I know why it sounds like y'all are whining. Because some of you are saying the game requires too much skill and others are saying it doesn't require enough.

What they have done is made the golden tripod easier to use- more autoaim, melee lunges, more powerful grenades. The game is no longer dominated by your opponent's superior ability to have ungodly aim or horrendous accuracy with grenades or uncanny ability to lead melees. Those things still have an effect on the game, but much less so nowadays.

In my opinion, it has been replaced with more depth and strategy (in an FPS? pshaw!). You complain that there are some situations you can get in that are simply a no-win for you? Well now whose fault is that? OK, to be fair, every once in a while it's the luck of the draw. But when I play Reach the vast majority of the time when I die I can directly see, "well, I was too meek here, should have taken the initiative." "I let them grab the power weapon and then didn't use the right strategy to counter it." "I really need to stop charging them on my own while they're on the defensive as a team."

It still happens once every few games that there's some guy who has robot-like timing and aim that gets him to the top of the ranking without competition. But far more often than I did in Halo 2 or 3 I see rounds where the dominating factor is an opponent's foresight and teamwork.

Unfortunately, it's not perfect, because sometimes this equates to knowing exactly when the rocket launcher is going to respawn or knowing exactly when your teammate is going to go into armor lock...