After the fluctuating emotions everyone undergoes sometime or another through, I think we can all agree that infection can either consist of your greatest Halo: Reach moments, or your worst. Here, we breakdown what infection contemporaneously is, and how it can be improved. Theme: Currently, infection is a gametype made specifically unbalanced from the inferior zombies, the the superior humans. Over the course of the game, this balance in power shifts as more zombies are expected to infect other humans. If you put it hypothetically, 1 human = 2 zombies Zombies are equipped with only melee weapons, while humans are able to shoot from quite a range with the magnum, and at close range with the shotgun. Zombies have heightened abilities, but lack in shield and health proficiency, while humans remain at normal proficiency. That is, the current infection paradigm; however, Halo has always been a tactical game that endorses balance, and fun - or that is the goal. Infection - while it should be a casual game - should still retain it's Halo idiosyncrasy. Imbalances in the gametype: -The system that decides who will spawn as infected is purely random, and often players have to start as a zombie multiple times in a single game.-It is expected that when players who initially spawn as a zombie, their chances of dying are high and repetitive and when others are infected, the chances of the initial zombies to persistently infect humans are greatly diminished, meaning players who initially spawn as zombies have a high death rate, but low kill rate.-There are very limited tactical options to use while engaging against a human that does not include engaging in numbers.-There are exploitative locations human players take advantage [e.g. tall, and hard to reach positions on top of buildings where there is often only one way to confront this player.] Community improvements: A breakdown on how to improve the gametype through allowing the community to answer the following questions.-How can players have fun on infection that isn't at the absolute expense of other players? -Should infection have it's own playlist? -How can tactics for the infected be expanded upon? -Are humans too overpowered? -Are eight players too little for infection? -Other features infection should provide or throw away?I realize this isn't all to discuss about infection, but I plan to add onto this post through the responses I receive. I also intend to make this thread more organized as well. Overall, I believe infection can potentially be an incredible gametype and I hope it is expanded to. Along the way on this expansion, I hope for improvements in the gametype to give a better experience to all of it's players.
For matchmaking gametypes I don't see why there aren't as many rounds as would make all players start out as a zombie just once, as in- 9 player playlist: 33% or 3 players spawn as zombies per round, 3 rounds,and "no players initially spawn as a zombie for a 2nd round until all players have spawned as a zombie once in the match" should be the system for choosing those zombies.
The thing is, that there's no way to fix the issues you encountered with Infection. Humans have to be stronger, in order to keep the community satisfied and make them want to play this gametype. If the zombies would have equal chances in terms of health and weaponry, a round would only last for a minute or so before all humans would be infected. For that reason, I don't think it has so much to do with the gametype itself, but rather with the maps. The maps in Living Dead are extremely unbalanced in terms of lines of sight, motivation to team coordination, overall thrill and connectivity. They lack competition. This is where Reach went wrong: they tried to make the standard maps play as Infection maps, which proved not to work. In Halo 3, there were 2 awesome infection maps I can recall really well: One was Infected Manor, the other one was on Sandbox and was a huge tower where the zombies could shoot to using man cannons. Both maps, especially that last one, had multiple entrances to each room, guaranteed a stunning game all the time, especially in the last minutes of the round when most players were already infected, and made it also a true challenge for the zombies to infect the humans. It wasn't a hopeless mission; they actually had a chance. Same for the maps we play in BIOC. (An Infection community) All maps are perfectly balanced, and even though it's still more fun to be a human than a zombie, the zombies can use both teamwork and tactical gameplay to infect the humans, and the humans on the other hand have to do the same in order to survive from the zombie horde. Overall, I think that the gametype itself is pretty close to the best you can get it to be, but of coure you can tweak things to make it a little better. In my point of view, it has everything to do with the maps. The whole problem of Living Dead doesn't have to do with the number of rounds. If you would make it more rounds, the game would be too long and people would get bored or annoyed, starting to quit and killing the game by doing so. Indeed, the selection of the zombies simply doesn't work. On top of that, they made the mistake of counting the K/D from a Living Dead game towards your overall competitive K/D, which makes it extra painful when you're a zombie 3 rounds. It's one of those things that makes Living Dead a nightmare to play for a lot of people, including me. That's what Halo 3 did a lot better: the division between ranked and social playlists, so it wouldn't really matter too much because things were weighed on different scales. And once again, like I stated above, it's mostly due to the maps.
People place way, way too much emphasis on the gametype (that is, the matchmaking variants). Indeed, it is a shoddy gametype and probably didn't involve much thought, but much of the failure players encounter playing the matchmaking infection is that the maps simply weren't built with the gametype in mind as even an afterthought. Then there are maps that were built around the gametype, that simply don't address the core mechanic, as you said, balance of power. I wrote a rather lengthy guide on the subject in the F201 subforum, but to summarize, almost every infection map I've played on completely ignored the paradigm shift, or even worse, doesn't even address how power is affected by locale in the first place. If you have a crowded maze, zombies are likelier to prevail. If you have long hallways with huge lines of sight, humans are going to have a better go at it. Then there's the whole notion of movement vs camping that's in effect, I should probably just finish that second guide I was working on revolving around the map chuck and I built for MM (forgetacular). Point is, even shitty gametypes can make for fun games on great maps, and on the flipside, great gametypes can completely change how a map plays. Since people who cater to the MM variants are stuck with trying to achieve the former situation (assuming they're aware of the gametype issues, balance of power, etc) people need to really place more influence on how they shape the experience instead of trying to figure out why the gametype itself is so broken.* Not saying you're doing that, just an observation. *Of course, the more knowledge you have on something, the better off you'll be. So if you're already aware that balance of power is an issue (or that if you're building around a concrete, unchangeable gametype, you need to build the map accordingly with every trait of the game in mind) then further analysis of tangential issues, such as dissecting the gametype itself, will only improve your maps and understanding of design in general.
Man I stopped playing infection matchmaking because for some reason it is rare for me not to be pulled as the alpha zombie 3 rounds in a row.happens almost every game.
Infection really seems like it wasn't given much thought before being integrated into matchmaking. I wish they change this for Halo 4 and maybe it will be a good playlist. Maybe.
I wish it were more of a priority, because then taking community feedback on that specific playlist would be more feasible. I would love to just tell them "this works, this doesn't work" for like five hours.