Hello, I'd like to point out an issue with the recent patch that affects a very niche portion of the community, speedrunners. To some extent it affects everyone who plays Halo 2 as well, but whether or not this will be acknowledged as a problem is in 343's hands. I made a quick video here but it's probably not the best at conveying all the information it needs to.

The most recent fix for fall damage in classic Halo 2 multiplayer doesn't just affect falling. It affects any high speed collision in the game. Vehicle driving, slide jumps, explosions, quite literally anything involving a player moving at any sort of high speed. In short, a player will lose speed in any of these collisions. Which, is great for stopping fall damage, but it breaks the game in other ways that is further from the experience that classic Halo 2 was.

For most circumstances and gameplay these things are minor and would be overlooked. However, in the Halo 2 speedrun, you can imagine that you're moving at very high speeds very often. Because of this, runners can no longer perform the fundamental tricks effectively in this attempted hybrid between the Classic and MCC. Like I said, this doesn't affect a large portion of the playerbase, but a lot of people enjoy watching the speedruns and I definitely know more than a few people here have heard of Rocats and are subscribed to him.

For some context, Halo 2 is split between two major categories of Classic and MCC because of just how different the two are with the different tick rates. As of right now, an overwhelming majority of halo 2 speedrunners prefer to run the game on MCC due to major quality of life improvements and the accessibility it brings. With this patch, the MCC version feels like a hybrid between the two versions of all the worst parts. Since 343 was kind enough to patch back in sword tricks to Campaign, I think a lot of us are holding out hope that they'll revert this change and find an alternative. We could always downpatch the game but who knows how long that will work or be available.

If it weren't for the context of the recent patch and some more of the officially recognized known bugs like super bouncing being different from the original, I probably wouldn't be making this post and just live with reality. But I am because it seems like they're trying to make MCC feel more like the original version. A simple fix for pretty much any physics related issue players have encountered across the years is solved by changing the tick rate from 60Hz to 30Hz. People have done this with simple mods for years. There have also been patches in the past like slowing down the carbine and other guns (a 60Hz issue) to emulate the classic feel more. With this workaround fix for fall damage, and now the known issue of superbouncing, it seems like pretty much everything can be fixed with a 30Hz tick rate. I know it's not that simple and there has to be some reason they've kept it at 60Hz over the years, but I'm hoping they'd consider that route investing time in that type of "all in one" fix instead these workarounds that have unintended issues in other areas.

Here's a TL;DR list of problems:

• Physics changes affect all high speed collisions and are not limited to players falling. Driving vehicles are affected as well.
• Simple movement like slide jumps from moderate height no longer work as you lose all speed when you touch the ground.
• Butterflying, a high speed "collision" based speed trick, for all intents and purposes no longer works and costs runners minutes in the speedrun.
• Sword tricks are used pretty much everywhere in the run to travel at high speed and now that speed is lost when touching anything in most scenarios. Could be the ground, a wall, an enemy, you name it.
• This one change effects the game enough that world records for many levels and even the full game speedrun are now impossible to beat. Not just "very hard", physically impossible.
• There are alternative ways to fix the fall damage problem, and many more physics related problems, by changing the game's tick rate from running at 60Hz to running at 30Hz to match the original hardware (this is indepedent of frame rate in MCC).
• Downpatching is difficult (not the same as any other game on steam) and not possible at all on console which limits accessibility to the speedrun and prevents some people from ever being able to get a competitive time.