Alt+F4=secret weapon in Halo PC!
Extremely long and whiny post ahead. Avoid at all costs.
1. A Ranking System That Works.
DON'T reward players for creating new accounts. I want to see people either staying on their new accounts or not playing at all. New accounts ruin the game for newer players as they get absolutely dominated, and wreck the intentions of the fatally flawed TrueSkill system. The easy way to do this? SImply make a set number of games to rank up. 1 win per rank up to level 30, 3 wins a rank from 30 to level 40, 5 wins a rank from 40 to 45, and 7 wins a rank from 45 to 50. This comes out to 120 wins to get a 50. No more second accounts (except for the minuscule percentage of the community that creates and sells 50s) because there would be no advantage to it. Reasonable?
2. Create A Real Skill Gap
Here comes the controversy... Before you call me an elitist, let me explain why this would benefit everyone from the pro players to the person who picks up a controller for the first time in his life.
A large skill gap creates division between players of varying skills.
Combined with a decent ranking system, a large skill gap quickly separates players of varying skills. Let's say there are three main components to a game that take skill. Let's say these gameplay mechanics are BXR, the BR, and grenade throwing. The player who has mastered none of these remains at the bottom of the ranking system with the rest of the players who haven't mastered any either. He never gets frustrated, because he isn't playing against people who are destroying him with the aforementioned mechanics. He doesn't even know they exist. But let's say this player watches a video on YouTube of someone doing a BXR, and becomes inspired. He masters BXR, starts to win games because of him mastery of it, and quickly ranks up beyond his previous ranks of people who knew nothing of BXR. He levels out in ranking because he starts to play with others who have mastered BXR, and no one gets frustrated in those games either because they are all on the same skill level.
A large skill gap keeps people interested.
This is pretty obvious. Knowing there is always one more technique to master keeps people playing and keeps the game interesting. Look at running. Millions of people time themselves and try to increase their times.
As you can see, a large skill gap can only help. It won't hurt the new players because they'll almost never encounter a player with far superior skills to their own (except for the occasional jerk who thinks it's cool to ruin a game by creating a new account and beating up on new players), and it helps keep people interested in the game.
3. FIX THE NETWORKING!!!!!.
A lot of people will argue that the networking works great, but this is simply false. Bungie themselves have said the system is not perfect, and unless we want to settle for mediocrity that means the system needs to be improved.
FACT: Your shots sometimes don't make it to the host. This happens all the time due to network packing i. e. your packets get lost somewhere in the 100s of miles that your packets may often have to travel. THIS IS A FACT OF NETWORKING.
OPINION: Bungie needs to accept that we don't all live in Boston and have fiber optic internet lines and develop some sort of work around to at least REDUCE the amount of bullets not registering (Package the BR burst in 1 packet to reduce the chance of a crucial packet being lost?) so that I don't throw the controller across the room when I lose a game 49-50 because my last bullet got lost somewhere in the magical cloud knows as the internet.
FACT: Halo 3s networking let's the host decide who lives and who dies. Halo 3s networking is set up so that the host looks at the information available to it and decides what is going on in the game from that. This can create some highly annoying effects such as a sniper bullets appearing to go through someone's head (the player will even see blood spurting from the person's body). This happens because the on the clients screen, he had a clear shot from on the host. However, in a lot of situations, the person's head will be in a slightly different place than what the clients screen is showing (depending on lag) and the client will get a nice big bloodshot on the person's head because the host decides that the shot registered in a different place that what the clients screen showed.
OPINION: This is the worst decision Bungie made with Halo 3. It makes me have to seven shot people, sniper bullets not register, and generally create more frustration that should even be necessary. I know that we don't live in a perfect world, but SURELY there is a better way of setting up the client/host system that what Halo 3 has today.
FACT: People's shots will appear to do absolutely nothing on their screen sometimes. I just explained the two main reasons why; in a nutshell, packet loss and host.
OPINION: To me, there is NOTHING more frustrating that seeing a blood shot with a sniper or watching my last BR bullet disappear into thin air. I feel like I'm being cheated. I know that this is taking the game a little seriously, but that's just the way I'm built. I take everything I do and do it to the top of my ability, from running to Halo. Think of it this way. Imagine it's game 7 of the World Series. Cubs vs Yankees. The Cubs are down 1-4. The game count is 3-3. The bases are loaded. It's the 9th inning. Alfonso Soriano steps up to the plate. The pitch is thrown, and Soriano cracks one down right field line! It's completely out of the park ladies and gentleman, the Cubs have won the World Series off a clutch grand slam! Suddenly the HAND OF GOD reaches down, grabs the ball from the air as it's flying over the park and deposits it neatly into Derek Jeter's hand. The crowd is silent. Someone stands up and yells "WHAT THE -blam!-?????". Okay, maybe I exaggerated, but you get the picture. The point is, it's incredibly frustrating to have what seems like the hand of god ruin a game for you.
4. Derandomize Everything.
I know this sounds kind of picky, but randomizing things like the BR spread is kind of stupid. Seriously, why should I lose a battle where everything from the network to my aim is perfect because I just get really -blam!- luck and my last shot's random spread screws me. There's probably a couple of other things that could be derandomized (maybe the spawn cycle?) but I'm just saying everything should work in a fairly predictable fashion that an intelligent player should be able to figure out.
Well that's the end of my post. Congratulations if you've made it this far, I apologize for any grammar mistakes or whatnot I have made. I would go back and edit, but frankly I don't have the patience. If you have a point to make, I would be extremely interested to hear it, but if you're going to just come in here and tell me I'm a loser for caring so much about the game then keep it to yourself.
Didn't mean to end on a negative note there, so let's end with "Thank you Bungie for creating the greatest game series ever created".
[Edited on 09.06.2009 1:11 PM PDT]