Competitiveness has done nothing but ruining & making games feel stale. Less wacky party fun and more unnecessary tightness to it as well as the map design. The more devs listen to the top 1%, the worse the games get.
Keep in mind this isn’t a 343i ONLY issue, this is gaming wide and i strongly believe there needs to be a Gaming Cultural Revolution against competitive gaming, not like itll ever go away but thats okay as longest games are designed around the actual majority and not top 1%ers.
But the real question is… Why cater to them? Do they even know in a fundamental level why competitive gaming exists?
What competitive gaming REALLY is, is Human nature. Some few take it to the extreme, most not. That’s just the way we humans are wired, in some shape or form we want to compete for bragging rights, but in the end most just want to have fun.
343i doesn’t have to cater to them to have an eSports scene. By human nature, it will always exist. As it has for every Halo game in the golden era when it was made to be, and understood to be a PARTY GAME, and every game before it.
You cannot stop human nature. And that’s why it makes absolutely no sense devs are acting as if they need too to have a ‘successful esports’ scene by catering to 1% which has only annoyed the majority.
The key to have a ‘successful eSports’ scene is for the actual game itself to be fun, popular 
eSports types fundamentally perceive games in a different dimension in ways most people simply don’t or have the patience too, there is absolutely no reason why their input should be taken seriously, ever, it always comes from a place of the game being designed around THEM aka making the game less predictable & fun.
Golden age Halo games sandbox provided the tools for enough customization where they could modify the game to their liking. And guess what? it worked perfectly as a containment zone. And that’s how it should’ve stayed, as a containment zone not the entire game being designed around it. Ranked Play is not enough, but for the most part it at least does the job at containing them.
The most popular games nowadays, example Fortnite, are not competitive, gee i wonder why! and even then it has a competitive scene.
Halo 2/3 MLG was the result of human nature. The games themselves were never responsible or intended too. There is no ‘competitive halo dna’, only Human DNA and this applies universally.