Yeah, adding a playlist that appeals to hardcore people is sure to increase the population.. do people remember the definition of the word 'hardcore'? It means 'outside of the mainstream'.
Arena is there, it lets you climb ranks, changing how the number is calculated isn't going to pull people off CoD (which 100% social) or Gears (100% Social again). It seems people don't want ranked because it already exists, they just have nostalgia for the 1-50 instead of 700-1600.
It was very apparent with the implementation of bleedthrough and 75/NB DMRs in Team Objective in the next update, 343 thinks these settings are to appeal to the hardcore base. But appealing to the hardcore base with 1-50 just pleases some of the people that already play the game. If they want 1-50 they can wait until Halo 4 to implement it, just like they should have waited for Halo 4 to bring the H1 Pistol back, put bleedthrough back, and rework bloom.
Instead we end up with half baked, wish washy playlist management where they try to please everyone and neither segment is pleased with the results (except for the Infection players, I guess) and are blatantly using Reach as a Halo 4 testbed. Talk about having knobs and levels to mess with from the new 1.1 Megalo hooks and we just get the same old 85% bloom / bleed through shit 3 months after the TU. We haven't gotten any other % of blooms, we haven't gotten a chance to try 85% bloom without bleedthrough, so what the hell kind of feedback are they getting if players don't have a choice?
343 should have implemented a TU system wide from the get go or not have done it at all. Limp wristed bullshit like we've seen from them so far has resulted in fracturing of the community Reach had, player confusion from where there was none before, and changes that seem to be more in tune with MS's bottom line than what would help the playerbase (ie, locking achievements to their map packs where we could get them on any map before that, not including a second Reach: Mythic disc with Anniversary)
I hope for Halo 4 they actually act like they stand behind any of their decisions instead of immediately diving for the 'out of scope', 'lack of time', 'not enough manpower' excuses that they constantly throw out, but instantly praise themselves for anything that goes well. 343 needs to start owning their shit (both the good and the bad) and being assertive with their control of a game. Implement the TU settings game wide and take the fact that you're going to lose people that don't want to play the game any more after you do it, just like Bungie did when they implemented Halo 2 1.1 and Halo 3 1.1. Stop going for the cool uncle schtick.
But doing shit like throwing the LAN community under a bus just so you can mangle the Reach magnum into the Halo 1 Pistol and then completely failing to actually include the gametype that includes said pistol on the
Halo 1 Anniversary disc, I don't know why I should feel they have any sort of cohesive structure to any decision they make. I don't agree with half the shit Bungie did over the years but at least they made their decisions and the why of doing them known, and stuck behind them and
ate the dog food and did it better next time.
Why is the TU Beta playlist even still around? We're less than a year out from Halo 4 and 1.1 has been around for 3 months now. Shit or get off the can. At least use it to give us OPTIONS to try, like 85% No Bleed Through, ZB No Bleed Through, ZB Locked Firing Rate DMR, 85% DMR with 100% NR, 50% DMR, 75% DMR, 50% pistol, 150% DMR, you know, what an actual beta playlist should be. Heck, throw in fun gametypes like a 1 shot Pistol with everything else normal so we can play Man With the Golden Gun gametypes.
If anyone needs to work on the weekly I'll be on Grifball in a few minutes.
