- don carnage1
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Thank you for keeping the fans in the loop. This is what makes Bungie great. But many questions remain:
Would it be possible to give your reasoning for the removal of Big Team Social? I partially understand why ranked was removed. It was a hard playlist to maintain, and there were flaws with the ranking system. This is ok with me. I also understand the need to coax more people into the DLC playlists, and putting many people's favorite gametype (BTB) there is a good way to do it.
But Halo is first and foremost a social game. My friends and I enjoy competitive gameplay in large groups. At the same time, we are all twenty-somethings and loathe to deal with screaming twelve year olds, so we generally only play with each other on a team and turn on the "team and party only" voice setting. Now with this change every time more than six of us are online we are either forced to play DLC (which gets very repetitive after a while) or we have to ask someone to leave, which is not something anyone is happy about.
As for "squads," half the fun of organized BTB is dividing up your team into little squads with specific tasks. Squad A goes for the flag while B defends, C grabs the power weapons... etc. It doesn't make sense for these tactics to be limited to so few maps, especially when original maps like Valhalla and Sandtrap were designed from the ground up for this purpose. The developers' creations will now not be used to their full potential.
Finally, this change isn't very fair to new players. Now, the eight-man pro teams that were previously occupied with competitive play in ranked matches are going to all be converging onto the social DLC BTB to get their kicks. While getting your butt kicked repeatedly isn't against the rules, a harsher learning curve does deter the further development of the player base. This is an inalienable truth.
All I ask Bungie is a little clarification on your reasoning for these changes and maybe shed a little light on what this means for the future of the game. Is this a test run? Is this only to promote the DLC maps? Will we ever see 8 on 8 matchmaking on Valhalla again?
Gratzi.