Well I don't care for "forced slow" rates of fire either.. that's why I hate the M1911 nerd in BC2 :(

I still think it's pretty clear that the AR, DMR, and NR all need some serious tweaking though. But hell, it's a beta, that's what this is for!

Just don't mess with melee or the pistol plz!

I bet Bungie releases an update that does the opposite of what we all want just so we appreciate it how it is ;)

Between one of the vidocs and the GDC presentation, I gather their tweaks are very data driven and high importance is placed on not reducing the effectiveness of a weapon in it's specified role in the sandbox. (i.e. when they had to do something about the sniper being too effective at close range, any changes that reduced it's effectiveness at long range were discarded).

So, considering the DMR for example; if they tweak that they'll tend to stay away from making it more powerful at shorter ranges as that's what the pistol is for. Of course, they could change both.

One thing about the voting system I am loving is the opportunity to vote en bloc for the more abstract gametypes everybody else hates! Team Crazy King for the win! If you want to play Slayer, off to the Arena with you!

I have no problem just ignoring the gametype and killing people. I can be that guy. If I didn't vote for it, my griefing is fair game! Plus, it's a beta and our choices are extremely restricted.

I hate people who don't play the objectives in Bad Company 2 (or TF2 or COD or basically any other game), but honestly... Oddball? CTF and Assault are the only two classic Halo objective types I actually really like. I'm not a big fan of one flag, which is a bummer, because it's the most common implementation of CTF in Halo. It's pretty awesome on some maps, but on others it's simply more fun to do two flag or neutral flag. I guess the numbers are too thin in 4v4 to make that work on larger maps, but who doesn't love 2 flag on midship?!

I did have an awesome Juggernaut moment earlier though. I was angry at my party for making me play it (I think the current implementation is sorta garbage).. but then I became juggernaut and got to punish everyone. Overkill incoming!

Why is there no assault in the beta!? Neutral bomb FTW!

I hope there are some larger maps for 4v4 and I sorta hope a regular BTB playlist makes the cut.You mean, "would be unbalanced," I'm pretty sure.

You have a magnum! You're already holding a better weapon!

And they initially said that Invasion would start on May 7th. Lets hope that's the case!

This really gets on my tits. Especially in free-for-all. In team games, at least killing the opposite team helps yours. In FFA people who are just sitting there padding out their K/D ratio are scum! Seriously, there are tons of options if people want to play Slayer. Just leave the rest of us alone.

That said, there should be more granularity in the playlists I agree (i.e. if people just want to play CTF, having to play the more obscure types is probably a pain). Before Halo 3 came out, I postulated that Bungie's ability to create more granular playlists was hampered by having to split them between ranked and unranked. Now that's essentially gone away, it's more viable I think to have say a Team Flag play list in the standard collection.

Effectively the Team Slayer lists are being replaced by Arena and the BTB ones by Invasion.

Here's something I would like to see, how many credits I'm earning for actions in the actual game (like COD). It would be a way to encourage better behavior, especially if credits were weighted to doing the right things in a given gametype.

The "technician" hints at that a bit but without knowing the specifics it's hard to see. There's been games of Stockpile where I've got six/seven flags out of the ten and not really earned much cR so I'm not sure what it does right now.

There are no options if you want to play free-for-all and Slayer. There are also no options for people who have a party larger than four. There is no social slayer playlist, and there's never been a free-for-all slayer playlist in Halo so far as I know (at least in Halo 3). So yeah, I have to disagree. The only objective gametypes where this is really hurting other people would be in team CTF or Assault (and others) games anyway. If you're really worried about the ball in Oddball, some dude running laps around the map killing people isn't going to prevent you from scoring. It's your choice to ignore other players who aren't in the immediate area of the ball, and it's a bad one. If you were meant to do so, they would all be on your team until they made contact with the ball, like juggernaut!

I want to play with friends. I'm not going to sit in the Arena when I have a ton of friends online and all we can play is grab bag or FFA.

I assume there will be a social slayer playlist in the final game. Arena seems to be replacing the old ranking system, which I have mixed feelings about, but they're not going to limit all Slayer activity to Arena.. right? That would be daft. If there's no BTB playlist I'll be slightly disappointed. If you can't play large games of assault and CTF with vehicles, that's a pretty huge departure for Halo. They best at least provide some larger maps for 4v4 games. That's not really a good substitute, but it'd be a start.

There will be plenty of options in the final game, but right now there is only grab bag, FFA, and arena. I'm not seeing how any of that equates to plenty of choices.

No shit. One more reason for you not to care. It's not my fault people have tunnel vision in oddball.

If this sort of thing didn't happen in the final game, I'd be more sympathetic but you and I both know that it will. If I spawn away from the action in Oddball only to get sniped by someone just spawn camping making no attempt to play the game, it's annoying. I am definitely all for designing the cR system to reward correct behaviour in given game-types. It's not really any different to hopping into a Team Slayer game only to find two of your four team mates are just dicking around killing each other or being consequent fodder for the opposite team.

In the beta, the options are limited naturally but if the room votes to play Oddball, in my view it's impolite to then be a dick in that game and just sit there spawn killing. If the group you're with continually votes for games you don't like, then back out to another room and if you're with friends a bit of old fashioned negotiation should mean everybody gets to play a game they want to play regularly enough. Given that it's a beta after all, I think people should just be happy with what they get. Perhaps it's because I'm British :PTo me it looks like the intention is to have at least four "types" of game, as it were.

* Arena
* Invasion
* Standard
* Custom

Arena would be a new take on the Team Slayer playlist and Invasion that of Big Team Battle. I don't think that would preclude there being a more social Team Slayer hopper in the Standard group or there being an Invasion Flag/Assault etc variant, just like there is Invasion Slayer. To me, Arena and Invasion look to be ways of organising Slayer and BTB style games in bespoke ways ( i.e. Better ranking systems for Arena, better structure to objective games in BTB).

In Halo 3 there are at least ten, if not more hoppers now some of which are duplicated (Ranked Team Objective, Social Skirmish, two FFA lists etc). Assuming the same player population as Halo 3, consolidating the ranked stuff into the Arena frees up a lot of slots. It could be something like this;-

Arena
- Standard arena
- Big team arena

Invasion
- Invasion Objective
- Invasion Slayer

Standard
* FFA
- - FFA Slayer
- - FFA Objective (fiesta)
- - Zombies
* Grab bag
- Team Flag / Assault
- Social Slayer
- Team Control (Territories / KOTH)
- Griftball


That's still only 11 actual hoppers and it's questionable whether you'd need all of those meaning the standard hoppers could be even further refined so restructuring with Arena & Invasion is an overall win for me.

I am happy with what I'm getting, I'm also perfectly happy to kill people who aren't holding the ball in Oddball. Hell, if they didn't expect you to, they should have designed it like Juggernaut. I do see where you're coming from, since it also infuriates me to see people not play for the objectives in Battlefield or Team Fortress (etc), but in this beta there really aren't many options.

Personally, I'm hoping for an "objectives that don't suck" playlist, but I'll mostly stick to TDM in retail. CTF and Assault are great, but I've never been particularly impressed with stuff like three plot (KOTH is pretty okay though) and I don't think the new gametypes are all that inspiring either. Hopefully the invasion and generator defense playlists are great.

I'm not sure I agree that the ranking system for arena is better than Halo 3's individual trueskill ranking. It was already pretty great.

Well it still uses TruSkill to create the matches with players of similar skill which is what the algorithm is supposed to do. The problem Bungie pointed out in the Ars interview with Halo 3 is that players conflated what is essentially a tool with the notion of rank and/or progress which isn't the same thing.

That's partly Bungie's fault because they presented it as such but over time this approach falls apart. TruSkill is designed to trend towards your natural skill level relative to the population. Once you reach your current skill, it shouldn't change very much and even if it does, it's relative to everybody else. If the general skill of the population increases and yours doesn't, your TruSkill should go down.

This creates a WTF for less skilled players (Why am I going down in 'rank'?) and frustration for more skilled players (why isn't my 'rank' increasing?). Consequences of this are people de-levelling, creating second accounts or finding ways to game the system so they can keep 'progressing'. After a period of time, the ranks become less meaningful. Is this guy really a 38 or is he on a second account or gotten there because he plays with three really good team slayer players?

So I think the Arena system improves on that in a number of ways. Your rating is no longer tied to your team and the season set up mitigates people gaming the system. If I look at someone's service record and see they've qualified for the top tier of Arena every season for the last year, then that's a better indicator of their skill than just an abstract number. It's a bit of a shame this and the commendations system isn't really properly integrated yet because it makes it hard to see how it replaces your overall "skill" number that influenced your gloabl rank in Halo 3.

The downside is of course that this only applies to Team Slayer. So it's just the commendations you'll have to go on to find out if someone is a 'good' CTF player, for example. Assuming though that TruSkill is now per playlist, it should match up teams with others of the same skill, even if it's not easily quantifiable what that skill is.

A better way of doing it for objective games might be a knockout tournament on a regular basis. So think of Arena as like the league and a CTF tournament as a cup competition of some kind.

Just an idea, I'm hoping there is plenty of stuff we don't know yet about how all this plays out before September.