Well your point boils down to "I think it's annoying", which is a personal problem. The benefit to gameplay was to mitigate the offensive boosts of the other AA's which also sped the game up. Whether you're annoyed or not, you can't deny that its function is by design. If 95% of people never used it correctly and you already know how to deal with it, as mentioned in your previous paragraph, then you should be getting a lot of kills. Not really making a case for yourself here. As for deflecting a rocket, a lot of people who are taken out by a one-shot weapon probably get a little annoyed, too. Never mind the fact that the other AA's only make those power weapons even more "annoying" by drastically increasing their effectiveness. As if killing someone in one hit wasn't enough, right? That's called being rewarded for patience. As a patient guy, I had no issue with it.
Nicely said Chrono. Good to finally have some proper counter arguments for all the Armor Lock complainers.
First of all, it's not a "personal problem" if it's shared by a huge percentage of the fanbase. To some extent it's subjective, but that is mitigated by the sheer mass of people who agree with me. If McDonald's starts selling a burger topped with anchovies and 95% of their customers hate it and won't eat it, it's probably sufficient to say that it tastes bad, without an asterisk indicating that 5% of people are entitled to enjoy a crappy-tasting fish-burger. As for it being "by design," I admit that most of its effects were probably understood by Bungie before launch. But so? That doesn't make it a good or enjoyable mechanic. Lots of things are done in games intentionally, and then later changed or removed because the developer admits they didn't realize how much people would dislike it. The two biggest such issues in Reach were armor lock and 100% bloom; they patched both, and both were removed in the fairly-similar Halo 4 (which otherwise kept most of Reach's core mechanics and armor abilities). That's not a coincidence, and really is pretty much the end of the conversation as far as I'm concerned. Again, not the point. Lots of crap in this game is annoying but doesn't really detract from my ability to kill people. The goal is to have an enjoyable game without randomness and with an appreciable skill gap inherent in its design; every argument I'll ever make about Halo's mechanics is to support one of those three goals. Trumping someone's neutral, contested power weapon (that requires map knowledge to find, timer knowledge to obtain except on initial spawn, and skill to control since other players try to get it too) with something you can have *at spawn* and requires no more skill than pressing a single button at the right time is not a good add to the game. Full stop. Whatever you think of 1SK weapons is a completely separate issue in my mind. Same with what you think of the other armor abilities. If you want to go down that road, I'm still not a fan of them, though as with all things in Halo I made my peace with it eventually. MOST armor abilities are too disruptive to the game and replace something that was initially balanced and thoughtfully designed with a bucket of semi-offsetting exploits. Yes, guys with rockets and jetpack are extremely frustrating. So are guys with camo and sniper, with evade and a CQC power weapon, etc. I'll pretty much agree with you point for point. But that doesn't mean I want ANOTHER annoying mechanic added in to try to offset all the other ones.
A lot of people used to think the earth was flat, too, but I'm not going to accept quantity of opinion as a valid argument. And yes, communities often complain and get what they want, right or wrong. Well randomness and skill gap aren't applicable here, so the fact that you don't find the mechanic enjoyable doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. I doubt you enjoy every game in the world, so we'd be missing out on a lot of games if we used that criteria. You're oversimplifying. AL requires great timing to be effective, otherwise you make yourself a sitting duck. There's very little timing involved for any of the other AA's except for Evade, which only requires it for dodging, but not gap-closing or map mobility. You also can't treat everything as though it exists independently of other mechanics. Weapons like sword, shotty, sniper, and rocket are all directly influenced by the use of AA's, as you acknowledge. Whether you want AA's balanced with one another or not is irrelevant, they still had to do it.
People's beliefs regarding reality have nothing to do with subjective opinions about subjective things like entertainment. You know that very well. Now wait a minute. I have a mere "personal problem" because I agree with the majority who disliked armor lock, but you can declare us all objectively wrong (in a video game, a matter of almost pure subjectivity if ever there was one) and that's NOT a personal problem? I don't think you're looking at the bigger picture here at all. It really seems like you're just stringing together whatever small rebuttals seem like they'll let you score some cheap rhetorical points. If a mass-market video game isn't to be judged by the same mass market that buys and plays it, who in the hell SHOULD be making those decisions? If McDonald's started putting mashed grapes in with their french fries and most of their customers complain, who are you to tell them all that they're "wrong" - regardless of how you feel about that abominable-sounding dish? That's the very definition of a personal problem, I think. A sizable portion of the Halo-playing community agreed with me, and eventually so did the developers who made Halo 4. I rest my case. I'm really not even sure how you can argue against that except that you're unhappy with the outcome and so keep trying to find ways to run an end-around. How do you even judge whether a game is enjoyable or not except by the people that choose to play it..? And a game like Halo has a built-in fanbase that had already played 3-ish iterations of the game before Reach came out; if those people aren't qualified, en masse, to judge the enjoyability of Reach and its individual mechanics, who actually is? Mostly I wasn't talking about people who are "effective" with armor lock, to reiterate an earlier point. But it doesn't require "great timing" anyway to press one button when a guy with a rocket launcher rounds the corner and jumps up in the air. There are similar "skills" to the other AAs at any rate. No they didn't. I know for sure you played hundreds of games in matchmaking where not one player used armor lock, and I'm guessing they all played just fine. Armor lock doesn't even exist in Halo 4 (replaced with the even-less-often-used hardlight shield) while the other AAs mostly do, yet Halo 4 also plays fine (obligatory space for people to quibble about how well Reach and Halo 4 play right here).
Why is this even an argument? "Armor lock breeds for smarter gameplay," right? lolololol Design behind armor lock: 1. Get it for free off spawn 2. Randomly charge and do stupid stuff, get yourself stuck 3. Use armor lock, wait out sticky / let teammates charge in and throw nades around you 4. Abuse armor lock + melee combinations 5. Camp yellow lift on sword base 6. Frustrate players by making the ridiculously long killtimes of bloom Reach even longer 7. ?? 8. Sales
Missed the point. The number of people that agree with you is irrelevant. That's all there is to it. I made no such claim about right or wrong, so your feigned indignation looks out of place here. Having the masterminds behind Halo 4 on your side isn't a positive in the eyes of many. You may not wish to "rest your case" with them. As for the point that you missed, I'm not saying you can't claim a mechanic isn't enjoyable, I'm saying you can't claim a mechanic shouldn't exist only because you don't find it enjoyable. You seem to have misunderstood the distinction, which is fine; it's an honest mistake. You're oversimplifying the subject again because you don't like it. I could diminish most shooters in a similar fashion by saying something like "all you have to do is press the trigger to win!" but that would be childish and unproductive. If you're going to take that route, they didn't have to add any armor abilities to begin with, but that's a different argument, isn't it? I'm obviously referring to the need for a defensive AA within the context of other offensive AA's that were already added.
If this game isn't for its audience, who is it for, exactly? This is not an irrelevant, meaningless point. It's the whole crux of the argument I'm making. A thing that is sold relies on the good opinions of the people who buy it. Don't understand how you could possibly argue otherwise. What the... I don't even... I QUOTED you, dude. Read your own quote. What did it mean, if not what I took it to mean? You're saying people are wrong (in what way?) about a subjective matter. If I've misunderstood you, explain yourself. I could very easily say the same thing about Reach and especially armor lock. You know that, right..? And now YOU'RE the one mentioning the "eyes of many" as if it means something? It's weird how frequently in this conversation you're willing to sell out your own stated opinions just to score rhetorical points. Again, I'm not arguing from my own personal opinion solely. Which you know. So your condescension here is both misplaced and dishonest. No, it would be intellectually dishonest and an argument made in bad faith. Which mine was not. I fully mean exactly what I said. To restate it plainly and in brief: armor lock is cheap and irritating because it is a counter against things that mostly require skill and effort (like obtaining neutral power weapons), yet which requires little skill (except timing your button press right) and no effort (since you spawn with it). It is not remotely comparable to shooting, as there is no aiming, no positioning on the map, no compensating for your own or other players' movement... nothing. Armor lock requires exactly two "skills": knowing not to jump (because you can't use it while jumping), and pressing it at the right time (which, since it lasts several seconds, isn't exactly brain surgery - you can mistime it pretty badly and still deflect a lot of damage unless the other player sees it in time and doesn't fire). People CAN use armor lock more skillfully than that, but most do not. Yet they are just as annoying with it (arguably more so, since there's also the standing-and-staring gameplay slowdown effect to contend with; good AL users don't usually just hold it down for the max duration). And I obviously was arguing that there was no such need. You're imagining it. The game played just fine when armor lock was not in play, as evidenced by literally hundreds of thousands of matches that were played with only sprint, jetpack, and camo (the three most popular AAs in Reach by a country mile - evade would have been probably as popular, had it been an option in more playlists). The intent of armor lock in the sandbox was fine. In actual practice, it sucked. It didn't end up being a needed counterbalance to the other AAs, it was rarely used, and when it WAS used, most players couldn't stand it. And on that note, I have literally nothing else to say about this, so... adieu.
The glaring problem with Armor Lock IMO is not its power in the hands of smart players, but its power in the hands of idiots. Agreed w/Nutduster's contrast of AL with aiming.
You're attempting to make an argument by consensus, which is a common fallacy. Your claim isn't valid just because it's popular. It is irrelevant. I would suggest you reread it, as you seem to have inferred something that wasn't there. It was a general statement about outcry from gaming communities. If I had wanted to say "you are objectively wrong", as you have inferred, I would have simply said it. I didn't say that it was my opinion. Again, I have not implied what you have inferred. To put it another way, the decisions made by 343 regarding AL are not more or less valid than the decisions made by Bungie. Therefore, it doesn't behoove you to use what you perceive to be 343's "support" as reasoning. No condescension, but that's understandably difficult to discern through text. This is getting back to the root of the argument, but you're neglecting some key points. In your example about obtaining power weapons, isn't it cheap and irritating that the players using spring/evade and even jetpack will reach the "neutral" weapons more quickly? Of course, whether it's irritating or not is subjective, but it does objectively give those AA's a distinct advantage of acquiring the items in the first place, not to mention using them after gaining possession. God forbid the guy who will never reach the neutral rockets be able to attempt to deflect one. That's debatable, as increasing offensive potential in a series that was already rather balanced could be considered unnecessary to begin with. That's probably an argument to have with Halo purists, though. I've never found "it sucked" to be very compelling, so I'm sure you can understand why I'd chime in.