I guess I just don't get it. Skill still matters. All the XP system and customization adds is stuff for you to do outside of playing the actual matches. It doesn't make a terrible Halo player beat a skilled Halo player, not at all. It just gives everyone some more to do and more to shoot for when trying to win matches.
Halo was a game where two teams of four were plucked from the ether and set against one another. Eight players entered the game, often on a symmetrical map, with the same tools, the same options, the same objectives. A second later, they were streaking off across the map to grab weapons and control locations. Individual duels would arise. Superior skill, knowledge, and experience won out much more often than not.
Importantly, no one new entered the fray while a match was in session; the eight players who began the game were the eight who would finish it -- or more likely 'resign' the game by quitting, because that's what people do when they are being beaten and the punishment for quitting is lesser than the punishment for staying and losing and learning how not to lose next time. In a competitive or ranked game, however, all eight players set out to win because it would improve their record, their rank, their stats, their
status both as they perceived it and as other players they would encounter perceived it.
It was, at its heart, a large-scale communal negotiation of hierarchy. There was a curve; it split winners and losers. If you fought harder, did better, learned from your mistakes, failed better, you could inch up the curve at the expense of others. You understood your value in comparison and contrast with your friends, your enemies, your peers. The result of a given game had a shared meaning, of sorts.
...
But Halo will soon be a game where a bunch of players hop into a game perhaps just beginning, perhaps seconds from its conclusion. The players on each team may already have changed many times. Many players may not care about the score or be invested in the result for that reason (among others). Some players may be focused on grinding a particular medal or challenge rather than winning the game. Most will be trying to get as much XP as possible so they can unlock wallhack and a sweet set of greaves. A few won't care about XP at all, and so will be focused on the old-fashioned inherent rewards of doing well -- but because of certain rule changes, these players will avoid going after, say, the flag in a CTF game because it is even more detrimental to those inherent rewards than before. And their 'competitive' experience will meanwhile be compromised by all those players who don't particularly care about the inherent rewards of team success.
At the end of the game these individual players will see wildly different numbers rack up on their screen -- their 'XP'. Maybe they will gain a level. Maybe they'll giddily spend an artificial currency on status rewards that have no scarcity and hence
no real status. No one will really lose. No one will really win. There will be no means by which you can know you are better than another player in a given game, because the context is more changeable and the mechanics more arbitrary over a 10-minute match than ever before. And there will be no means by which you can know you are better than another player even over a much longer haul, because even if the arbitrariness smooths out over months of play, there is no metric for skill, only experience (quite literally, 'XP'). Most importantly, there will be no means by which you chart your progress in terms of skill. There are no systems in place to demonstrate you are a better player than you were two months ago, that you improved, that you beat the curve, crept forward, improved relative to your peers. Your peers start to become props, under this philosophy; they are now pinatas with points in them. An eight-player match is eight individuals trying to get a solo high score faster than the seven others; but it's no longer a zero-sum game, and you no longer really
beat someone, except in the most threadbare sense, and not in a way that has a shared meaning. All you can do is outpace them to the next helmet. It's a game everyone can win (albeit at different speeds), and not a sport of consequence.
I get that those things don't matter to many, or even most, and certainly not in the heady first week or month of release. But they matter to me. And I'll mourn them. I'll love the core gameplay, I'll delight in learning the new maps and mechanics, I'll have a blast with my friends for a month or two... and then I'll wonder why all the rewards are set up to be extrinsic, and the onus for finding meaning in all those random matches is on me. And I'll wonder why 343 don't care that I, or those like me, played Halo -- rather than other shooters -- in part for those reasons.
(Too long, don't read.)
