March MM update

Why the **** is Squad Slayer getting removed? And we're getting a Team Slayer replica playlist with TU settings in its place? That makes no sense.

 

Aaaaaaaand there it is. How could any developer behind the Halo name go for so long without utterly pissing me off. They remove my single favourite playlist (which I play all the time and never have troubke finding games in) and replace it with one filled with godawful forge variants, and also remove an awesome aspect of the TU.

 

I'm fine with the bleedthrough removal. It was just too inconsistent especially when your shields are recharging. And then there is the healthpack glitch that meant that sometimes you were a 4-shot even at full health and shields.
I'm fine with either systems really but I do like the clarity Reach's system gives you.

 

Im not sure why they changes team objective to 5v5 and removed the actual 5v5 playlist, but Im sure there's some form of reason. Im not saying it's a good one, but im sure it exists. Really I no longer care though- I just play Anniversary MM if I ever go online to play some Reach multiplayer. Which rarely happens. Still, no Bleedthrough... I dont really care either way on that one =P

 

Wow.

I am not usually a vocal, militant type when it comes to these changes - working for a software company myself, I know what it's like to be involved in hard decisions and try to fix things that need fixing while not pissing off a bunch of people if possible. I sympathize with these guys, I really do. But seriously, you assholes, what the **** are you doing???

Squad is my favorite playlist by a country mile. It has good team sizes, good game settings (I love playing to 75 and except for jet pack, which I could take or leave, the AA set is the best one in Reach), and the best set of maps in all of matchmaking due to the lack of mediocre-to-shitty forge variants. If they kill it, I might seriously retire from matchmaking altogether. I just don't care enough about the other playlists to play them regularly.

And this bleedthrough thing... aaaaggghhhhhh. MAKE UP YOUR DAMN MINDS. I just got done downloading all the TU gametypes, now I have to download them all again? This is the third iteration (I think; it's AT LEAST the third) of the title update, and since they insist on pushing it out through gametypes, I have to keep re-downloading the damn things just to have the current matchmaking ones. Frankly I am neutral to slightly-negative on bleedthrough and I guess it's fine they're taking it away, but how did it take them this long to figure it out? And what happened to just patching the game instead of this constant poking and prodding via gametypes (that they don't bother to host anywhere, so you can only find them in matchmaking or from other players' fileshares)?

343: You are on thin, thin ice. Please don't devote your first term in office to making us realize that we actually had it good with Bungie.

 

yeah the only thing i touched in matchmaking was squad slayer so...

goodbye halo reach matchmaking. that's retarded, it felt like the majority of people preferred squad slayer over everything else. Maybe that wasnt the case. Oh well.

 

So they took out one of the most popular play-lists, removed the only AA I actually enjoy using (and one of the few not game-breaking), and took out one of the best aspects of the title update?


Awesome.

 

You couldn't be more wrong.

 

Evade is actually horrifying outside of BTB, in the hands of a capable user. If you ever run up against a crew of four highly ranked, good players in team objective and all using evade... just quit out. Save yourself the grief. It's one of my LEAST favorite armor abilities in the game thanks to that, and in a world of camo/armor lock/jet pack, that's really saying something. (BTB cures a lot of ills: all of the AAs I just named except for camo are much more tolerable in that context, but are downright annoying in smaller games.)

 

I'm gone with the bleedthrough removal. Not touching MM again until they put it back. Way to screw over the game. Herpaderping just came back with a bang.

I hope all people in favor of bleed through's removal get hit by a speeding bus. And whoever made this stupid decision. **** game.

Thank god Nexuiz came out yesterday. Best $10 bucks I've spent in a looooong time, and most enjoyable game I've played in years. Pick it up in xbl Arcade.

 

I may have to resurrect my "YOU GONNA GET HERPADERPED" avatar for the occasion!

Serious discussion time: did anyone else not find herpaderping to be a big problem pre-TU? I found that I killed would-be herpaderpers like 90% of the time. People kept complaining that it reduced the skill gap or made guns less effective and I felt completely different - it encouraged people to do something stupid that allowed me to almost always kill them. I distinctly remember a game on Countdown where some guy bum-rushed me about eight times and I killed him every single time. The only map it was legitimately annoying to me was Sword Base, because of all the tight spaces and short hallways. But the thing with chronic herpaderpers: they seemed to always overestimate how quickly they could reach you, and whether or not you'd be able to backpedal out of melee range. So many little noobies died in a puddle of tears trying to charge me, with the last headshot downing them before they even fired off the first melee...

One thing that does surprise me is that 343 is apparently still not considering a partial (nerfed) bleed, or reducing melee damage. I think a lot of people would be happy with either, but instead they're just reverting back to the thing so many bitched about, prior to the new thing that so many others bitched about.

 

Vanilla Reach's shield system is fine. I don't mind bleedthrough being gone at all. I prefer the more consistent and clearer system that Reach had at launch. Bleedthough is a guessing game too often, especially when your shields are recharging.

 

Same here. I feel too often in TU games like I don't understand quite how someone killed me (the melee health bug probably contributes to that - and there's one benefit of losing bleedthrough) or exactly how much more effort it's going to take me to kill someone else.

 

It's like this Over, you know the player is at most (sans OS) a 5-shot kill. If they're down health, it doesn't make it a worse situation in any form. Players that are down health should find a health pack, easy as that. As there is more incentive to use one, you can more easily predict player traffic.

When it comes to x-shot+melee, its a little more structured than you think.
Red Bar = 1 shot + Melee
Orange? = 2 shot + Melee
Green = 3 shot + Melee

You know when your at risk of getting boned.

The only true flaw of the bleed through system is the melee/health pack glitch. That and only that. We've had bleed through in every other Halo game, why are we ****ing it up now!?

Another easy solution, give us naturally recharging health. Holy hell!

 

You act like bleedthrough only occurs when you're punching people. What if you're hit by a grenade and still have some shield left, it's extremely hard to precisely say when exactly you're a one or two-shot. This becomes even more of a guessing game when you're in the process of recharging shields.

In Reach's system you're one-shot if you have no shields, that's it. It's a lot better at giving visual feedback feedback.

 

Evade isn't "game breaking". It's just handled wrong. It should mostly be a pick up instead of a thing you spawn with, like all AA's should have been in anything mildly competitive since Reach was launched.

"Oh god, he can move around faster than me", well, at least he's not invisible, literally freezing up and being taken out of play, creating a giant barrier, or flying around the damn map.

 

"Oh god, he can move around faster than me" doesn't begin to sum up evade. It sums up sprint. A player who is good with evade can turn it into a nightmare that allows him to fight at long range until he's wounded, then instantly disappear behind cover to reset his shields, and instantly pop back out the moment he needs to get a shot on you. Full teams doing this can turn basic tactics that are already hard to combat (four guys standing on key pieces of ground and team-shooting) into a situation that is basically impossible to counter, unless your team is as good as theirs and doing the same thing. I've run into this multiple times in team objective - teams of forerunners and inheritors on Asylum for instance (one of the best maps to do this). They stand around the ring, on the carbine bridges due to the convenient doorways into the ring, and just pick at you with DMR fire while evading to safety any time you hurt them more than a little bit.

This may not be "game breaking" per se, but it's every bit as frustrating as anything you can do with armor lock or camo. And I didn't even begin to get into the extreme overpoweredness of evade + sword (funny how evade triggers a short cooldown period before you can use any weapon - except sword, which is by far the most useful with that particular AA), or using evade on close quarters maps like Countdown or Sword Base, where cover or a cheap melee is always a button press away.

You want to know the most obvious sign that something's wrong with evade? Compare it to sprint. You can 1) move farther in the same period of time (double evade vs. max use sprint); 2) evade sideways for the ultra-strafe (sprint only works going forward); and 3) evade backward for the ultra-backpedal (ditto). Given these extreme advantages, why would you ever choose sprint instead?

I maintain firmly that evade does not belong in any playlist other than BTB, or silly action sack type games. It sucks in objective... utterly sucks. People that are good with it exploit it to death.

 

Every problem you listed (Besides dodging and moving, which are kind of why it exists...) could be cured by making it a pick up, like I said. It's not game breaking. It might be hard to combat, but that's the point of AA's, to give advantage in certain situations. If it was a pick up, you wouldn't run into entire teams using it.

Which is what I said in my first post.