...If they're flipping "constantly" then they're not shooting, thus not a threat. Plus flipping around without boosting doesn't displace your position all that much so while a tougher target, it is not an invincible one. Also as you mentioned before that "fragility" actually seems like a pretty good counter to strong offensive capabilities. Don't stay in the opponents side for prolonged periods of time to take damage. The most effective Banshee pilots I've seen swoop in then run away. That way they aren't getting ungodly, unfair, amounts of kills at once and the banshee itself doesn't fall apart. I, as I'm sure many can claim this, have never had trouble taking down a banshee or piloting one on a map properly set up for it. Is it an issue that could be fixed? Yes. Is it a game breaking glitch or an issue effecting millions of Reach players' experiences over Live? No.
I second this. The banshee is on 5 maps: Renegade, Boneyard, Spire, Utopie and Paradiso. Out of these 5 maps, the ONLY one without an insane amount of weaponry to remove said Banshee is Spire, but there's still the means to take it out. In paradiso, I never EVER have trouble taking it down. Now, if your team are complete idiots and lose every single power weapon, along with your own tank and Banshee to the enemy (I don't even know how they'd manage), then sure, you have a problem. But if your sniper and all your vehicles are lost, concentrated DMR fire can take it down in less than 30 seconds. So if your team are literally brain dead, then sure, maybe you'd have a problem on Paradiso. On Boneyard, you have pretty much the same, although without the fire power of the tank. Then again, it's a MUCH smaller map with alot less space for dodging, so the Banshee is a lot less effective. On Spire, you have rockets, a sniper, and a falcon. As long as the falcon driver doesn't suck ass and stays ABOVE the Banshee, it shouldn't have problems chewing it up. Good Banshee drivers always try to stay above the Falcon. On utopie, it's a neutral Banshee which both teams have quick access to. But there's also a laser, a sniper and your teams DMR skills, as well as everything else. On renegade, I've never seen a Banshee last more than a minute. Ever. It's always gone straight away either by laser or Sniper, and the skies of the map are completely open from each end, so effectively using a Banshee on that map is nigh on impossible. Anyway, we seem to be getting off topicish. So this discussion probably shouldn't go far past this.
Silly semantics. You can flip, fire, flip flip, fire, and be quite effective doing it. A very good banshee pilot will employ this method and wreck your **** up, and it ends up costing you wasted sniper and DMR shots all over the place. If you haven't seen this and ground your teeth to nubs over it, you must not play as much big team as I do. A tougher target that is essentially firing rockets that track is bad enough. It doesn't have to be invincible - it is WAY too easy to rack up killing frenzies just by flipping around the enemy base and firing bombs at everyone you see. I just disagree with this on principle. Why make the vehicle both ridiculously powerful on offense and crazy fragile as well? Why not just make it what it was in previous games, which worked better? Bungie messed with a good thing to no good end, IMO. The banshee isn't really balanced any more, it's just feast or famine. You either go on an automatic 15 kill spree, or you get destroyed as soon as you fly anywhere exposed. I guess that's a KIND of balance, but not to me. Are those the criteria by which we judge all possible future fixes? If it's not a "game breaking glitch," it's not worth either discussing or addressing?
It's not that I DON'T want what you mentioned fixed, I just don't see it as much as a major problem as you're making it out to be. What I do want fixed is what's already coming. Bloom and Armor Lock above everything else, honestly. Your point is valid, my argument was that it just doesn't seem like that big of a problem.
Pac my man, you are quite honestly falling back on the most tired, unfounded and frankly moronic arguments possible in this situation. They have been paraded around time and time again, and have yet to ever hold any merit. I'm afraid I don't see this changing any time soon. Change needs to justify itself. 'You just want things to be more like H3' is, in the way you're using it, supposedly an argument that can justify any change for better or worse, even encourage it despite a negative effect on the balance of the game. If something can be improved, change it, but then it can be justified on its own merits and does't have to be justified simply by 'merit' of being different from H3. How would you feel if Bungie had included a new weapon with wall hacks and wall penetration, with incredibly high RoF and a 1 shot kill? Or if they'd made it so all nades homed indefinitely? If you called out how stupid those were and people said 'you just want it to be like H3 again,' would you be able to do anything other than just sit there, mouth agape and their lack of grasp on the situation? Again, change needs to justify itself. Realism is the other fallacy of these arguments. 'It's an explosive, it should do a lot of damage.' Well yeah, but this is Halo, realism kinda went out the window a while ago, and thank god. Making a balance choice on the basis of realism means that said balance often gets screwed for the sake of making something realistic in a context which is far from realistic anyway. When people trot out this argument I genuinely have to question whether they've even bothered to read the wealth of topics like this one, it misses the point of a balance argument so fundamentally that it boggles my mind. As for the issues themselves: -Grenades. Sorry, but being shot ONCE but a DMR or peppered slightly by an AR and then naded for the kill requires too little skill for the damage done, and benefit yielded for the attacking player. This is the core theory of balance, as these are basically the two things being 'balanced', skill required (though often with a strong aspect of situational use, like short range weapons) vs. benefit yielded from the action in question. Halo CE grenades were more powerful, thus even more 'realistic' in these terms which you choose to focus on, yet were also more balanced than Reach nades. You know why? Because the bounce was more extensive and, most importantly, the fuse was longer, meaning the higher power was balanced (see, there's that pesky word again) against an aware player being able to dodge them in more situations. -Banshee. Nutduster basically covered this. It does rape, and is a widely appreciated problem on pretty much every Halo community I've visited that discusses it, including Bungie and 343 forums. They made an incredibly fragile vehicle in damage terms (again to do with the whole problem of everything and its uncle being able to hurt vehicles pretty badly) and so attempted to balance it by upping its offensive and manoeuvring power even more, which resulted in something utterly binary. The vast majority of Banshee take offs result in either very quick death as you're focused on too soon to do anything, or an extended and brutal rape session which sees near every player on the map pinned inside some kind of cover of structure. This often depends on the level of coordination within the opposing team, but it's unfair to say that a team in question should have to show medium to high levels of co-ordination to take down one single thing, otherwise they're screwed, when this is not the case for anything else in the game. What makes Paradiso worse even with all the counters you mentioned is the fact that the spawning is utterly atrocious with just one spawn area per team, meaning that even a couple of kids with DMRs can do a good amount of spawn raping, let alone the flying death that is the Banshee. Good luck getting to any of those counters if the pilot is eagle-eyed enough. But it's other maps too, Breakpoint is another great example, to the point at which they even had to acknowledge it and just remove the Banshee. Spire demonstrates it well, and the only reason it isn't more apparent here is the sheer size of the map, meaning a Banshee has to fly for ages to cover the whole thing so you generally just see it working the main spire area. -Assists. I honestly don't feel there is a problem. I can totally understand why people do, but I feel this is more of a subjective issue and not really balance related since it doesn't affect the outcome of a situation or game, just affects whether you get a medal or not. I personally like assists being harder to get, but again I can see why others don't. As Overdoziz said, this is far from the biggest issue here anyway, so can be fairly swept under the rug in the context of your 'things that matter' angle. -Strafe. As stated, it slows down the pace of the gameplay because it reduces the aspects at play in any given battle, but most notably in precision weapon battles. It also, in a way few people account for, makes nades very slightly more powerful than they already are. The lack of traction that a nade explosion underneath you causes means that moving away to avoid the following headshot is often impossible, at times it feels like wheelspinning in a car when trying to pull away. But I feel the key point here is to return to your Halo 3 argument. Honestly, I don't want them to return to H3 in this sense. It had a pretty horrible strafe too, H2 and CE were much, much better in this respect. Another part of this issue is the lower movement speed, which accentuates this 'sluggishness' problem, and is actually responsible in good part for people's nostalgia about H3 in this sense. It had pretty horrible movement accel as well, but the higher movement speed made it feel less sluggish. Go play MLG or another 110% speed gametype and I think even those who think H3 was better will start to see what I mean. Movement accel is just another way to limit the potential of someone with high movement skill, and I still don't understand Bungie's logic in working to negate it over the past 2 games seeing as a good strafe is the fundamental counter to precision weapons, thus should surely be the cornerstone of helping not only competitive play, but also to help balance the desires of casual vs. competitive player, as casual players tend to call for ways to negate the all powerful nature of precision weapons. Wall of text I know, but these things are sooo much more complex than simply saying 'change is good'. If it's a good change, then it'll be able to stand on its own merits and not have to be defended as simply being 'different'. I for one have no desire to return to H3 per se, I think it was the worst in the series including Reach, I even made a very extensive post to that effect (scroll down to the bit about MP). I love the return of a single shot weapon over a burst one, I love Sprint and even AAs in general (even if I'd rather have them as pickups than starting abilities for the most part), I love the improved netcode, the best Halo has ever seen imo. I'm even really closing to loving bloom, though as I've said many times its implemented poorly in Reach, thus for the meantime I think no bloom is slightly better than the crappy bloom we've been presented with. Reach is a fantastic game in so many ways, but that doesn't mean there can't be things I think were done better in previous games, and were changed either to dumb down certain aspects or even just for the sake of change.
Or if you're playing with randoms against a coordinated team who make a point of controlling the contestable weapons and areas of the map. Or if a couple of your teammates quit. With two evenly matched, full teams of decent players, the banshee's problems are not nearly as evident as in an uneven game, where they suddenly become monstrous. Paradiso has two tanks and a neutral laser. Boneyard has one tank and no laser (though it does add barely-effective machine gun turrets, I guess). I've had some of my most gross banshee runs on that map, and seen others do likewise. The only thing that makes the banshee somewhat mitigated is that it's hard to escape out of the main area of the map once you're in it - team DMRing is more effective because there's almost nowhere to run to escape from it. But if the other team isn't DMRing it enough or is being disrupted by enemy infantry and other concerns, the banshee can be a huge sore spot, especially if you've lost or exhausted your sniper, which is really the only true anti-banshee weapon on that map. Rockets are barely worth mentioning to me as an anti-banshee measure; they only tend to kill bad pilots who don't see them coming and don't trick frequently. Renegade is the ne plus ultra of feast-or-famine banshee maps. I've seen this scenario play out a dozen times (at least) on that map: in the beginning of the game, both banshees are quickly destroyed by each other/sniper fire/the laser. Later in the game one team will gain control of the middle (and therefore the laser), kill the other team's banshee, and then free up their banshee and revenant combo to roll into the enemy base to spawn kill. At this point it becomes a slaughter and the banshee usually racks up 10+ kills in a heartbeat before the other team manages to take it out. Of course this has as much to do with the dull and cruddy design of Renegade as the banshee itself, but still.
I think you all are losing sight of what the original point was. This title update is fixing mostly general things and bugs. The majority of the update is to ready MM for the OG pistol and the beta hoppers. We're not telling you what not to discuss, we're saying your proposed ideas are not essential to how Reach plays and its impact on the live community so, as title updates are extensive processes involving careful memory management and tweak to make sure other areas aren't broken, expecting it from a title update is asking a little much. Maybe those kind of fixes can be applied at a later time but I doubt it as halo 4 draws closer. Edit in response to Pegasi: It is equally "moronic" to believe fixes for the sake of fixes are intrinsically good all of the time. First, while games in a series are linked by the concepts they share and in most cases the development team that made the series, the games are still separate entities. It is these nuances between the games that define the character of those games. If you liked Halo 3's gameplay better you are free to play Halo 3. Reach has its own style which has so many factors going into it like the AA, the map selection, the settings within the Reach engine which is different then halo 3. Some people might like the changes, some may not, but that is what defines the games as separate titles. Second, if I'm a developer who released a product. I have a client who proposes 200 improvements. Some major, some bug fixes, mostly minor things. As a business changes take time. Time costs money in salaries. Efficiency and prudent planning are essential in the work place. So we focus on the major concerns and bug fixes because it is a better investment of our time to do so. Would we like to fix everything that client suggested (even if there were some bad ideas) sure but we do not have infinite time, infinite money, and we have other products to develop. Thinking like a gamer playing a product is sometimes at odds with the developer making the product. It is a fact we've all had to deal with and you can voice all the complaints, make the most eloquent points imaginable but if the.suggestion isn't cost effective, then that is how it goes.
Although I resent the word "perfect", Headlong was in fact the perfect multiplayer map in my opinion. Greatest close-quarters environment ever. EDIT: Did I manage to click the wrong "Last post by:" button? F--k me man....
You were the one starting to argue that these problems were not present. And how are these things not essential to how Reach plays? Grenades, the Banshee (for btb), vehicle health (also for btb) and especially player movement can drastically change the way the game plays. Pegasi, I've got newfound respect for you.
...I never said the issues weren't present. Read the rest of my post for the rest of it. And that last statement is central to you. It would greatly impact how YOU play the game (I doubt it, but whatever). Not to millions of halo players. Even the MLG community who drives a lot of changes is only a fraction of the halo community and only a fraction of that fraction would benefit or care. Now, again, they are issues and they could be addressed and the world would be slightly better because of it. They aren't going to happen this update.
IMO, Reach's biggest problem is its maps. This is so easy to fix its unbelievable why its a problem in the first place. On the topic of game breaking things that need to be fixed. The banshee is game breaking. If you've ever been in the game where the enemy takes an early lead in slayer, half your team quits, and then you end up getting spawn raped by the banshee, you can agree. On Utopie, the banshee spawn is so incredibly easy to camp, that it can become something of a second base.
Funny you should say that. I just played a game on Utopie recently where it seemed like the other team had abandoned their base and just set up camp on the banshee building. I had to go in there guns-and-nades blazing three times in a row to clear them all out and ensure that when the banshee respawned, my team would have a shot at it.
Meh, Utopie COULD be better, yet Bungie is finished completely with the game while 343 is extremely busy with working on on CEA and Halo 4 along with the Reach engine update, so I don't see it ever being fixed... (at least it's better than Paradiso).
^I think that's the big issue here. Tbh Pac, TUs are normally aimed at fixing the game itself, be that in terms of bugs or balance fixes, like (I think) you're saying. But actually, this TU isn't like that at all, it is in fact providing an entirely new way to play the game whilst leaving the vanilla game untouched, warts and all, which you also accounted for. This is why I can't agree that what we're asking for is abnormal, even unreasonable, for a TU. I would have thought it'd be best to apply fixes and a new playstyle at once, which they seem to be doing with the AL nerf (which I would assume is going to be MM-wide, having two different versions of AL would seem very strange to me), but then I guess they have their own priorities and frankly the big changes they're making excite me a lot so it's far from all bad. That said, as someone else mentioned, this might not be the full list. It would seem odd to not mention everything at Halo fest, but then the whole discussion there seemed very CEA focused and maybe they didn't want to discuss too much at once. There's also something to be said for keeping some cards close to your chest to give the hype a more regular kick up the ass in the time between now and the TU release. I guess we'll see.
This is the absolute truth. Halo Reach has the worst launch maps out of any Halo ever. Combine that with the fact that we only were given 9 maps (forgeworld's variants do raise that count). Usually I'll want a few maps to be carried over to the next game... but out of all the Reach maps, I think Highlands (A DLC Map) is the only map unique to Reach I'd like to see in Halo 4. Ouch.
DtL, I'm happy for you and I'mma let you finish, but Zealot is one of the best Halo maps of all time. OF ALL TIME. *Waits for Ladnil to come it and beat him* EDIT: Actually, Powerhouse and Boardwalk are pretty good too, though I agree that only 3 decent maps on release is pretty disappointing.
Really? Of all time? It's not a bad map by any means, it's one of the most enjoyable maps on Reach actually. I would just rather see something new instead.
I loved Countdown, Powerhouse, Boneyard, Spire, and Zealot... Reach had a lot of great maps, but it tried to spread it's gameplay out too far between Campaign, Firefight, Forge, Invasion, Slayer. the other halos only had multiplayer, so it had great multiplayer maps, but Reach had too much on its plate and we ended up getting a good forge, a good slayer variety, a good campaign, and a good firefight mode.