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Posted by: XxXLew420XxX
A couple of things, first of all, Bungie is a multi-million dollar corporation fully capable of 'defending' it's actions, it does not need defenders championing for their crusade of making games with an extremely small skill gap.
I'll get to the BR in a moment, but first let's talk about the skill gap.
A skill gap is the seperation of noob and pro players in their ability to play a game. An excellent and competetive game has a wide as possible skill gap. Anything that's part of the game that helps someone who is better beat someone who is not as good is wanted. Not like, you've won 300 times your guns do more damage, but if someone is playing every situation more accurately and strafing better, for example, then they should win. Take a quake style arena deathmatch game for example. In an arena fps you have many more considerations than halo, you have your aim skill, your skill with leading rockets factors in there, movement skill(trick movement, like defrag), map control, player awareness, and spawn fragging. The amount of raw skill to be a competetive player could take years to achieve. Through the course of a match, the better player will win easily. In halo 3 there are very few required skills, mainly just mild shooting skill and 2-3 weapon several minute respawn timer map control.
The skill gap is so large for quake 4 that when fatal1ty, the highest paid professional gamer in the world, played the editorial staff of pc gamer that he went 170+ frags, 1 death with 6 players vs 1. They are not bad gamers, they're not noobs, the game has a large skill gap and fatal1ty is the best at it. Now let's say we matched up players in halo 3, some 40's, 45's and pitted them against any of the top slayers from the MLG circuit, the top slayers would die frequently, not because of lack of skill but because of the skill gap. Mostly in halo 3 the raw aim skill is incredibly nerfed because of magnetism, I personally enjoy playing console games because of the reduction in aim skill because of the controller vs a mouse. But with magnetism there is an easily obtained 'max' to aim skill with most weapons besides the sniper. The pros don't have perfect br's, but it's damn close. So one of the underlying problems with halo is the relative ceiling on aim skill and the lack of a skill gap.
So how does a skill gap and aim ceiling affect halo 3's BR? It's rather simple, at a decent level of play from two players, the outcome of many situations is going to be decided by the spread. Some people will say, the better player will use the spread more, that is not possible. Due to the nature of the spread, unlike a counterstrike style spread pattern that as a player you can adjust for, the BR spread is completely random. So the real problem is that on a BR to BR battle, the outcome can be decided solely based on a random number. Addditionally because the spread is not constant, the desired effect of reducing the ability of a BR player to kill an AR player before they find cover will sometimes work, and sometimes not, however that will not be decided on skill but by luck.
If you look at games with large skill gaps, you'll see dedicated followings and increased competetive league play. Take counterstrike for example, or check out any of the games on the www.caleague.com website to see how many people play them competetively. Halo games have so far had one league from the MLG and it's a very small league compared to the million-ish Counterstrike players who have competeted in CAL. There's a reason people watch sports, competetion in sports in almost entirely in the hands of the players on the field, wind and such may factor in, but you can account for it. So the real problem with the BR is the inability to account for the random aspects as a better player.
So say what you will about shotguns and AR's and such, but if you have any decent amount of intelligence you can see why those guns make for a very anti-competetive game. With the amount of magnetism on both of them, and the complete randomness of their shots, the 'ceiling' on shooting skill with them is almost nothing, if you run at someone with an AR and they run at you with an AR and you're both not retarded, whoever wins(If it's not a tie beatdown) will be decided on sheer chance. If two players run at you with an AR and you have just about any weapon in the game except for rockets, you will almost certainly die, no matter how good you are or to a certain degree, the skill of the players against you. That IS a problem, skill should be a factor in any game you play on an xbox, or you might as well start rolling dice or watch TV for all your input will matter.
In closing, a random spread on the BR helps further shorten the gap between experienced players and new players, further weakening the game for competetive or 'fun' play. There are dozens of factors that reduce the skill gap, however this one is mainly important for circuit play and is so easily fixed without destroying AR 'game balance' that I can see no reason not to change it besides bullheadedness. The spread penalizes good players the most, and unskilled players will not notice the changes whatsoever. So why not change it?
Oh my God...Get out of my brain. The only thing that confused me was the last part...but I COMPLETELY agree with the rest of it. And having played CAL for quite a while(CoD2 Cal im-m, CoD4) I totally see where you are coming from. So..would you like to take my place in this argument for a while? :D