Is anyone interested in a match with B3Dguys? Say Friday night? I bet we can get 16 players total.

If so what modes/maps would people like?

Beyond3d.com Where all of us techie geek pixel counters live.

50 assists is easy. Pair up with someone, stay close together, and target the same enemies.

I dunno. My kills:assist ratio is a lot lower I guess. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing (considering how much better you are at me at Halo, probably bad), but in the time it took me to get the 125 kills I got 19 assists.

8 grenade kills on the other hand was pretty easy. I got it in the rumble pit. Slayer Pro + stickies in FFA = lots-o-nade kills.

That multi-team suggestion sounds good. I might go try that.

edit: yeah I just sorta held off on the kill from time to time and I'm wracking them up. It's not hard but I do still think it's a little high. It encourages me to play differently and those are the worst kinds of challenges.

I got 'em and then some.. still took a lot longer than the other three but it wasn't too bad. I wish they gave us a better weekly challenge this week.

I haven't started playing in the armory yet. I'm living off of 48 hour Xbox Live passes right now, and they won't let you use your fileshare or play arena :(

If I'm on at the right time, feel free to shoot me an invite. Probably won't be because of the time differences. Would be good to play a few though :) Setting up a Halo 1 style CTF Classic on Haemorrhage might be fun.Ah I forgot it was fifty. That is a bit steep. If they are encouraging people to go for assists and not kills for a measly 1000 credits (when you can earn more than that in one game) that's kinda encouraging. It means the daily challenges are resonating with people (surely what they wanted) and they can potentially be used to modify behaviour for the better. We'll just put this kinda dumb one down as part of the learning process.

Today's challenges are;-

Find individual challenge progress:

Where There's Smoke...
Kill 40 enemies in Firefight Matchmaking.
400cR

Shootin' and Lootin'
Kill 250 enemies in any game mode in Reach.
2500cR

A Satisfied Thirst
Kill 100 Grunts in Firefight Matchmaking.
1500cR

That Pink Mist
Kill 20 enemies with a Supercombine from the Needler or Needle Rifle in Firefight Matchmaking.
400cR

A bit more realistic I think. 2500cR is about the right amount to make it worth going for too I'd say. Lots of Firefight tonight

That's actually the polar opposite of yesterday's dailies. I'm not sure they really have the balance on the challenges down yet, but then again, maybe they don't really need to. It's just for fun, after all. They do give you a nice little boost through the ranks, but it's not so profound that it'll get you to major overnight. I do feel like things are going to be pretty easy after we all get past Warrant Officer (as I'm sure some are already). This rank takes longer to progress through than anything afterwords, if the information I've seen online is to believed.

You can do these challenges in score attack, with all grunts, and it should be achievable in a round or two.

I'm not sure how that's encouraging personally. I've yet to see an achievement, challenge, unlock, or whatever actually push people into better behavior in an online game. It's always been, and will probably continue to be, the exact opposite. There's basically nothing good about everyone playing towards one goal in an online shooter, especially when that goal is a massive amount of grenade kills in a single round, or having people play for assists when they should be killing people.

If they could do what you're implying, they haven't yet, and neither has anyone else.

A Satisfied Thirst
Kill 100 Grunts in Firefight Matchmaking.
1500cR

This one seems like my cup of tea.

Just because it hasn't been done before doesn't mean it can't. If players are modifying their behaviour in order to chase after a relatively paltry amount of credits then there is an opportunity for that to be leveraged constructively.

There's a medal now for protecting someone. Combine that with protect the oddball carrier or the data core carrier and that could encourage better team play in those games. Similar to a challenge asking for a certain number of flag defend medals.

Other games haven't done this yet because few games offer explicit tracking for such a variety of events (i.e. the medals) and Halo has never had a system to reward/incentivise those events before now. Not saying it's easy to do, but the potentials there for the playlist designer (and yes, Bungie consider that a design position) if they so wish.

Don't be so negative man :P

It takes a long time if you don't do the all grunt score attack. There's not enough grunts in the average game for four people :)That oppertunity has been around for a long time, in a lot of games, and it has yet to yield a more positive experience. When you consider that the daily challenges have already included negative behavior modification, I don't see why you would come away encouraged by it. Now it hasn't had a really big impact on Reach in either direction yet, but when achievements and unlocks have been doing this for years, it's hardly a shocker.

You're right, what you're talking about is hard. Even if you could positively impact player behavior with these kinds of incentives, you'd be hard pressed to think of a way to execute that plan (that would actually work!). Having every player on a team game go for the same objective is never going to make things better. Unless you had different objectives for different players, you'd never improve the experience, and if you give people rewards for everything, you're just really right back where you started anyway.

Experience (including Halo Reach!) tells me that it's far more likely to have a negative impact on player behavior than it is a positive one. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is complicated, and any failure to produce positive results can very easily produce negative ones.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and all that.

I didn't say it wasn't hard.

It's also a bit of a stretch to assume that all players will automatically pursue these objectives at the same time in every game. There will always be players who are unaware, don't care, consider the bigger picture more important, have already achieved etc. Of course a whole team going for the flag at the same time is a) a bad idea and b) a poorly designed example. A whole team converging on a member of the opposite team who has their flag in an effort to score 1 of say 5 flag defend medals is at least less of a bad thing/poorly designed challenge. As is preventing a team mate carrying an objective from dying.

How much less we can debate but if you can't at least recognise that then you're just arguing for the sake of it.

Perhaps if there are other games released that track micro-in-game events to this level of granularity, have a challenge system to incentivise, a credits system to reward, someone specifically responsible for setting good challenges and evidence that these resonate with players we can observe how this has gone before. I'm not aware of a decent comparator myself. Until then, I'll believe the idea has some potential and presumably you'll believe not.

The Wingman achievement in Reach is another example. Surely only positive behaviour is induced by incentivisng some (i.e. those players cognisant that the achievement exists and care about it but perhaps with a bit less in-game awareness generally) to pay a bit more attention and allow their team mate to spawn next to them?

Having the credits helps too. In Halo 3, if you didn't draw or better then you weren't getting anywhere. At least now credits are given for anything good that you do manage to do. I agree on the playlists but they need to set the challenges right. "Play 5 games of King of the Hill" would be a bad idea because despite loving that game type, there are enough tits out there who see it as a cheap way to sit outside the hill and score multi-kills. "Win 5 games of King of the Hill" on the other hand would at least increase the possibility of finding people who want to play the game type properly.

It's not a stretch, it's history. Have you ever played TF2 after an update?True, though I got my frag challenge in team slayer. The latter point is a good one though, as it definitely got me playing more firefight. It's not that I'm not interested in firefight, but it definitely takes a back seat. Today's challenges are really super easy though. I actually liked that a lot, since I don't have time to play Halo all day today :)

Yes, you really should try to eat and sleep sometimes :p

Do you need to be a gold member to do these challenge things? I have one, 1 month card left and i'm hanging on to it until i'm good enough to kick Acerts butt.

Depends on the challenge, but most of them, yes. They usually state explicitly what playlist or mode they need to be played in. The "shootin' and lootin" challenge is any mode, so you can do it in campaign or local FF.

The game should have also come with a two day pass :P

Okay, thanks! :)

Yeah, I'm saving the two day one for when I take you all on for the 'King of the Mods' crown. Which I hear you are favourite for so you'll be going down first big boy :o