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Halo |OT 23| Thruster is Love, Thruster is Life

No, they have. I remember Josh doing a post about it on Beyond a while ago. Essentially, the argument is that by forcing the player to choose between high speed and offense, they create more dynamic choices, or some such (could somebody find it? I'm stealing a moment at work). So, even if you disagree, saying that they've never tried to explain it in gameplay terms is just false.

And I'm more referring to your refusal to believe the poll returns.


I'm sure the 11% they chose is correct, but from what I know, there were multiple questions about sprint, and the people in the polls were "carefully" selected. It's not exactly a wide spectrum of the entire community.
 

link1201

Member
I'm sure the 11% they chose is correct, but from what I know, there were multiple questions about sprint, and the people in the polls were "carefully" selected. It's not exactly a wide spectrum of the entire community.

Didn't everyone who signed up get a survey?
 

Fuchsdh

Member
People overreacted big time on that one, yeah. Still not sure what the big issue was. I think people thought they were being made fun of, on some level.



It mentions lighting tweaks somewhere in there. Frankie, does that by any chance include the Prophet's Bane?

I think some people just have a very touchy reaction to the whole "COD and Halo are for dudebros" stereotype. So anything that looks like it could be catering to that segment gets met with a vociferous reaction.

Didn't everyone who signed up get a survey?

Was probably a randomly selected sample, although it would still suffer from participation biases, if any exist.
 
There's some good changes in there.

Base movement speed buff + sprint speed nerf is an awesome change.
Strafe acceleration buff is great too.

The Spartan ability toggles will at least be great for making custom games.
Don't think I'd want competitive settings to be different than vanilla settings.

Grenades exploding mid air needed to be disabled, and lighting improvements are welcomed.
 

Welfare

Member
Oh yeah Frank, regarding that "11%" thing, just what was the full breakdown of that question, because there were multiple answers to that question.
 
I'm sure the 11% they chose is correct, but from what I know, there were multiple questions about sprint, and the people in the polls were "carefully" selected. It's not exactly a wide spectrum of the entire community.

You can't seriously be suggesting that they only sent out surveys to people they thought were okay with sprint.
 

Karl2177

Member
Good read. I'd love to see Shoulder Charge kills vs. Assassinations line. Something I forgot to point out in my early access write-up was when I was sprinting from behind and I would melee for the Assassination and it would Shoulder Charge. Don't know if there's a way to make a contextual Shoulder Charge Assassination, but it would be nice.

In response to the following:

  • "Spartan chatter: players will have the option to turn this on or off in the settings menu"
  • "General tuning for announcer and Spartan chatter to reduce the frequency of events and focus on the information that matters most to players"
The toggle is nice, but if it were up to me, I would have two toggles, one for informational stuff like "enemy has Sniper" or "enemies in blue base". The other toggle would have the chatty stuff.

Lastly, the CSR section was the one I had issues with. I'm just going to break this up on a per paragraph basis, instead of covering it point-by-point.
Halo 5: Guardians features a brand new seven-tier competitive skill rating system. We put an early version of this system through its paces in the beta and uncovered a number of bugs that are being addressed.

Probably the most common question that we heard about CSR was regarding recognition of individual performance. The system is designed to reflect wins and losses at the team level. Individual performance is not taken into account when calculating bonuses/penalties to CSR; it’s all about team. The one exception is during the initial placement process when the system is solving on individual skill. The biggest complaint we heard was in the case of a losing team member that significantly outperformed the other members of their team. Many players felt that in this case the penalty for losing should be reduced.​

It's smart to design it around wins/losses. We all saw Arena S1 in Reach, where it was a combination of AR starts, Armor Lock, and ranks based on individual performance. It was a mess.

The problem with basing everything on wins and losses of the team is when the player enters matchmaking without a team. Either the matchmaking system has to be smart enough to match the player with teammates and opponents of a very close skill level or it has to rank the player differently. Halo 3, Reach, and 4 have shown that randomly putting players together rarely results in having every player on a similar skill level. I've played games where it matched me with complete buffoons and matched me against Poopsockola and co. It sucked losing and being the only positive player on my team and getting a -30 to my rank.

Philosophically we believe that in a team sport the only thing that should matter is wins and losses. We also believe that incentivizing players to prioritize their own individual stats in a team game can undermine team play. A player’s Kill/Death Ratio (the stat that tends to be focused on in these discussions) is not always a reliable indicator of impact on team success. A player may have inflated kills from finishing off enemies that their teammates have damaged, or may have pursued kills at the expense of positioning and map control. The simplest and best way to assess performance within a team sport, is the team’s success.​

There's a way to see what kills come from assists. If a player has 25 kills, but their teammates have a combined 5 assists, it's pretty clear who did the work. As for map positioning, there's no good quantifiable way to see that.

The win/loss, is the simplest and the best, but that doesn't mean it is the only thing that matters. Looking at the margin of each game is just as important, and how players can quantifiably add or take away from that margin. A football team that is ranked #1 and loses to an unranked team in OT by a field goal is less notable than the #1 team losing by 21 to the same team. The #1 team losing to the #2 team by a field goal in OT is a lot different that the #1 team losing to the #2 team by 21 points. I will acknowledge that it is a bit different for Halo, as there is both an upper score and time limit, whereas football only has a time limit, but it still remains that win loss is only a single aspect of the final.

Bonuses and penalties are based on the relative strength of the teams at play. Teams are assessed on their collective skill at the beginning of the match. You gain more by winning against a team that is considered to be stronger than your own. Likewise, losing to a more skilled team will result in a lesser penalty to your CSR. These gains and losses are further modified by a player’s individual CSR relative to the teams at play. So for example, a lower tier player gains more from a win than someone at a higher CSR tier. We will continue refining these bonuses & penalties to reflect the difficulty of each match.​

The only thing I can add to this is to make it more visible to the player. Starcraft tells you which team is favored before the match. There was a couple of matches that I played. I largely played solo in Slayer and got placed into Silver. I lost to Silver players and lost 20-30 points. Next match I get matched against Gold players and won. I gained fewer points than I lost. To me, that's a match where I shouldn't have been predicted to win, but I did, and my reward wasn't as much as my penalty.

I have more thoughts on the matter, but I don't have the time right now. Maybe later...
 

VinFTW

Member
Glad to see feedback addressed, 11% makes sense with how the poll was done, should have been open.

Still worried about HCS settings/community split with toggle. I mean, look at Beyond already. Same negative response because sprint hasn't been removed. If they have it in HCS, it'll be a nightmare and everybody will just hate again. If they don't keep it, we have a split fanbase. Ugh. It's like a rain cloud over my head right now and won't let me enjoy the sun of some other excellent news.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
The only thing I could find in terms of "visual clarity" was the mentions of adding some kind of way points over weapons to highlight them better (h2a style?) and lighting improvements. Is that for all maps? Ie. Orion had the glaring sun, Truth had a ton of haze and cloudiness, Eden had the dark tints that diminished clarity of blue team etc.


Yep, visibility improvements will be made across the board - some subtle, some big.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Oh yeah Frank, regarding that "11%" thing, just what was the full breakdown of that question, because there were multiple answers to that question.

It was 11% based on responses I personally agreed with and only from people who use invert and Recon.
 

Madness

Member
Yep, visibility improvements will be made across the board - some subtle, some big.

Great to hear. Let's hope the art team (Vic, Tim Diaz etc.) and others aren't too upset, but it was needed.

It was 11% based on responses I personally agreed with and only from people who use invert and Recon.

Are all the control schemes being looked over more? Especially with the change for crouch jumping/ground pound? For example, Default has a natural advantage in that holding down the LT immediately allows them to rescope when shot whereas Recon users would have to again press the right stick.
 
Forget the bro shows, killcams are off by default. You know how many jimmies I'll personally rustle by teabagging people again? That's one of the top three changes for me. Seeing the area around my body, seeing what happens to guy who killed me, etc. The others were bringing back classic scope, turning sprint off (increase base movement and strafe) and turning killcams off.

Seems like Flinch is gone, they're going to do away with the grenade destruction in mid-air, etc. Right away the game just seems it'll play better. Quit penalties and bans as well.

I hope one of the toggles is turning ADS off, so that we can create classic Halo game play fully. No mention of maybe having classic zoom there in some form. I hope they'll look into a custom games browser. That alone would probably keep the community going so much.

You get my hug of the day, you are spot on how I feel :)

Very happy about the kill cam choices. But NOT happy about that "smart scope" bs-it's aim down sights, and I hate it. Give me a toggle for for that, I would take classic scoping and lose any "advantage" the "smartscope" is supposed to give. I would take twice the "dudebro" before and after the match to get an ADS toggle.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Are all the control schemes being looked over more? Especially with the change for crouch jumping/ground pound? For example, Default has a natural advantage in that holding down the LT immediately allows them to rescope when shot whereas Recon users would have to again press the right stick.

Yep. There will be a little bleed and cascade on those decisions and they're not just button mapping changes, there are dependencies.
 

link1201

Member
I wouldn't mind electing to wait longer if that meant a better mm experience. I would love to see that as an option.
 

MegalonJJ

Banned
Are 343i bringing back the option to play with classic scope? (I.e. is it possible to get rid of ADS/Smart scope across all playlists as an option).
 
Hey!

I play inverted on Recon!

...does this make me bad? (I guess not knowing I could thrust to all four movments gets me the perpetual noob award lol)
 

SaganIsGOAT

Junior Member
Dudebro Spartans are a must.

I'm disappointed.

Yup. More of this please!

DitGieT.gif
 
Stopped reading around the part where base player speed will be increased. Had to cry for about 15 minutes before reading the rest. So glad they're listening to the fans. I cannot wait for Halo 5.
But please get MCC working

Did anyone ever see what a 2 man win screen looked like?

Yeah, it's just the 3 man victory pose. I felt cheated....
 

RowdyReverb

Member
DMR: adjust position of the scope to improve visibility
Much appreciated.
Also looking forward to seeing how movement feels with a faster base and slower sprint.
Great list overall. Really shows how much 343 has been paying attention to feedback. Makes this feel like a true beta test instead of just a preview.
 
Stopped reading around the part where base player speed will be increased. Had to cry for about 15 minutes before reading the rest. So glad they're listening to the fans. I cannot wait for Halo 5.
But please get MCC working



Yeah, it's just the 3 man victory pose. I felt cheated....

Aw man. I was hoping for increasingly vigorous celebrations, with the 1 man just being a Spartan standing on a pile of the enemy team, twerking vigorously.
 
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