help me. It has a lot of potential too, which is what really pissed me off about it. The Beta was a good set up, and Bungie more or less tweaked what didn’t need to tweak and didn’t nerf or removed what really needed removing. Sigh. Please don’t let me down 343. I’m tired of crappy Halo multiplayer. Halo 2’s internet issues and glitches made it borderline awful, and 3 and Reach have both been worse. Fix Reach. Please fix Reach. Don’t listen to the idiots talking about the minority. Bring Halo back to what it was in Halo 1.

You can’t fix what’s not broken.

What needs to be fixed besides Hockey having its own playlist and the delay in swinging my hammer when switch from sword?