Before you read on, realize that I am a nobody in this community. I just see a problem here that I wanted to address.
I believe that Halo is naturally a competitive community that is isn’t based around the casual-ness that we have been playing. The reason why I say that is because I see way too many people defending this ruleset. Let’s look and see what is happening because of it. Halo is VERY VERY VERY low on Twitch when it comes to views. Many people either opt out of watching it because it’s boring, not halo, because they hate 343, no “face” to actually watch the game for, etc. But maybe the real problem is the lack of BR starts.
I’ve played competitive Halo my entire entire life from Halo 1 to Halo Reach. I decided to leave the Halo community around then because I saw Halo taking a turn in a direction that it didn’t want to go. With reach taking away the 1-50 ranking system, it caused many players to simply not care about playing the game or better yet, not care about being GOOD at it because all you had to do is play X amount of time and you will reach high ranks.
I used this hiatus from competitive Halo to experience other eSport games that were just starting to look for their identity and stride. I started off with Call of Duty: Black Ops 1. In that game, competitive was mainly Famas with a nade, two stuns with lightweight, slight of hand and dead silence as the perks. This was easily the most competitive Call of Duty in the history of Call of Duty, but it failed to bring in viewers. What made it the most competitive CoD was the fact that everything was balanced. You had a high recoil gun with everyone running the same load out. Does it make the game boring to watch? Maybe. But it had the fundamental spark that made it a great competitive game (no idea what I mean by this).
In this hiatus, I realized that Halo lost its purpose as a game. It began to follow Call of Duty because it wanted to try and steal some players that had initially left because of where it was heading i.e me. Halo is a game that should be competitive first and causal second. Like Counterstrike: Global Offensive. Even the casual deathmatch players are good at the game. I digress…
Halo 5 is the perfect Halo game. It’s been a long time coming that’s for sure. The questionable things are the Spartan charge beat down, which is the only Spartan ability I find “too much” in many situations. Radar should just be off for the sake of being able to run around the map freely without someone crouching around corners. But most importantly, the starting weapons. This game needs BR starts. I see too many people on Twitter asking for it or refusing to play the game because of it. I know many people like the AR/Pistol start but it’s not what’s best for the game. I find most the time with the way the maps are layed out, that having a pistol vs any good player with weapon (plasma cutter, BR, DMR, etc) is very unbalanced. Especially when a team has control of all the range weapons. The causal ruleset should be the competitive ruleset not vice versa.
Halo’s niche is the BR. If we take way the niche, we are losing out on a perfect opportunity to bring it back to its glory of being he premiere console FPS game. I know this post was a cluster**** of mind changes. I’m writing this at 6:00am on the West Coast, and I am extremely passionate about this game succeeding as an eSport. I understand that there is 1.5 million that will be put on the line. I just would want players that are playing for that money to have the most competitive ruleset possible. Because playing a 1.5 million dollar tournament with the AR/Pistol - radar on start is absurd.
I’d like to thank 343 for making an amazing game. I truly believe they have a good hold on the world that we are playing in, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. Thank you to everyone that read the full post. I’m sorry you had to endure that. I kind of explained my reasoning in a weird way. I hope some of you got it at least. I’m not really a forum person, so I’d prefer that you contacted me through my Twitter @ScumbagPisToL if you have anything helpful to say. I’m going to double post this on two different threads because I don’t know which thread is the correct on (forum noob)
Get your Halo 5 on
-PisToL