Halo: Reach

[Karooo]

I cant juggle between Reach and Lost odyssey getting pwnd. I think will play LO after the 19th now.

[TRMNTR]

A guy from MLG forums on 'Why the Arena Ranking System is AMAZING'.

 

Number One: The arena operates on a season and resets at the end of each season. In short, it gives the community something to constantly achieve.

 

Number Two: In Halo 3, a player could easily achieve a 50 or buy one, yet they may not actually be at the skill level. It seemed like there were 50s and then there were real 50s. With the Arena, buying accounts means nothing and a persons real skill is able to consistently shine.

 

Number Three: Consistency is noticeable in the sense that a player may only be good enough to constantly achieve a rating of 1400 to 1500. With each day, there is a new average, so players will be rewarded that day for going off one day, but the system will still notice their average consistency. In Halo 3, a player could achieve a 50 solely by having a good day, but the next day the lack of skill was evident. In short, the consistency in the system accurately describes a player.

 

Number Four: The five divisions divide the community into 20% increments based upon their seasonal rating. After that, it divides the division into percentages, associating a player to a certain percentage. So, you could be in Onyx Division, but are you in the top 3% of Onyx? In Halo 3, Pro players were 50s, but upon playing them, it was obvious they were beyond Bungie's rank. In reality, a Pro was maybe a 70 on the TruSkill system. Hence, an MLG 50 could be in Onyx, but a Pro could be in the top 1% of Onyx. Basically, this gives even clearer definition of skill.

 

Those are some really nice points. I totally agree with them. I feel that Arena is the most well-designed and intelligent skill system ever seen in an FPS.

 

______________________________

 

@ Karoo - Sweet gif!

[Aftrunner]

OMG that GIF is priceless.

[TRMNTR]

fk

 

I forgot to mention that.

 

It's not worth getting the membership right now. You could ask someone with Bungie Pro subscription to render videos for you. If you wanna get tons of them rendered, you could pay them for the minute packs. Just an idea.

 

I am definitely planning to get it once Reach launches...that is, if I'm any good at it. :/

[WhiteWolf]

You guys shud join Bungie.net forums and give your feedback....there...

[Bulovski]

Arena is a good way to kill all the accounts where skill boosting was happening.

[Aftrunner]

Ok so Invasion.....

 

I am kinda split about it. Invasion slayer is f**king AWESOME. No doubt about it. And the map is excellent too. Its (I think) slightly bigger than Sandtrap and MUCH better designed. The core Invasion gametype is a bit iffy TBH. Problem is the Elite spawn loadout at the beginning is absolutely sh*t. The spartans get higher ground, a DMR and the Pistol in the first load out. The Elites are stuck on the lower ground, a HUGE distance away and have a choice of spawning with the needler or a Plasma repeater. And that is just f**king nuts. A good team could easily spawn rape the elites. But once the chaos gets going it really is a lot of fun. I do wish that the vehicle stages were unlocked a bit earlier though. Even from the get go.

 

Also the DMR is invasion slayer is the go to gun. Its like the map was built for it.

 

Oh and just found out that the thing where it kept splitting the party up is a known bug.

[TRMNTR]

Oh and just found out that the thing where it kept splitting the party up is a known bug.

 

It better be a bug or else I'm suing Bungie!

 

They also need to fix the split-screen bug. Why the f**k should one of the players go to the other team?! That's just ridiculous and unfair for both sides!

[Aftrunner]

Nah the Invasion thing is a confirmed bug. Jarrard on GAF said so. The split screen thing though... god only knows.

 

Oh and the DMR on Boneyard... Holy crap. Its a weapon of death.

[TRMNTR]

Weapon of death indeed! Though I got pwnd a lot of time by the Needle Rifle. :/

[TRMNTR]

I was just watching a stream and the game said, "Flag Reset!" when the Core reset. :|

[gonekrazy3000]

lol. invasion is mega buggy. once when in a safe place waiting for madhav to spawn i just suddenly died.

and Madhav spawned under the map and fell to his death

 

to be honest i dont find the elites nerfed that much in stage 1 of invasion. yes they don't have long range weapons but they START with camo. using that its pretty easy to assassinate a lone spartan and get his dmr.

and once that happens its pretty easy to get to stage 2 considering (atleast in my experience) the elites shields

are slightly better. also their normal running speed is awesome. once in stage 2 you get needler rifle loadouts

so its all kewl.

 

All that being said Invasion slayer is AWESOME @_@

i freaking love the fact that you have to earn new loadouts and vehicles for your team by capturing those

drop zones. so its like objectives+slayer mix.

[TRMNTR]

 

EDIT - I hope all these things are fixed by tmrw morning. I really wanna play some Invasion.

 

 

 

[Madhav]

Weapon of death indeed! Though I got pwnd a lot of time by the Needle Rifle. :/

yeah i remember...

 

once when in a safe place waiting for madhav to spawn i just suddenly died.

and Madhav spawned under the map and fell to his death

i was watching yur screen, waiting to be respawned and as i was about to get my spawn, yu died somehow and bungie gave me a spawn outside the map as if i was given a spawn straight to hell...

[gonekrazy3000]

^^ when i mentioned that i suddenly died i meant it literally lol. it didnt even tell me that someone killed me.

i just... died. and respawned. i wasn't even shot lol.

[devil_angel]

^^ when i mentioned that i suddenly died i meant it literally lol. it didnt even tell me that someone killed me.

i just... died. and respawned. i wasn't even shot lol.

spooky

 

EDIT: The mistery of spartan's death!

[Aftrunner]

Invasion is seriously glitchy. One of my team mates died by falling off the edge of the cliff. And the game spawned me on his corpse, in the air, out of bounds about six times in a row with no option to switch. As soon as I would spawn I would fall down and die. Not funny.

 

I guess thats the point of the Beta but still super annoying.

[TRMNTR]

Bungie Weekly Update 05.07.10

 

Here’s of quick rundown of some, but not all, of the things that we will likely change from the beta to the finished product.

 

Death by Stereo

 

Here at Bungie, we love us some Steitzer. The man’s a living legend in his own right – a sonorous savant. But truth be told, even we’re well past annoyed by the overwhelming rapid fire regurgitation of, “Flag taken...flag dropped” that can plague certain games where going clutch on the skilled juggling front is the order of the day. Same goes for all the other objectified oral mutterings. Once is enough for most cases, thank you very much.

 

Stole Ya Stockpile

 

Same goes for some pretty shady teamwork on display in Stockpile. Cool flags, bro! Derek had made some changes before the Beta went live to address the problem presented below, but the build was already being put through the certification grinder and it wasn’t possible to implement the tweaks in the short term.

 

It would be so sweet if everybody would just play nice, but for some players civility isn’t much of a concern. Almost as soon as those same player’s boots hit the mud they made it their obligation to snag flags that had already been snagged and either replace them so they’d get the sweet credit or to chuck them out of their own stockpile at the last minute in an effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and ruin the game for the other players involved.

 

Though I myself am saddened by the fact that those brand of "people" exist, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that they make the most of what should be a cool feature that allows defenders to pick up and wield their already planted flags as powerful weapons of destruction. Oh, well.

 

By Design, but Still Being Fixed

 

Whoa, what’s up with those reticles, Candland? Kinda hard to make out, aren’t they?

 

Yup, if you were wondering if you need to calibrate your television set you can stop fiddling with the levers and knobs, it’s not just you. But it’s not Candland, either. When I asked him about the thin and transparent optics on display Candland threw design straight under the bus.

 

Turns out our UI team didn’t have much to do with the current reticles in question. Instead, they’re what Candland calls, “Designer Art.” They're just placeholder.

 

They’re Everywhere!

 

Yeah, so a lot of players have been remarking that it’s been remarkably difficult to pinpoint exactly where they’re taking fire from. Totally accurate and understandable – some last minute fiddling with alpha channels actually resulted in some fairly light damage indicators. If you’ve been feeling pinned down by enemy fire in the beta and couldn’t eye dee where the incoming was actually coming from, now you know why.

 

Ghost like Swayze

 

There’s a certain segment of players affected by some other graphical artifacts, too. Some frame blending bells and whistles that are being applied to help polish things up on the IQ side resulted in some undesirable artifacts in the Beta. Something the layman such as myself call “ghosting.”

 

If you’re in that population that can’t get it out of your head, wrap your arms around our waist and hold on tight. Our graphics gurus confirm that it was a bug we identified before the Beta launched and that it’s already been resolved in our main branch.

 

Fists of Fury

 

Thoroughly frustrated by the frightening changes that have been foisted upon the third leg of your beloved golden tripod? Rest easy. While the melee system has undergone a significant overhaul and we won’t be going back to the Halo 3 model, we do have a few pertinent issues preventing the new stuff from working exactly as we intended.

 

For now, you’ll have to deal with two bugs that we’ve identified. The first is likely the most obvious.

 

Currently in the Beta, when you throw a melee you can almost immediately follow it up with second smack. The end result is that players who’ve gotten the drop on unsuspecting chumps are often penalized if they keep firing and take the fight up close. In the fall, the time delay between melee attacks will be slightly extended. Up close, melee will no longer be a trump card you can play no matter the situation. You will need to use it wisely.

 

The second issue stems from a larger than ideal melee contest window that allows two players to strike simultaneously – something our sandbox guys call “clang.” The end result? The double melee.

 

Without getting all technical, let’s just say the fix will result in fewer instances of both players landing killing blows at the “exact same time,” which will reduce both the amount of simultaneous melee deaths you experience and the amount of times players can appear to mistime a melee and still be rewarded with a clean kill.

 

Go Boom

 

Also getting some love are Reach’s tactical nukes, aka the Frag Grenades. We’re hearing a lot of lip service about how the current iteration will kill a fully shielded Spartan in one toss and about the sheer amount of bang for your buck distributed throughout each map. While the former isn’t accurate (you can absorb a direct hit if you have full shields and health), we are seeing a healthy share of grenade kills in the Beta.

 

I spoke to Hamrick this morning and he confirmed that the team is investigating a number of ways to make grenades a little less predominant – tweaks to everything from base damage and radius to the number of grenades at spawn, on the map, and discarded by dead players are all under consideration.

 

Fundamentally, Reach’s grenades will still operate differently than their Halo 3 counterparts – that much won’t change. You'll need to get acclimated. Beyond the core blast radius, damage now falls off gradually instead of abruptly as is the case in Halo 3, so you’ll still need to be wary of incoming nades. But the tweaks being considered will ultimately mean that you’ll have to rely on good placement above huckin’ and chuckin’ if you want to consistently snag skillful kills.

 

Mad Cred

 

So you’ve won a game of Slayer, but some stinkin’ bunshole on the losing squad got way more Credits than you did even though you totally outskilled him. That’s totally a bug, right? Nope, it’s by design. Even though your latest chart-topping crossmap-laden performance netted you more street cred for skill than it did your opponent, they likely earned their huge steaming pile of payout via capping off one of their own personal Commendations.

 

It’s understandable that you’d have difficulty making the distinction, though. In the Beta, Commendations aren’t exactly explicitly detailed. For now, any time you see the rectangular tile appear on the lower half of your screen, it means you’ve met the requirements for a Commendation and you can expect to cash in at the end of the match. The finished product will be much more transparent about the underlying what’s and why’s. We promise.

 

Bungie sure does listen to the community. <3

 

 

[Aftrunner]

Good, thats almost everything I was worried about being taken care of right there.

Except the pistol getting those extra 3 bullets per clip.

 

 

I still wish they would go back to the Halo 3 melee system but I can understand they made a design choice that they think will improve the game and wanna stick with it. Plus I am kinda getting used to the melee system so its not a big deal.

 

I also thought they were gonna come up with something more stringent to penalize quitters.

 

Oh and sh*t like this is why you do a Beta test. Wish other developers would get their sh*t together and actually use a Beta to test out their stuff.

 

/Glares at Epic.

[devil_angel]

Good, thats almost everything I was worried about being taken care of right there.

Except the pistol getting those extra 3 bullets per clip.

 

 

I still wish they would go back to the Halo 3 melee system but I can understand they made a design choice that they think will improve the game and wanna stick with it. Plus I am kinda getting used to the melee system so its not a big deal.

 

I also thought they were gonna come up with something more stringent to penalize quitters.

 

Oh and sh*t like this is why you do a Beta test. Wish other developers would get their sh*t together and actually use a Beta to test out their stuff.

 

/Glares at Epic.

Gears 2 could've been an all time great game if they had tested MP properly!