If you remember... the god squad that was instinct in reach didn't want to get rid of bloom and sprint. so, i think that is probably legit. What you are saying not what i am saying.
When Halo 2 came out I was aware that there was a competitive community surrounding the game while I was playing it. For Halo 3 I was unaware that people played the game competitively at all. This isn't to say Halo 3 didn't have elements that made it a good competitive game, it just wasn't as popular as one and I don't believe Bungie necessarily designed the gameplay with competition in mind. This stands as a good comparison to Halo 5 which was clearly designed for fast-paced, competitive play by orienting itself towards what gamers expect from a first-person shooter. In the case of Halo 2 I think it just so happened that there were elements that favored a competitive style of play as with Halo 3 and Reach it was clear Bungie was consciously moving away from that sphere. If I had to weigh in on this debate I'd argue that Halo 3 is competitive, based on some of the reasons listed prior, but not the most competitive in the Halo series. Then again someone's definition of what is and isn't "competitive" varies greatly across this community, so it is easy to argue both sides. For example, I know there are players out there at believe Halo Wars to be competitive and I would tell them an RTS where there are basically three/four heavily reused strategies is not very competitive. Fun sure, competitive nah. You're pruely fat on beautiful observations.
I got one. I've always thought of it as rotational or radial symmetry, not inverse. Inverse maps are rotational symmetry at 180°. Another example would be a starfish which is 72° radial symmetry (360°/5 legs).
You can call it what ever you want sweetheart. I only have an issue when people start talking about mirror symmetry and ignoring that there are multiple ways of doing it and it still be a mirror sym.
Pt1 So I figured I owed you a fair response. It wasn't too long ago I first registered on the Beyond forums with more or less these exact same opinions thinking that CE was dated and a joke and 3 had the ultimate skill gap. It was a bit of a culture shock for me to learn about what made each Halo game tick and if it weren't for people like Cursed Lemon actually having the patience to explain to be why I was being an idiot I probably would've continued to think what I did. I definitely don't have the same patience to continually bring up the same discussion so I'm glad there are people like him who do it. That being said, I'll do my best to describe this very objectively. BR spread is inexcusable in every way. There's no justification for it. You said that you could use it just fine, sure within 15 meters. After that it's a tossup who's going to win the battle. The basis of every competitive shooter is the remove every sort of randomness possible. If anything is random, it's not up to the player and ultimately falls to chance. BR spread is random. Even the most accurate bullet of the burst has a .15 degree variance, the second having .6 or something along those lines, and the third bullet between those two. Even very close middle range battles are sometimes 4 shot, sometimes 6 shot. Shooting from A box to B box across Amplified, not a far range by any means, is a joke. There's videos of someone shooting a stagnant player from this distance, varying from 6 shots to kill all the way to 14. That shouldn't happen, EVER. If the creators of a video game want to limit the distance of a weapon to give it a defined role, there are better ways to do it than random spread. The BR in Halo 2 is fairly difficult to use beyond RRR and that's just because the auto aim drops off (however H2 has ample bullet mag so this isn't the best example). We're playing with a console controller here, once auto aim is gone it becomes relatively impossible to effectively kill someone who's even standing right in front of you. If the BR was to be a decent utility weapon, it should have 0 spread and just drop AA beyond RRR. Halo 3 has bloodshots with the sniper rifle ON LAN, that should never happen. There are plenty of games that do it MUCH better, part of it is just poor host variance and lag compensation. Regardless, it makes the game poor even in LAN environments. This isn't the biggest deal but it's worth noting. "Throwing grenades to blast someone out of a corner" is their use, grenades are there to empower the player and prevent camping. The blast radius of grenades in CE make the game play like chess. If someone is sitting in sniper room in Cold Storage in Halo 3, there's nothing you're going to do about it. Grenades won't flush them out because you can barely throw them and they have a miniscule blast radius. In CE you literally flush people right out of that room on Chillout, everything becomes a mind game and it forces people to move. Stronger grenades do nothing but empower the individual player more which is what Halo needs. Less team reliance and more individual empowerment. Note I didn't say less teamwork, there's nothing wrong with teamwork. There IS something wrong with being inable to actually do something on your own. I like the bounce that H3 grenades have to them, they're fun to bank and you can be creative with them. But if nothing else you need to be able to throw them much further and much faster. I never said you COULDN'T strafe in Halo 3. Relative to any other console franchise Halo has always had much better movement acceleration. But relative to the rest of the series the strafing is terrible, it's the second slowest in the series only better than Reach, which felt like you were walking through syrup. There's no reason that the strafe shouldn't have been faster in H3, it was okay at close range because the aiming was so bad but that's artificial difficulty. It really does need to be faster, Halo 2 should be the standard for movement of any Halo game. I never denied that it was your opinion but that doesn't get us anywhere in a discussion. Which map in Halo 3 do you find particularly good? The Pit completely fell apart during competitive games, if you're as good as you claim then you'll know that. It becomes 3 minutes of sitting around waiting for rocket or camo to come up, make a push for the middle, and then run back to your own side and sit there. The map flat out does not work in competitive play. If the BR didn't have such atrocious spread then you MIGHT actually be able to put pressure across map but that obviously isn't the case. Also flag on it was horrendously predictable, probably the most linear gametype of all time except Narrows. Pit Hill was probably the best map/gametype combo next to Construct Hill but it was removed. Narrows also wouldn't work in literally any other Halo game with a decent utility weapon that could shoot more than 15 feet in front of you. It was quite literally, a single path in a straight line with lazy cover, and then the mancannons for the wild card. Guarentee if that map was not a dev map and someone made it in forge, everyone on this forum would laugh it out of here. It is quite literally push push push push push. That's it, just a straight line with a mancannon for obvious flanking. Flag was the same. Guardian is the same as Lockout but with a bad BR so you couldn't even shoot in S3/S2 from Gold effectively. Meaning any push was either going to come from lifting bottom blue, or from the long exposed elbow green. Again, this map fell apart competitively and every single match played on it from 2007 to 2010 MLG played out exactly the same. Oddball was okay on it. Construct...oh Lord. A complete joke of a map, possible the flattest more 2 dimensional playing map I've ever seen in competitive Halo. The only saving grace was Hill because it quite literally forced teams to run where they never would before, just to sit in the Hill. This gametype highlighted everything wrong with the BR as teams did nothing but hide from the person with sniper because the BR couldn't even descope someone with it. Isolation, Snowbound, Assembly, and Epitaph are all equally atrocious. The Big Team Maps were good but that's about it. Everything else is mediocre. The art is really the saving grace of Halo 3, which gave each map its own charm. But in a vacuum if anyone here designed any of those maps, they wouldn't receive a second glance. Pros obviously recognized this as strats on every map were the same from team to team. And you seem confident that your skill level levies your opinion (for the record I boosted H3 dubs all the time, most of the time winning just came down to hugging corners and team shotting) go on Beyond and talk to the general community of their opinion on competitive Halo 3. Most of the people there are insanely high level, have competed in events, or actual pro players who go there to discuss. The general consensus is that Halo 3 competitively is a brainless joke. The melee system? Pre patch it mirrored Halo 2 where the person with more health would win the encounter. Which pretty much meant that whoever fired second would get the kill, it was stupid in the way that melee didnt have much bleed through so the first person would punch, not kill, and the second person would be firing that whole time and then punch just a few moments after and the game would grant the second person the kill despite them not earning it. This was stupid, so it was patched within several weeks of launch and they just made everything trade all the time no matter the health. Which is the worst way to settle a dispute like this, the lag compensation on melees made it so even if they had already died on your screen, they still send the signal of them meleeing and it goes through and you die. This is possible the worst compromise and it's the same exact system used in Halo 5 but with a larger buffer zone and larger melee lunge. Which is another thing, the lunge is absurd in Halo 5 but it's also pretty bad in Halo 3. CQC has no depth with it, removing all lunge is where skill comes into close quarters battle because then your strafe and how you step in and out actually matter, you can bait melees. This RARELY works in Halo 3 because the lunge is so strong, and more often then not you'll trade. The crouch is too tall to actually duck under the melee's and you can actually punch people that ARENT IN YOUR SCREEN. This is 1: because there's way too ****ing much auto aim and lunge, and 2: the FOV is the smallest in Halo 3 (60 something degrees, as opposed to CE which has 85~) which explains why it's so easy to ninja people in H3. Because they can't actually see anyone next to them. Halo 2 at least had button combos and you could crouch under melees in close quarters which had a lot of depth to it, Halo CE had both of these AND a zero lunge melee. Both of these brought a lot of depth to close quarter fights, neither of which Halo 3 had. I'd go so far to say as H3 has the worst melee system of any Halo game except Reach, which didn't have bleedthrough. Halo CE and 2 ALSO had momentum melees. This meant that the speed you were moving at AND the weapon you were holding affected how much damage you would do. Melees ultimately aren't hard to do, it's much easier to punch someone than shoot them until they die so they shouldn't be overrewarded (which is what happened in Reach, it was easier to sprint up to someone and punch them twice than to shoot them to kill them). Standing still a melee would take 3 hits to kill in CE/2, and moving it would take 2. The only 2 weapons that were considered heavy class were the rocket launcher and the sentinel beam, combined with the highest form of momentum (jumping) meant that if you jump meleed someone with the rocket/sentinel beam it would be a 1 hit kill. This brought a lot of depth to weapons that wouldn't be there initially so you could use them even if they were empty. Jumping melees combined with different weapons meant different amounts of shots to kill. ALL OF THIS combined WITH button combos like BLB, BXR, BXB, meant CQC combat in CE and 2 really really interesting. Also keep in mind that in CE the weapons had different hitboxes for melees (meaning weapons would swing differently to hit in different directions on the screen) and different speeds. For example the Pistol and rocket would melee very slow in CE and hit vertically down the center of the screen, which made them difficult to use in close quarters. The AR would hit like a baseball bat in front of you horizontally, and the speed was MUCH faster than other weapons like Rockets. This gave the AR HUGE potential and depth for close quarters combat. Halo 3 has literally none of this. There's just tons of lunge, and tons of auto aim. And that's it. You just have to know how many times to shoot someone. Here's a video of Ghandi (my favorite H2 pro) showing the H2A melee system This is a really cool video by Hard Way explaining a lot of tips in CE melee, I think you'll find it really interesting to watch This is a video by cT (Chaos Theory) who is the best known Halo player in the world for his knowledge of why and how Halo works. He's showing some of the differences in melee between Halo CE and 3 as well as some bullet magnetism stuff
Pt2] @no god anywhere The aiming is something I didn't mention before but Halo 3 has really terrible aim acceleration which makes close quarters aiming very difficult is the primary reason the BR is so difficult to use in H3. If the aiming was consistent and natural I guarantee everyone would be missing MUCH less shots. In an FPS, the one thing that should work correctly is the aiming because that's what you're doing the entire time. You're looking around. It should work in your favor, not against you. Halo 2 probably has the best and more intuitive aiming with the least acceleration. The Halo 5 aiming actually reminded me quite a bit of H3 with how unnatural and difficult to control it was. It also uses grid aiming as opposed to radial aiming. What this means is that there's basically an invisible grid on your screen with thousands and thousands of lines vertically and horizontally. Your aimer moves along these lines, so it's never actually moving purely diagonally. Your aimer will want to stick to these lines. This is why strafing on a ramp is so effective in H3, because it's very difficult to aim diagonally accurately, it's why it's much easier to just look directly up and then over when adjusting to fights like that, and it's why it's so easy to just swipe snipe people on a flat level. It makes doing what you want to do very difficult, and it makes other aspects of the game that SHOULD be hard very easy. Trying to swipe snipe someone in Halo 2 (despite the sniper being 10x easier because hitscan/bullet mag) is infinitely harder because it's actually difficult to move your aimer in a flat line to the left or right. Halo 3 is the only video game i've ever seen in my entire life that uses this system as opposed to radial aiming, which just pulls your aimer out from a central point using circles. Now the kill times, this is a really deep issue that people over at Beyond have written books about (cT literally has a book about this, why Halo has the kill times it does) but I'll do my best to explain very concisely. Fast or slow kill times in isolation don't mean much. Longer kill times allow you to outplay someone, true. This is essential to Halo's identity in remaining a game that allows you to outshout someone if you're better than them. Short kill times overall mean it's less about gunplay than it is about simply seeing someone before you, similar to COD. It's very difficult to actually turn on someone in that game because you usually die in an instant. Now here's what's important. In order for this concept to work best, you need a fast PERFECT kill time and a slow AVERAGE kill time. This means that if you hit every shot perfectly with your utility weapon, you should be able to kill someone relatively quick. However, if the weapon is difficult enough to use (and a utility weapon SHOULD have a large skill gap) then the average encounter should be relatively long, ie the length that you think of when you think of Halo battles (several seconds). When you have long kill times with a weapon that's easy to use, there's no chance of outgunning someone. I don't know if you played much H2A but man was the BR on autopilot, all the time. The poor strafing, high bullet magnetism, and hitscan, high auto aim, easy aiming, and burst fire nature of the Battle Rifle all made it very difficult to actually throw someone off you in a gun fight. It was actually difficult to miss someone in H2A, which made almost every encounter a perfect 4 shot. It just wasn't possible to turn on someone when you're down even just 1 shot because the game was too easy. Halo 3 is this to a lesser extent. The awkward aiming, bullet spread, less auto aim, and projectile nature of the BR made for some difficulty but not nearly enough. Because let's be real, against someone who's not completely retarded if you're 1 shot and you turn the corner against another player with a battle rifle, you're going to die 99% of the time. It doesn't matter how good you are or how bad they are, all it takes is 1 bullet from 1 burst of their gun to kill you. That's the issue, if you're lucky you might get 1 or 2, MAYBE 3 bursts off in time but you'll still die. The game design literally doesn't allow you to ouptplay someone and show off your skill no matter how good you are, it's fairly difficult to out BR someone if you're down 1 shot, it's near impossible if you're down 2 because the perfect kill times are just too slow. I don't want to hear anecdotal evidence about that 1 time you out BR'd 8 other people in a big team game while you were 1 shot, on the grand scale of Halo 3 and the range of skill, you cannot out shoot someone no matter how much better you are when you're down only a few shots. The strafe is too slow to throw people off effectively, the guns have too much bullet magnetism, and the perfect kill times are too slow. What's the kill time for a perfect 4 shot in Halo 3? 1.2 seconds or something like that? I looked it up but couldn't find it. Now what do you think the average engagement is in H3 with a BR battle, maybe like 2 seconds tops. Probably closer to 1.6 or 1.8. It's very very rare for a player to miss 2 COMPLETE bursts worth of shots if you think about it. Because the burst fire nature of the BR just makes it easier to swipe over someone's head and at least 1 of the shots will connect, something that you cannot do with a semi auto weapon. It's just much harder to a more varied kill time with a burst fire weapon in this regard, which is where CE/Reach shine. If you miss a shot with a semi auto then that's it, you don't get any damage. A majority of the time when you miss a burst you'll probably still connect with a bullet or two, which makes outpalying someone while you're weak extraordinarily hard in Halo 2/3. Watch this clip This was taken with 0 Bloom settings fyi. Now, Reach had very consistent easy to handle aiming and a LOT of auto aim and bullet magnetism on top of hitscan weapons and the slowest strafe of any Halo game. The fact that a player can do this is SOLELY because the DMR is semi auto, if this clip was taken with Battle Rifles it would've never happened because it's simply too hard to correct yourself and actually miss someone when using a burst fire. This concept was hard for me to accept because like every other Halo 2 and 3 kid, Halo is pretty much synonymous with Battle Rifle. But looking at it objectively a burst fire weapon only hurts the potential for the Halo sandbox which is something that's very apparent in Halo 3. In CE not only is it a semi auto weapon, but it has projectile properties, AND the direction you're walking in affects the direction the bullet will travel. Which means if you're strafing right in CE and you fire a bullet straight at their head, it's going to go right and miss. You have to compensate by aiming left, this level of depth COUPLED with the fact that CE has the least auto aim and bullet magnetism in the series AND an awesome strafe... ...means that people in CE miss, A LOT. Now the pistol is a 3 shot kill or .6 second perfect kill (twice as fast as the Halo 3 BR) but CE has on average the LONGEST engagements of any Halo game. If you look up a video of the best Halo CE players in the world Ogre 1, Ogre 2, Walshy, Patch, etc. they miss. A LOT. In fact in won't be unusual for them to shoot the entire 12 shots in the mag and not kill someone in a straight up pistol vs pistol battle right in front of one another. Using 12 shots and not killing someone in CE is the equivalent of using 16 BR shots and not killing someone in Halo 2/3, can you imagine that? That means shooting your entire magazine, reloading, and shooting 4 more shots and they're still not dead. Obviously the pistol shoots much faster than the BR so the engagements aren't insanely drawn out. It's very rare to see more than 1 or 2 perfect three shot kills in a game with the best CE players in the world (and the CE pros are godly good, the aiming skill in CE is unparalleled among any Halo game). THAT is what Halo needs. Because the ability to outplay someone in Halo 1 is there moreso than any other Halo. There's clips of Ogre 2 literally being 1 shot with 2 health bars left and single highhandedly killing 4 people straight, because the variance of skill is so great in CE. If you shoot perfectly you can kill 4 people with a single clip. That is where Halo 3 fails, because situations like that will literally never happen no matter how good you are. The game design doesn't let you outplay people in the way that you should because even IF you shoot perfectly, you'll probably still die before you can kill them. AND even if your shooting isn't perfect, the BR spread is more than likely to jip you of the 4 shot, which is extraordinarily rare past close mid range. Halo 2 also has the BR but at least you can double/quad shot (which is insanely difficult) to outplay people, buttom combos like double shotting, BXR/BXB, nade shotting, all allowed players to rise above and beyond to perform difficult buttom combos to outplay the enemy. Team shotting isn't a bad thing, but when you HAVE to team shot to overcome something... there's an issue. Like when you're shooting someone S3 on Guardian and they just back up and walk away. They were in a bad position, you fired on them and they weren't punished for it. It's very forgiving for players and allows them to get away from mistakes they've made, sort of like thruster and sprint in Halo 5. It elongates encounters and kill times beyond your control and allows people to get away from situations they shouldn't. Fast perfect kill times are very empowering for the individual player and allow them to rise above and do things that can't accomplish in Halo 3. And keep in mind, this isn't some spectrum where CE has less teamwork and more individual power, whereas Halo 3 has more teamwork and less individual power. You can absolutely lose one of something and NOT gain the other. Halo CE you can still teamshot and it's still an absolutely effective strategy, but it's not necessary. There are other forms of teamwork like weakening someone and calling your teammate to push and kill him that really only works in CE because the shields recharge so slowly and the grenades are so deadly. It's like playing chess. This isn't true in Halo 3 where you shields come up right away and you kill AND move to slow AND the grenades aren't strong enough to punish players. Look at half the bogus maps in CE, look at a map like Derelict. It's so mind bogglingly simple and unbalanced towards the top, Derelict would be an absolute disaster and fall apart in literally any other Halo game. But because the CE utility weapon is as strong as it is and has the range it does, the map works. You're not stuck at the bottom with a useless BR that can't apply pressure or fight back. It's because CE is so versatile that maps that are this bad can even exist and still work. It's a testament to how great and competitive CE is. Even in Halo 5, playing with the CE pistol on any map almost immediately remedies so many map design issues that might've been there before. Spots that were too powerful before you can easily shoot someone out of and are no longer issues, fast perfect kill times allow for such flexible map design that you could NEVER have in Halo 3. (Only issue being the CE Pistol in Halo 5 doesn't perform similarly at all, it's hitscan/way to easy to use and has random spread). Halo 3, again, has none of this. it has a horrifyingly simple melee system, slowER strafing, a utility weapon that can't shoot straight, can't kill fast, grenades that can't flush people out on campy maps, a small FOV, poor weapon sandbox to fight over and diversify gameplay, an automated spawn system, NON static weapon spawns in vanilla, maps that honestly don't have any sort o depth to them whatsoever,I could go on all day. And this isn't even going into what Halo CE has that Halo 3 doesn't. I've only touched on what Halo 3 does wrong. The spawn system alone in CE does unbelievable things for the meta, the weapon nading, fast spawning power weapons that keep people moving (something that Halo 3 desperately needs, if power weapons spawned twice as frequently you could effectively eliminate camping on maps like The Pit), the different strategies, so forth. If you're still reading and have the time, watch this one analysis of a single game on Prisoner in CE. There's literally more depth and meta to a single map in Halo CE, then there is for every map combined in Halo 3. That's not even a hyperbole. Compare CE Chillout to H3 Cold Storage. Same exact map, but two different engines. And tell me which one is more competitive. If you're curious about how the CE spawn system works, just ask. I don't mind explaining it. Keep in mind that everything you're saying to me, I also posted on Beyond almost 2 years ago. I went in there thinking that Halo 3 was the greatest uncontested Halo for competition ever, but man was it eye opening to learn about all this. I guarantee the more you learn about Halo CE and the more you understand it, the more you'll fall in love with it. Halo CE 2v2's have such unbelievable depth to them that I had never known about until I watched some of missingno's commentary. Halo 2 will look like a joke next to CE when you start to learn it, and Halo 3 in comparison is child's play. CE still is and always will be the most competitive console shooter of all time, second place probably goes to shadowrun (which was designed by the game design of Halo CE). I wouldn't even put Halo 3 in the top 10 honestly. Let alone most competitive gaming of all time? Oh **** no, Halo CE is only a fraction of what goes on in a Quake 1v1. Quake is probably the most skillful game of all time, in my opinion.
Which is why we need a proper CE sequel. Here's to hoping I run into drunk Phil Spencer at a bar and he gives me the keys to the halo kingdom.
Have you ever played or watched starcraft 2? Starcraft is basically chess but with 8,000 more things going on.