Another obvious point I forgot to mention. With friendly fire off, it's a very simple system - play the game right and you'll be fine. Accidentally run over a teammate and you'll usually be good unless you've done considerable damage to their invisible "health" in the past, in which case the prompt for booting's more likely. Contrary to popular belief this is an effective system and can probably be deemed useful about 90% of the time, the other 10% being when a griefer just weakens you rather than kills you or the game pulls the old "it let him kill me five times and I couldn't boot him but killing him once got me booted!" problem.
This is not the case at
all with Friendly Fire enabled. Now your team's troll doesn't have to worry about any repercussions, other than the fact that he isn't doing any literal damage. Rather than having an asshole steal your Warthog and splatter three teammates and get booted, now you have a guy running around, knocking stuff over, pushing teammates way out of the way or even off the edge, and who can stop him? Not any of your teammates, that's for sure, because now an invincible griefer is stealing some of your power weapons and there's nothing you can do about it.
They fixed that with Out of Bounds areas. I would love to have friendly fire off in social gametypes where guests are allowed.
I totally get what you're saying, but moderation is the key. I think it'd be good to have a Team Training playlist and it would be the only one where guests are allowed. In turn, you can only go in if you have guests. Chances are they'll be too inexperienced to consider anything like trolling and the worst you'll run into is probably second-accounters griefing a game every now and then. Out of Bounds isn't a perfect solution though. I'd really prefer 343 switched up the map design philosophy, because making it through a soft killzone only to get stuck at an invisible wall with 2 seconds left sucks. They should do this, in my opinion:
-Coat the map borders in a soft kill barrier applied sparingly. If you manage to get out, nice job! You did it in under ten seconds, here's a reward. Go explore everything we modeled out here, crappy textures you're not meant to see and all. You might get an invisible wall in about half a mile but go nuts. (This applies ONLY in custom games)
-Rather than make getting outside an option, replace the soft kill barrier with a hard kill barrier a la Halo 3 and then cover the outside of
that with a two-dimensional invisible wall placed horizontally over the top of the map to make sure nobody has any chance of getting out. (This applies in Matchmaking)
Fixed isnt the word that should be used. it was poorly implemented and easily exploitable.
Can you remind me of the glitch where one can survive inside a soft kill zone or make it through a hard kill zone alive?
I think he meant more that it was used to prevent Bungie to do any real thinking when it came to leaving maps and that there were plenty of spots where you could make it out in time, even if it was only to get into hiding spots just out of reach. See above.
I wonder if 343 has thought about this for griefing. With DIDO if you get kicked for betraying you could theoretically rejoin from the recent player list over and over to be an asshat.
An easy solution would just be making sure you can't re-join a game in matchmaking you've quit/been booted out of. Time will tell if this is the case though.