Well it does say he earned 0 xp in the first image I posted. Maybe he lost so he didn't get any xp like in H3?
This already happens in Reach. But yes, you should get noticably more credits for winning and contributing to your team than for merely sitting through an entire game. The hefty rewards for "participation" and "slot machine" have encouraged people to think that winning isn't meaningful; thus they screw around, go AFK for entire games, or pad their k/d instead of helping their team. (People will still do that stuff anyway, of course, but maybe less if the game makes it obvious that it rewards playing the "right" way.)
BTW, about the killstreaks: I don't know if this is cOLD or not, or has been shot down/discussed. So we have yet to figure out what triggers the ordinance drops. I wouldn't have too much of a problem if the person that scores the 25th point for the team or something gets to trigger it, rather than the person who gets a killing spree. The worst part about all of this is that the videos look almost precisely like old-fashioned, good Halo gameplay, but then they drop these massive nukes on our heads with the info they release. x.x
The games he played had power weapons on a timer. Frankie did say that personal ordinance drops (killstreaks) are in the game but only in specific gametype/playlists.
I know it happens in reach, but it seemed like they were putting more of an emphasis on rewarding medals. But I agree with you. A good ranking/reward system can go a long way to making matchmaking more enjoyable
I must say this, after thinking about it for a while this morning. If 343 really wants to make Halo more hospitable to newcomers and casual players, the main thing they can do to achieve that goal is not all this messing with the skill gap. Instead, just FIX THE TRUESKILL SYSTEM. This system worked reasonably well in Halo 3, enough so that people had to look for (and found) ways to game the system: e.g. new accounts, sandbagging to decrease their rank, or having their friends do either of those and then partying up with them. I would argue that TrueSkill works *not at all* in Reach. I don't know what has changed or why. But there is supposed to be the same background calculation happening that occurred in H3, just without showing you the 1-50 ranks. I'm here to tell you, this cannot be true. I can never tell from one game to the next what sort of herd of morons or team of tight-knit professionals I will be playing. The really perplexing games are ones where everybody is random and no one is partied up, yet one team is all forerunners and eclipses, and the other team is all warrant officers. I've seen that happen a number of times, and it really makes me wonder, how are these 8-10 people in the same game in the first place, and how did it decide on THESE teams? Games like that inevitably end up looking like this. (Granted: in this case three of us were partied up, so this game wasn't a pure accident. But why were we even playing guys as bad as this, and why did it toss us a very solid random just to make things worse? And I've seen games go nearly as bad as that when everyone in it appeared to be random. In H3 it really seemed like you needed to be in a social playlist or run into some second accounters to get a beatdown like that.) I understand the urge to supply more personal investment features. Customizing armor (which started in H3) was just the beginning; they're always looking for ways to hook people who can't sustain themselves by just trying to get one win after another for months or years. But all the other things they've done to subtly (or not-so-subtly) reduce the skill gap... don't bother. Good players will find ways to beat bad players anyway! Just fix TrueSkill and patch up the workarounds as much as possible.
^ Agreed wholeheartedly. I tried my hardest to see the good side of skill matching in Reach, but after a while you've just got to accept that it's utterly awful. I think it must be deliberately loose rather than just badly implemented, because in Arena it actually works quite well. I suspect that Bungie consider putting matches together at all more important than waiting for well balanced ones, and there's arguably some validity to this, but when you shoot yourself in the foot by such skewed matches it puts people off, so what's the point? Thing is, even that doesn't explain situations like the one you outlined, Nutduster. And I agree, I've been in those situations on both sides. Sometimes it's desperately trying to carry a team of 4 other randoms (RIP Squad), who apparently don't have hands, against a team of awesome randoms with no good reason for teams being constructed like that. Other times, I'm matched with 4 guys who I find it hard to keep up with, against 5 complete noobs. There's no rhyme or reason, and I try to see a logical reason for why it's set up this way rather than simply assuming it's broken, but frankly that's pretty difficult. So yeah, provide people with better matches rather than forcing a skill leveller on all players to give the (inconsistent) illusion of accurate matches.
I wonder if a big part of it is that they want to have lots of micro-playlists, and they also don't want players twiddling their thumbs waiting for a match. So they loosened up the requirements so you get into a game sooner - disregarding the fact that you're now three times as likely to get your ass kicked (or kick someone else's ass). I would sacrifice a few less-populous playlists, even ones I personally like, to have better skill matching. If I can live without squad slayer for basically no reason, surely I could live with an equivalent sacrifice in Halo 4 at the altar of giving us match-ups that make sense. It also seems like the system could be smarter depending on a playlist's current population. I can understand preferring quick matches at weird times of day when no one is playing, but if there's a thousand-plus people in a playlist, I can wait an extra minute to get into a competitive game. I don't feel like this is currently true; in most playlists I feel like the matches are near-random all day long. (Though as you suggest, arena seems to work better; maybe it's just that it attracts a more adept population to begin with, but I don't really know since I don't play it that often.)
As far as Arena goes, I maintain that the system is functionally better in there. One of the things about Arena is that your value takes a lot less time to settle down to a lower level after not playing for a while, so I notice the difference. If I start playing, I'll be walking through games like it's nothing, and within like 5 games I notice the opponents getting tougher, and staying tougher. I don't play for a few days and it gets easier again, only to readjust after I start performing well. Also, the other day I played for the first time after qualifying, and I'd gotten like top 10% Gold. I seem to remember doing OK in my first game, but then I just kept getting stomped on, lost almost all the rest of my games that day. Next day I came back on and had been bumped down to Silver, since it doesn't happen instantly but seems to happen during the night, or perhaps after a certain period of inactivity. The games were instantly manageable again, I cruised my way through a few more and then had gotten Gold again by the next day. Idk, a lot of people dump on Arena. This is for good reason in the wider sense, gametypes were bad for a very long time and still aren't fantastic, percentiles aren't visible in game so there are only 5 visible ranks in actual terms, plus the rating based ranking was awful and they took way too long to change it to W/L. Low populating brings longer wait time, and this is clearly self perpetuating. But still, I think the matching system on its own is pretty robust.
This is almost satirical, though I don't think it was meant to be. Check out the "halo fan's" soul slowly die as he gets this information.
I don't see the part where his "soul slowly dies." Looks like a dude asking questions about Halo 4 and receiving scripted answers.
I liked the part where he says "But you don't unlock better weapons, like in Call of Duty, right?" and they answer "Well, yeah, you do". Also, "Halo Fan" was in quotations to indicate sarcasm.
I really hope it won't take more than a couple weeks to unlock everything for load-outs. Anything more than a month would be unacceptable.
I would normally disagree because I love playing games that take dedication, but since it's Halo and there shouldn't even be "unlockables", I hope it's easy as well.