I've never really understood why bloom is always brought up as this big massive negative change from the random cone spread of H2 and H3. It's essentially the same mechanic, but you're given MORE agency over the accuracy of your gun than you were previously.
And therein lies the major problem with this debate: whenever anyone talks about halo 2 or halo reach they talk best case scenario (no mods, TU, turning everything off in customs) but when they talk about about halo 3 its always worse case scenario (which I don't even know what that is...AR starts?). We've been talking about some distinction where a gameplay experience has been altered to appeal more to a specific audience. Hell, actually you weren't even debating that you were just simply debating that the changes to Halo Reach from Halo 3 are no greater in magnitude than those from Halo 2 to Halo 3. In neither case are you correct. The changes in Reach were far greater than anything Halo 3 changed. We are talking about the default experience that was marketed and unless you can provide examples from Halo 3 to prove this otherwise (you can't because they don't exist) then there isn't much left to argue. Again, how much you like or dislike an individual game is not relevant to the conversation. This is equivalent to CoD 2 to CoD 4 changes: quite a bit is different though they are the same series. Yet MW2 to MW3 is much more similar to a Halo 2 to Halo 3 change.
^ Or the non-6 minute version of that. Don't type in "halo 4 leaks" into google or go into forums or threads that discuss Halo 4.
I could write 10 essays on this, in fact I probably already have, but suffice it to say that it is NOT the same mechanic. Pre-TU bloom slowed down kill times at key competitive 4v4 ranges more than spread did, and introduced a level of randomness which utterly dwarfed even Halo 3 spread. Anyone who argues to the contrary has not taken the time to watch competitive play with old MLG settings enough. I maintain that 85% bloom made a huge difference, and if the game had been like that from the start then bloom complaints as a whole would have been much less frequent and not so loud. But it still would have been cause for concern in competitive sense, even if 85% did a fair amount for the game balance by dropping kill times it still didn't eliminate randomness and so was an issue for competitive play. It just so happened that ZB came out at the same time as well, so in competitive terms the comparison was always 100% bloom vs. none.
I'm not gonna pretend that I'm particularly well-versed in the ins-and-outs of what makes for "good" for competitive play (as far as I understand, a large skill gap and less inherent ramdomness), but implementing a system that rewards a player for well-paced, well-aimed shots over spammed shots seems to fit both those criteria. You as a player have control over how accurate your shots are, and with skill you can essentially eliminate the randomness in the placement of your shots. If the issue is that accuracy benefit of paced shots doesn't outweigh the speed benefit of spammed shots, and everybody just spams anyways, then I'd argue that bloom should to be increased rather than decreased to punish spamming more. I think the current issue with bloom in Reach is the balance of the mechanic, not the mechanic itself, and with small tweaks to the max ROF, optimal ROF, amount of bloom and bloom recovery time, all the current complaints could be addressed. But outside all of this, I feel that true "competitive" play is so far removed from what the majority of Halo players enjoy or want to play that trying to balance the game as a whole based off what the competitive community feels are the "best" and "most competitive" mechanics is extremely impractical. I'm all for having lots of gameplay settings we can mess around with so that the MLG community can play exactly how they want, but it really annoys me when it's suggested that those particular competitive settings should be made standard for everyone.
The issue with bloom as I see it is that it sometimes fails to offer a reward for catching another player off guard. I'll provide an exaggerated example just to make the point: I'm in SWAT on Boardwalk, and an entire enemy team is by the 1 flag cap point, out in the open in the courtyard. I shoot the first one, miss the next two shots even though I aimed right on because of bloom, and am killed. The alternatives are: I shoot the first one, not shoot again waiting for bloom to reset, and get killed, OR: I shoot, back away, peek out, shoot, in which time the rest of the team has escaped. Point being, stupid moves need to be punished, and bloom impedes that. There is definitely a limit to how punishing things can be, though. (Imagine a TS game where all players are, by default, absolute and one point is to win.) Just trying to stir up discussion
I agree that it fit into the joke, sorry about the sarcasm. I played Halo 4 at PAX and used the Boltshot and it worked exactly as a mauler, but you had to charge it up first. So I suppose I may be wrong now, but it would be pretty stupid if it was a 1sk
So considering the game as a whole(Theater etc) 2-3 changes are roughly same as 3-Reach and when limiting the parameters to only include the core sandbox muliplayer experience 2-3 changes are roughly the same as 3-reach changes. But only under the specific circumstances when limiting the parameters just enough just to include the "default experience that was marketed" but not to far as to only include the multiplayer sandbox is there becomes a issue. Which is some arbitrarily drawn line because "default experience that was marketed" only thing I can conclude from that is matchmaking and how poorly presented the game was and how much better things could of been done getting into opinions etc which is why I think your hate of the game is effecting your stance. Which is fine because i think the presentation of some matchmaking systems was horrible But in terms of changes between core game mechanics or the game as a whole, the magnitude of changes aren't that different. Not gonna address bloom, Been there done that. That's why i like to use the term "MLG competitive" and competitive as different meanings. Because MLG wants the most competitive 4shotBR/strafing/powerweapon timing gameplay. Which is fine but most hardcore MLG players wouldn't think twice about any other competitive aspects of game, AR slayer, competitive BTB vehicle combat, etc.
Nice to find someone willing to respond with something other than a condescending non-answer My counterpoint is that you're assuming that somehow you deserve all four of those kills. Imagine if you were one of the four dudes instead, and some guy jumps out from behind you and murders your whole team before you can defend yourselves, with a DMR no less, not even a power weapon. I dunno about you, but that would kinda piss me off.
Yes. Precisely. The issue is that bloom doesn't do this, and pre TU bloom was particularly bad. The effectiveness of spamming, especially on host or LAN, was just stupid. And even aside from this, rewarding "paced" shots is all very well but that still slows the game down and increases kill times leading to more redundant encounters. No, it should have been fixed. The issue with bloom in terms of how Bungie designed it in Reach is that it's very random. The very fact that it's possible for a shot fired with a fully bloomed reticle to land dead centre is just silly, as it undermines the whole purpose of bloom in the first place. This is the problem with ALL random mechanics, they serve to achieve their purpose with inconsistent results, because they are themselves inconsistent. Range or RoF limiting mechanics (bloom is both) should do their job as a matter of course, not only do their job some of the time. What's worse with bloom is that other mechanics like the hitboxes and generous magnetism further undermine the supposed purpose, by dragging bullets back toward the centre of the reticle and making damage, even kills at higher levels of bloom more likely. And also, I'm very conscious that I can afford to shoot faster on a good connection, and even more so on host. Yet another aspect of disparity in engagements for no good reason. It's a random mechanic, and a badly implemented one at that. If you want to limit range then there are other, consistent ways of doing it. Damage drop off is one I quite like, and bullet travel time as well if done better than Halo 3, but you can also get trajectory stuff like height drop and wind, though these seem more suited to sim shooters imo. Damage drop off is nice since it requires an awareness of distance to understand and predict damage done, but doesn't impact upon aiming mechanics directly. I really wanted to see them try damage drop off on the Pistol, but it was never going to happen. Well yeah, which again is why I'm promoting gametype options rather rebalancing the vanilla game. Sure it'd be nice for the competitive community, especially in the sense that having the vanilla game and competitive games as close as possible is of real benefit to the competitive scene since people are more open to it. People feeling like they're playing a different game when playing MLG gametypes is a real blight on helping encourage new competitors. You can argue that MLG settings should try to be more vanilla to alleviate this, but at that point you're saying that increasing the player base is more important than a particular part of the gametype's competitive value. This argument has been had a thousand times on the MLG forums. Bloom did little to help people feel more at home in MLG, either, so even that's a moot point. If one guy can jump out and kill four of you before you can defend yourselves, he earned that. Sorry but four people being taken by one guy simply through the element of surprise, with a DMR alone? I don't think that's caused to be pissed off at the game. Even with 2 on 1, awareness and getting the jump on people is something to be rewarded. That's one of the things I like about Halo, it isn't a position focused shooter (mostly sim shooters like CoD or BF to a slightly lesser extent) so getting the jump is an advantage but not such a defining feature of each battle, and coming back from surprise or shots down is one of the things that defines Halo. Seeing the other person first in sim shooters is so much more influential than it is here, so I don't think it's such a solid argument. EDIT: Oh you're talking about SWAT. Well that IS more of a position focused shooter then, so my answer would be: don't play SWAT if getting caught out of position bugs you. That's the point of the game compared to regular Halo.
you do deserve those kills, no question. if your team was bad enough that theyre all looking in the same direction and they let someone on the other team get behind them without anyone noticing, then that whole team deserves to be killed by that player (if we're still talking about swat)
I'm pretty sure that we're in agreement that bloom as-is in Reach didn't work for competitive play. I personally think, though, that it's a good concept independent of how it was specifically implemented in this particular game, and outside of the competitive theater, functions fine in standard vanilla play. I'm not trying to say that MLG settings should be vanillified, either. I think it's best to have unique game experiences so that each kind of player can be as satisfied as possible, I just wish it was easier to have a continuum (via gametype options and playlist selections) from ultra-casual to ultra-competitive instead of either an awkward, middle-of-the-road solution that nobody is happy with or a polarizing, binary competitive-or-not solution that splits the fanbase and leads to condescension and elitism. EDIT: Consider my post about SWAT reneged, then. Being an entirely position-based gametype, bloom or other ROF/accuracy limiting mechanics don't have a place. However, if you wanna play a position-based shooter, go play COD. I don't think arguments about SWAT have any bearing on the vanilla sandbox.
Idk, I've yet to be convinced that random mechanics are good for either end of the spectrum. It's not just a case of balancing weapons away from competitive players doing loads of damage really quickly, instead it just means that the outcome of any given encounter involving these mechanics becomes a little less reflective of what each player did during it. Skill displayed, mistakes made etc. Again, this goes for everyone.
^Basically as long as the changes they make can be turned off in gametype setting's it's not that big a deal. That's not to say absolutely every new thing must be customizable, but some things are just stupid to force into the game. I thought bloom was an effective way of limiting fire rate at long range and without it hemmorhage would have been even more of a DMR sniping war. I was somewhat indifferent about bloom overall, but I wish there were options besides just 100, 85, and 0 and some of those were only in specific gametypes.
Exactly. It's leaving out fundamental gametype options which tends to frustrate the competitive community. In Reach it was bloom, in Halo 4 it's gonna be sprint. There are always other ones which annoy us (and everyone else tbh) like the stuff done to CTF in Halo 4 which we can't undo, but the fundamentals are what really make or break a competitive title. Reach saw that happen at MLG, bloom really killed that game. The last MLG Reach event was when we finally got ZBNS gametypes and the turnout and crowd were insane, best stream I've seen since the height of Halo 3 without a doubt. But MLG considered it too far gone and axed it from the circuit anyway. Even though the turnout was amazing (something insane like 1000 players for the FFA) stream numbers weren't nearly what they needed to be apparently, though to be fair they only announced that Reach would be there about 6 weeks before hand and left the majority of publicising the event up to the community.
I'm pretty sure that's what 99% of us want in a perfect Halo game with perfect sandbox balance tons of custom game options with amazing forge with AA's and loadouts as options. But i doubt 343i will accomplish that or want to accomplish that(specially with MS breathing down there necks). Highly doubt they want to make a perfect Halo 5(gaining $110 with DLC per copy) instead of Halo 5($100),6($100),7($100),8($100),9($100),10($100),11($100) Specially since Halo 4 imo is the first "side grade fps halo" every other halo has been about evolving the game.
You keep changing the context of the argument. Since the beginning of this debate it's always been about the MP. There isn't competition in campaign, so there is no need to debate that. Either way, it could still be debated that the changes to campaign are far, far, far more significant than any previous Halo (no master chief, in addition to all the things such as AAs, etc), but I don't want to bother with that much. Additional features aren't really a bother either. They aren't altering any existing features, therefore they aren't changing anything and therefore we cannot use them of examples to balance the changes between games. One could make the argument that forge alters MP in some ways, but initial forge did little to alter it. Forge was a slow growth throughout Halo 3 and still affect multiplayer little (though custom maps did get in eventually, and did negatively effect matchmaking, this was substantially more apparent in Reach than Halo 3). As for theatre? Great feature but changed nothing. Theatre was back in Reach, Forge was a far greater change that it was in Halo 3 and Firefight (completely new multiplayer portion of the game). Again, not that any of this was what our initial argument was about. So back to what we were actually talking about: the multiplayer experience. The reason I drew the line at the "marketed" experience is because multiple times throughout this debate it has been mentioned/discussed whether or not the "casual" audience was being catered to. My other problem is that when not talking about this directly, people always seem to discuss meta-Reach, which honestly is the least mainstream metagame I've ever seen. There were multiple places to play BR and competitive maps in Halo 2 and 3. In Reach there is one playlist to play ZB, which is half the time what people go on about Reach for (praise). As far as I'm concerned, Reach is AAs, Reach is Bloom, Reach is loadouts. Compare this with Halo 3 and it's a few big changes. Now find something between Halo 2 and Halo 3 that compares to this.