Halo: Reach Discussion

[Tnnaas]

During matchmaking games on Xbox Live, other players cannot join the game. On Halo: CE, someone quits and five minutes later another person joins. In Reach, you are pretty fucked when it comes down to just you and another buddy getting spawn-trapped and subsequently raped by four different 12 year olds who require no skill to kill you. Also keep in mind that this is mostly just team based games. FFA matches also get slowed down as the amount of players decreases, but others will only see you as a "n00b". Really, the idea is to play and have fun. It isn't fun when a teammate can simply kill you for a rocket launcher and get away with it or you lose a game because half of your team is gone. The point being that you want to discourage players from being asshats that ruin the experience for others.

And to expand on the "play matchmaking with friends" BS: With newer and newer releases, many of the folks on your friends list are off playing different stuff. Even if you send an invite, they'll likely turn you down because they are having fun and don't want to sacrafice their own time with your trivial requests.

[Kornman00]

Yeah, while all of that article sounds pretty cool, Reach won't see any of it. Hopefully Halo4 will have improvements. They can start with using the Kinect to streamline some of the in your face shit too (should get people to invest in a Kinect more).

Instead of going through 500 prompts to place a penalty on someone, use a Kinect voice command. Tada. No more complete disconnect from the game with silly UIs.

[=sw=warlord]

I imagine they could make it so the system knows when a disconnect is intentional or whether it was accidental.
IE: Kinect sees that the user has stayed in place when disconnected or whether user has left their position to disconnect the cord/adapter.
There's a lot that Kinect could be used that's likely to be never even be checked up on.

[Siliconmaster]

@DarkHalcyon- great summary of why quitting on consoles is a pain in the ass. Pretty much one out of every 5 games has people quit, and as a result the odds become weirdly stacked for one side or the other.

@neuro and Hotrod- getting penalized for quitting on a pc is inane, but on a console it's one of the few ways to prevent what amounts to a total clusterfuck. I think COD allows for mid-game joining, but Halo is be-there-at-the-beginning-or-find-another-game.

[Warsaw]

They should remove the penalty and just let people join like in CoD. That's how games work on PC, I don't see why it has to be different on consoles. It's not the game's fault that you joined late (and as such it shouldn't count that round on your rank that heavily), and you'll get a chance to prove your worth next round.

[Pooky]

I can understand it because it pisses me the fuck off. In Halo, now-a-days, you're fucked over by spawn kills and superior numbers if someone quits. And that "just go into matchmaking with friends1!!!1111!!!" excuse is a load of shit. I say just remove the quit option all together. Brothers till the end.

That's dumb. I would just eject the disk. We used to do that all the time in Halo 3 when it was going to something we didn't want to play, since Bungie tried to be clever by removing the option to back out once the variant is locked in.

[Hotrod]

They should remove the penalty and just let people join like in CoD. That's how games work on PC, I don't see why it has to be different on consoles. It's not the game's fault that you joined late (and as such it shouldn't count that round on your rank that heavily), and you'll get a chance to prove your worth next round.

The reasoning used for not allowing people to join mid-game for Halo has something to do with it being "a competitive game" or something like that. I can't say that I would like to be stuck into the middle of a game for Halo either, but it wouldn't be a bad thing to have people come in during the game to make the sides even.

[Tnnaas]

They could split the playlists between Social and Ranked. Anyone in the Social playlists could join mid-match while people looking for Ranked games could wait until a match starts.

[Hotrod]

They could split the playlists between Social and Ranked. Anyone in the Social playlists could join mid-match while people looking for Ranked games could wait until a match starts.

I actually really like this idea and could totally see it working!

[Warsaw]

Or they could nut up and accept the fact that Halo is not and never really was a "competitive game." That title has always belonged first and foremost to Counter-Strike and remains so to this day.