I would consider it a competitive patch if it were a competitive patch. The game still sports these abilities, and so playing with charge and pound is by no means "pre-patch." That's a huge leap. No sprint, thrust, or clamber would be much less of a headache, yet you don't want them removed from the settings. Why?
TU reach still sported base reach modes. HCS using them? Really? That's news to me. And if HCS didn't use Sprint, Thrust and Clamber I'd advocate not including them as well, however that's not the case.
HCS is the definitive H5 settings that still keep the game's identity, for better or worse. If we were to go full classic, or even some combo of the two, everyone would have to re-learn how to Forge for actual Halo movement. Speaking from personal experience, it's much harder than it sounds.
Am I really being told right now that a classic Halo experience would be harder to design for than halo 5? Am I being punk'd? If you too are arbitrarily beholden to HCS settings even though this isn't a competition for HCS maps and HCS doesn't even exist in halo 5 anymore... fine, that at least makes some sense to me. However, to use "well it's easier to design for" as a reason to remove charge and ground pound but NOT for sprint, clamber and thrust is... weird. I know the popular thing right now is to defend Halo 5 but come on man, that is beyond absurd. Those abilities create exponential problems to account for and to say it would still be easier because we 'forgot' how to design for classic Halo is just stupid. It would literally take 5 minutes of reorientation to realize how things used to be and that's being generous. Defending the removal of pound and charge "because it makes designing easier" is a lazy argument at best.
You said it! The problem of scaling, as you describe it, is constant and inherent within Halo 5, regardless of abilities. Which means that abilities will only complicate our processes. Both modes suffer from Halo 5's fundamental quandaries, and then the spartan abilities add a stupid number of problems on top, and funnily enough, some of the biggest problems are even more scaling issues. That's an objectively harder setup to account for when designing anything. And as for weapons... Scaling and balancing for literally anything but the pistol is honestly foolish. The weapons in the game are that broken, and that's not even considering an environment without the abilities, which will certainly make things worse. It sounds like you guys have wasted your time in that regard and have missed the point of this game. If I'm not mistaken, you guys even use the H2 br for mythic right? I mean, come on man that's just dumb. I can't look at that and simultaneously be convinced that all your difficulties are only a result of how 'difficult' designing for classic supposedly is. Frankly, sounds like some human error is involved. At the end of the day, just play Halo 5, or don't play it. Radar is different because it's not a mechanic, it's just a constant state of free information that compromises Halo level design to its core. The arguments for this abominable middle-ground that is neither Halo 5 nor classic hasn't at all been convincing to me. And really, if we're being honest, ground pound and charge are the least intrusive from the design perspective. I mean yeah, ground pound is over rewarding, spartan charge is obnoxious, but clamber, sprint and thrust are all individually more impactful and painful to work with, and all trivialize our level designs much more than the abilities that you want to be rid of over these, and the movement tech that ground pound hovering and charging offer are honestly integral to whatever "Halo 5" is. This is a Halo 5 competition after all, and the Halo 5 we all know and love, the game we've designed for, is filled with spartan charging goodness. That's the last I'll post about this. I'm assuming that we'll end up with HCS settings because literally nobody listens to me here, but that's okay, I'll just have to win and use that money to run my own contest
I want to say again how thankful I am for all this feedback. I have just finished up the rule set for this contest and have submitted them to the writing team for them to start on the article. As I stated before there where things everyone was on the same page about and things that not everyone agreed with. I believe I did my best to put something together that will propel us in the right direction. There where some Ideas that I really love that will be implemented and there were ideas that I love that will not make it into this contest, simply do to the fact is we don't have the man power for this contest and would need to figure a lot of logistics out. Before the official announcement I want to cover three main points that were brought up. First judges. I choose the judges and I decided to go half and half. Two Staff and Two community members. Second is transparency, all playtest and judge discussion will be live streamed for everyone to watch and listen to. Third the Multi thing. Him and I know that we would love to work on this together on this, but that will not be possible. The rest I will keep hidden from you until the official announcement : ). Thanks again to everyone that replied. You all were a big help.
Thanks @WARHOLIC for this!!! It's awesome that this site still exists. Contests are the icing on the cake.