I'll gladly own the decisions we made regarding Halo: Anniversary because, while not perfect, they provided the best experience for the widest audience. I've always appreciated your passion for legacy items in Halo, because they're very personal to your enjoyment of the Halo experience. Please understand that we don't have the luxury to focus on personal opinions all the time because sometimes tough calls are for the greater good. When we made the call to do a title update for Reach, our number one pillar was "DON'T BREAK HALO: REACH." The method we used for the title update was seen as the best solution to this very complex task. We didn't set out to break interoperability for LAN with the title update but the constraints of time and resources made supporting that feature from a test perspective impossible. And remember our core pillar was "DON'T BREAK HALO: REACH." I'm not going to bother digging into the "default Reach" stuff much, but I will say this. The quote that you so love to bring up about our so-called promise was in reference to changing the game to zero bloom, so using that as some umbrella statement is disingenuous at best.
I absolutely agree with you that Halo: Reach has too many playlists, and this is something we will be addressing. Additionally, we've learned a lot from our successes and failures regarding playlist management for Reach. I know Frank has said this before, but we're planning to have a much more streamlined hopper experience for War Games when we launch Halo 4.
We're not perfect. We're human beings. We've made mistakes in the past and will certainly make them in the future. I won't ask you to trust us, but I speak for myself and and everyone else at 343 when I say that we absolutely care about Halo and its fans. We will always try to make decisions that benefit the widest number of players. Sometimes that will cause us to step on individual toes. That is unfortunate, but it is also reality.
