Are you trying to say a process can't be random because the outcome must be within a certain set? That's not now randomness works. Just because the bullet is not permitted to go literally anywhere does not mean the spread is not random.
What I am trying to say is the phrase "random spread" can be misleading. The levels of max deviation are consistent, as in it won't randomly decide to have a max error angle of .1 with one burst and then .2 with the next, and then to .05 and then to .3. It does have spread constraints, just sometimes the bullets can fall closer to the center of the reticule.
I think it's important to distinguish this, as a player can always predict the maximum spread and know their bullets will fall somewhere in between. I don't think it is a good system as it is unpredictable, and yeah the results are random. But the max spread is consistent.
/raises hand
Yeah, this is something that we've been concerned about for a bit - things that are either balancing issues they only now finally care about or bugs that they couldn't have known didn't exist unless they just didn't play the game. Things like Mantis and Wraith boarding balancing changes being considered bug fixes implies that they launched not having the intended behavior and remained that way for nearly 6+ months without anyone realizing.
It was really evident with the Warzone REQ rebalancing because the second batch of changes came immediately after 343i got destroyed in Warzone Warlords. Presumably they don't play the game enough in a post-launch testing environment to understand their own meta, and that's frustrating. I understand development on Halo 6 is underway and they've got maybe 20 guys, 17 of which are Tom French, working on the sustain team but if they're going to bill their product as a service then they need better service.
Like, hell, you can still get under red base on Coliseum. They've tried to patch it three times and they've done everything except just putting a kill zone in the little hidey-hole where people fall through the collision. Same for the 6+ months of people getting out of Antifreeze when all you had to do is use invisible blocks, and same for people getting out of Scavanger now. Whoever tried to fix it in Forge didn't realize that safe zones override kill zones - so the halfpipe you thrust up to launch yourself out of the map is clearly not supposed to be playable, but they just didn't know their own game well enough (or the Forger didn't know forge well enough) to properly fix it.
Also, good to have you here finally.
Glad to have finally been approved
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I have often had similar concerns, and it carries over to HW2 where things like Anders sentinel's are so OP do to a bug, it raises questions as to how much it got played in house and if it did become a problem shortly before ship why it happened and how many other things could have "broke". I've pretty much decided to not play HW2 until they are done with all the patches and leaders as I don't have much interest in playing a strategy game where my strategies end up having to change because they are changing the rules of the game, rather than having to out think my opponents. Which is disappointing to me as I probably played HW1 more than any other Xbox title.
I'd say the AR is a bigger issue than anything else we've seen, as it's arguably the most prominent weapon in the entire game, as well as the poster child for ADS being added onto traditional weapons. Does this reversal on the AR mean an admittance on their part that ADS for automatics is an inherently flawed idea for Halo's combat? What does the admittance that the guns ADS doesn't result in the gameplay they intended mean for other guns like the SAW and SMG?
I personally think it had a devastating effect on the campaign gameplay as I end up using the AR as a poor mans BR for landing headshot damage and stripping shields at range. It ends up being more effective than most plasma weapons for shield stripping and while an adjustment to it's ADS to prevent that should be welcomed, we then have to deal with the fact much of the combat in the campaign expects you to be able to use it for that purpose. I might be in the minority here as I generally buy Halo for the campaigns and stay for the multiplayer, but a recurring pattern I see in H5's campaign is a lack of attention of how certain things send ripples through the game. Let it be ADS extending the range of each encounter (and the AR being the worst offender of this), not being able to fine tune AI aiming effectively to compensate for all the changes in player movement and base speed, or simply not recognizing problems with the revive and respawn system. To me it's far more disappointing than the story.
As far as H1 speeds go, projectiles such as the PP, PR, are obviously designed to be more easily dodged at range as they slow down. But it's also applied to the warthog so you can actually weave to avoid the tracers when it tries to shoot you at range. H1 is pretty brilliant in that all it's vehicles are designed to pull you in close to the players so that grenades can flip the hogs and ghosts, while the tank is then left open to be vulnerable to headshots as it tries to advance on players.
The pistol and AR speeds are a little more obscure, but I am fairly confident they wanted the AR to be able to knock pistol players out of scope if they fire at the same time so the pistol users can't see if their first shot impacted or not. This doesn't happen with high levels of play given how pistols are incredibly dominant, but it's the only conclusion I can really draw. While the AR's accuracy makes this not a highly likely scenario, the AR did at one point have a variable fire rate and accuracy depending on how hard you pulled in the trigger on the controller, but this never made it to the final build. So this system could have been more apparently earlier on in development.
The shotgun is a little more obscure but it seems to be similar to the warthog gun to decrease it's effective range... although I am not sure how much of an impact the projectile speed matters given it's spread. It does eventually only travel at 2x the initial speed of the plasma rifle though just for perspective.
Sniper doesn't need much explaining, they wanted it to feel instantaneous except at the most extreme ranges. While it's been a long time since I played H1 MP on the original xbox, I believe the only map that saw this come into play was Bloodgulch as sidewinder doesn't have as long sight lines. Curious enough, the sniper combat on the Gearbox maps would have benefited from this the most but the broken netcode in the PC port and subsequent changes to the game on MCC make this a moot point anyway. But it's nice to think they factored in that behavior of the gun for the PC maps anyway.