I quit two months after release... Hm. Is Throwdown actually fun though? I wanna give Halo 4 another chance.
If you liked the MLG playlists in past games, you might get some enjoyment out of it. It's still a patchwork fix, though - there are things that just can't be fixed with the tools the community has, so elements of vanilla Halo 4 still shine through, good or bad. I have no idea what it's like now, since I haven't played the game in close to a year.
Would you say the game should of been designed to mimic team throwdown's style?
I had an absolute blast with halo 4. But i attribute a lot of that to not really getting into halo's multiplayer at all since 2. So it felt much more fresh to me. Personally i loved the playlists that offered such a different style of play. It kept that freshness for me.
But it was pretty clear looking at playlist numbers some were just not getting any attention. Anything with less than 300 players seems worthless. So i see your point about it splitting the community so much.
Not particularly, though I guess that depends on what you mean by "Team Throwdown's style." If you mean that it's a place where people start on a balanced playing field, absolutely. But I don't think the base should necessarily be as extremely pared down as Throwdown is, no. I'm fine with there being a more hardcore place for really competitive, e-sports invested people to funnel into as a real test of their skills...but the gulf between that and the vanilla game can't be "ultra-hardcore tryhard playlist vs. ultra-casual foolin' around playlist with zero tension or competitive viability" without some sort of middle ground as a base. That's the problem - the core Halo 4 experience was just devoid of any semblance of competitive design, and the only response for a very, very long time was to implement the most extreme polar opposite as a companion. I chalk a lot of the apathy towards the game's core multiplayer experience up to elements that only really popped up after significant progression into the investment systems was made (something obfuscated by the unlock system that hid several really ridiculous balance issues behind a time investment), as well as pretty atrocious gametype design that was seen at the outset - prerelease, in several cases. The former allowed the game to show very well in short bursts (because the core shooting/movement mechanics are actually pretty solid), and the latter was often waved away by "you won't understand until you try it!" before the game was released.
The thing is, vanilla Halo (at least once rifle starts were commonplace, which usually happened reasonably quickly) was a pretty decent common ground for people. It offered a reasonable level of competitive depth at the top end, and at the lower end people could kind of fool around and awful players could spray their ARs and try to rush people for melees - the kind of thing that doesn't really fly against good players. Then on top of the core, you had MLG playlists that pared that already-reasonably-competitive experience down into something much more fast-paced and hardcore, and you had party game playlists like Living Dead or SWAT that let people zone out and have fun without much time or skill investment comparatively.
Halo 4 lacked that middle ground as a starting point - the core (which was very much rooted in the Infinity-style modern-shooter model) was instead that low end of the skill requirement spectrum and it took a very long time for the middle ground to be introduced which left a lot of players who didn't want to live at either end of the spectrum out in the cold. That was sort of addressed by the Legendary gametypes, but it took an absurd amount of time for that and the balance patch to materialize, and by that time it was too little, too late for a lot of people. Even with those, it's a Spongebob-branded band-aid on top of a sucking chest wound simply because the underlying systems and maps just were not designed for that style of play (which is why you see Forge variants so heavily dominating the Throwdown playlist). The core of the game - base player traits that had remained fairly constant throughout the series (and more importantly, extremely predictable within each match) - was gutted and scooped out so that perk choices could fill the holes, and you just can't really come back from that without doing more work than they were willing to, because they only have so much manpower for sustain and frankly, the chance of getting some percentage of the players back who were driven away might not have been worth it.
In the end, I think it was just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the staple, longterm players utilized the multiplayer in the series up to that point. Or at least how people like me used it, I guess.
