The Spring Social Playlist have been posted as follows:
January 25, 2023 → February 1, 2023 Shotty Snipers
February 1, 2023 → February 8, 2023 Grifball
February 8, 2023 → February 15, 2023 Fiesta
February 15, 2023 → February 22, 2023 Recon Slayer
February 22, 2023 → March 1, 2023 Escalation Slayer
March 1, 2023 → March 8, 2023 Grifball
March 8, 2023 → March 15, 2023 Rocket Race
March 15, 2023 → March 22, 2023 Halo: Reach Combat Evolved Anniversary
March 22, 2023 → March 29, 2023 Shotty Snipers
March 29, 2023 → April 5, 2023 Fiesta
April 5, 2023 → April 12, 2023 Grifball
I love MCC’s weekly playlists, but I’m particularly frustrated by how limited they are, often being limited to few games and game sizes. For example, Fiesta isn’t available for Big Team games, Rocket Race is only available for 2: Anniversary and 3 when the other games have explosive Race variants, 2: Anniversary has all the weapons for Recon Slayer, etc… While I understand spreading gametypes among multiple playlist sizes could divide searches and increase matchmaking time, it’s still frustrating that so many games are limited.
Worst of all, these playlists only apply to Ranked and Social games. Many of them could have firefight variants, such as Anniversary Slayer with weapons and enemies from only CE, or Shotty Snipers and Fiesta firefight games based on those weapons with a higher difficulty unlike what’s offered in the Arcadefight playlists. There could be weekly heroic playlists like Gruntfight for games like Escalation Slayer that can’t translate over to firefight, or they could be spiritually similar, like Fistfight being an option alongside Grifball.
If I’m supposed to be excited for playlists, I’d love to play them in my own way. 4v4 isn’t my favorite game size, I’d love to play all these cool game types in other options.
Playlist management should be the lowest effort way for 343 to provide some form of variety to MCC.
They rotate one weekly playlist in an extremely lazy format and one/two playlist every two weeks/month.
The MOTD isn’t even updated weekly anymore, now they link to your list above. I’m guessing that intern was laid off.
Some extremely simple examples listed below off the top of my head, in no particular order:
Where is Multi-Team?
Where is the Community Forge Playlist?
Where are 6v6 Lobbies?
Where is Team Melee?
Where are the Valentines Day / Holiday Playlists? We had Turkey Time back in NOVEMBER and it was wonderful.
Where is 7 on the 7th?
Where is Score Attack? (For those who want a rewarding solo experience)
Where are double XP Weekends?
Why is Invasion still in ranked?
Why cant social slayer be 5v5?
Why are H2C Hardcore and Reach Hardcore rotated in?
Condense these playlists, offer some variety that you already have, and go from there.
In the next 11 weeks:
3x Grifball
2x Fiesta
2x Shotty Snipers
1x Recon Slayer
1x Escalation Slayer
1x Halo: Reach Combat Evolved Anniversary
1x Rocket Race
Replace some of the recurring playlists in this list with something NEW/DIFFERENT. Why repeat when its SO LAZY.
Yeah, matchmaking polish should be the highest priority. Now that Infinite is out and new unlockable content is at a slower rate, the player base has a little more divide. A lot of things I’d like to improve matchmaking would take more intense development (I’d give anything to mix player sizes in addition to games and gametypes so Big Team and Free-for-all aren’t so sparce compared to Four vs. Four), but small things like more weekly gametypes or more variety in existing map and gametype pools would require less development while goimg incredibly far.
Some standard playlists aren’t even available on matchmaking. I believe Big Team vehicle games isn’t selectable for Halo CE or Halo 2, despite having great vehicle-centric maps or games.
Thanks for this calendar. It is greatly appreciated.
I would like to see community playlist as well. Even if it is Grifball or Rocket Race fan made maps. The fans have made super fun maps already that should be implement in playlist. It can’t be that hard to make a community playlist, 90 % of the work is already done for you.