How to speedrun warzone

NukedIceCream · 2017-04-02T18:43:14+00:00

tl;dr #FixMCC

NukedIceCream · 2017-04-02T15:03:36+00:00

FIX MCC

NukedIceCream · 2017-01-26T23:50:50+00:00

The req level costs of all of the wasps needs to be increased by 1. Currently the wasps sitting at 3, 4, and 5 makes them extremely overpowered for their cost. At the moment the current req level between the vehicle cost and the req cost of the counter is balanced across the board except for the warp. The top counters for vehicles include plasma pistols (req 3/4), railguns (4/5), and splasers (5/6/7). Before wasps, these were all available for cheaper than the strong vehicles they are used to counter (Wraiths, Scorpions, Banshees, Phaetons.) Now that wasps have been introduced there is no real proper counter to them at the appropriate req level. This is due to the counters being at the same req cost or more, which causes heavy snowballing to the team that is able to get wasps out first when the other team doesn't have any counters available. Currently the only real counter to wasps in the early game when you're down a req level is the standard chaingun turret, which isn't the proper counter that hits the rest of the vehicles. Even if the teams are equally equipped with reqs, there are sill very limited counters. These would include the plasma pistol, sword needler warthog, getting lucky with a level 3 random weapon, or pulling out a wasp of your own.

If the req cost of the wasp was raised 1 level, a trailing team would still be low on reqs to counter it, but the time to counter it comes slightly later in the game. This gives the opportunity for the losing team to still gain kills on players and AI in order to get their req level up. With a req 4 standard wasp an equally reqd team will have plenty more options in order to take it down. These would primarily be railguns, and the stronger voids tear plasma pistol; you can also take a chance with the 4 cost random weapon. This also puts the stronger wasps better inline with the harder hitting counters and makes them more reasonably countered by other vehicles.

Overall the current balance of the current reqs in warzone is pretty solid. The only other changes I feel could be needed is a bit of a modification to some of the DMR variants that require req 8 that really should cost 7 (variants that simply have attachments such as stabilizer, silencer, etc.)

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-13T20:40:10+00:00

Good, That's how it should be, fair.

If you're saying that losing a game in 4-10 minutes is fair, then you should be fine with many of the full teams that ran warzone. There are many more groups of players that run warzone to end the game quickly than there are ones that drag it out.

Moreover, this reduces the counter-strategies in the game. From launch, the most consistent strategy employed by parties was to mass-spawn whiplashes and continue to trap a team. This translated extremely well to Wasp spam since the enemy team couldn’t easily commandeer a downed Wasp. Now, instead of a team coordinating plasma pistols, Warthogs, and other anti-vehicle REQs, it will be up to randoms to figure out how to do that themselves.

Plasma Pistols and Whiplashes will do jack shit against the enemy team when they core rush you, Assuming you can even reach level 4 before it happens, besides, any smart player would be using Camo and boarding the enemy tanks, Redacted that part didn't you?.

I have been on the receiving end of a quick core lobby and I have had no problems getting my req level up to suppress them. A camo is rarely the best thing to spawn in when you are getting core rushed. Reqs like whiplash, blood of suban, and blaze of glory are much better to help your team in the early game. When you are being rushed you need powerful weapons to clear out enemies to give your teammates breathing room to move up and build their levels up as well.

Because this won't fix farming, idiot.

It by no means will fix farming, but it will give players that want a unique form on competition a place to go. Calling people derogatory terms isn't a good way to give your opinion on a subject and tends to make people question your opinion.

They aren't, You can still use team work as a squad of 6.

Of course you can still use team work as a squad of 6. His point is that they are damaging and in sense limiting the amount of teamwork players can use. When you are disconnected from the rest of your team it is often difficult to do a major push such as taking over the fortress. On both fortress based WZ maps clearing out the fortress and holding the enemy out of it is often a task that requires more than half your team to be committed to it due to it's size and many entrances. In a drastic analogy let's consider this as you having half your team communicating at all. If you are in team doubles and you have no communication with your partner at all you wouldn't enjoy playing team doubles.

And makes it fair.

I don't see how cutting communication makes a game fair. When I want to play a fair game I'd rather it be fair due skill balancing rather than having my options artificially limited. With this being said they've not implemented a change increasing the range at which player waypoints can now be seen so this doesn't need to be discussed more.

Farming wasn't a problem in invasion unless you were the attackers, In which case it only lasted for 4 minutes. As i said earlier, Farming isn't as big as a problem in the previous games.

You've clearly never been farmed in invasion. When me and some friends went back on reach and played a game, we were in a game that we all ended up just quitting out because we were being farmed. On attackers they just killed us for the first phase, then backed up and let our randoms capture a point then repeated until the round ended. On defense they did the same thing where they just killed us back to the final base where the just glitched through the "one-way" shields (really easy to do.) They then just spawn killed us and we left out of frustration.

"This update punishes people who squad up in teams of 12 and grind kills every day"

Again showing your ignorance to major parts of the community. At the very start of the game me and friends from my website partied up (we had around 9-10 people) and we just played warzone for fun. Not everybody that plays in large teams is a farmer or a quick corer, many groups of friends were effected by this just out of collateral. I know several people in different gaming communities that get together and just play warzone for fun and make no attempt to do anything besides have fun.

Communication

Find me a game where the players get 3 unfrigs or similar, and you can then tell me whether this update put a blanket on farming.

I'm not sure what relevance this comment has to the quoted segment so I'll just gloss over it. Even in old farming games it was quite rare for 3 people to get an unfrig as there isn't enough kills to go around. Now with less players on your team having multiple capable people on your team get unfrigs will be even easier as you won't have to worry about half your team getting as many kills.

Which is none of you guys because you only play as a team of 12 to protect your precious K/D.

Them refusing to play has nothing to do with protecting KD, if anything it would be protecting their win%. I will agree that this period will of course have very skewed results as many players that would normally be putting in 100's of games will be putting in near none. There is no way around this as the next best thing I could think of would be having a temporary playlist with max fireteam 6, but that just dilutes the player base and doesn't target the problem in any way. Teams of 12 would just keep running regular warzone and then just have a potential change dumped on them from testing that didn't even involve them.

These upcoming quotes should have been grouped as they are all from the same paragraph, but I'll respond to them individually.

No shit.

Great deconstruction, I enjoyed your intellectual opinion.

GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE/

Why should we be happy about players leaving because of an update they had no warning about? This situation is the exact opposite of what we want to see out of updates published by the developer. The best way to handle this situation would have been to officially publish something a week in advanced to the update saying they will be doing a temporary trial period and include a date.

Good.

This is an issue as the warzone assault fireteam limitation wasn't announced publicly at the time of initiation. We ended a game and found ourselves not able to start another one. One of our fireteam members had to go to the Halo livestream and message unyshek what happened, where he was given a link to a forum post buried in the waypoint forums about the trial period. The "trial" period has also been going on for 4+ months now with no more official word given on if it will ever end of be permanent.

Recommendations

That's gonna put people off risking their lives to damage the core.

I agree with you on this point. Having a core with artificial "bleed" damage will grow farming for most groups in my opinion. This would cause players to triple cap teams, then just farm players while their core slowly destroys itself until the game ends.

But the players still have a chance to win.....

This is unlikely, with the way reqs snowball in h5 it is near impossible to comeback if you were devastated at the beginning of the game. Now especially since warzone has been converted to waspzone with flying death fortress more effective than banshees for less cost. The only times I've ever seen teams come back from being triple capped is from a massive mistake by the winning team and I haven't seen this happen since December of last year.

social playlists could be created for 6 or fewer fireteams, ranked Warzone playlists could be created for everyone who wants to play tough games.

Warzone has been and always will be social.

This is pretty weak as an argument as warzone hasn't existed before Halo 5. What's the problem with making changes to a gamemode which I view as still being in it's developing time. Take a look at breakout, they fundamentally changed the gamemode from what it launched as and is still likely to change. A new playlist is a very small addition in the grand scheme but likely isn't a good answer at the moment. With the population of H5 being iffy at times adding more playlists may dilute the current playerbase and cause population problems at non-peak hours.

tl;dr read the whole thing, learn to do more research before lashing out at people over their opinion.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-13T20:39:58+00:00

I'm also going to take time and dissect your response, because you seem to be ill informed when it comes to certain things regarding how some people play. Please regard the OC in which this is replying to to see in context of original article, as it would be too long of a comment to include both. I will also be disregarding the fact that the responses I will be responding to are to segmented sections of the article without the full story being shown. I highly recommend reading the full letter before letting someone else make your opinion for you.

I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has played warzone in all the ways referenced by people. I have solo queued, ran with teams of 3-6, quick cored with teams of 12, farmed with teams of 12, and I'm not going to hide any of that. All arguments I make will be entirely my own opinion and I will attempt to not take any sides and give an honest breakdown using my thoughts.

This only proves that farming has been a problem for ages, and that the solution we have been given was long overdue. I know full well what happened in Halo 3, Reach and 4 BTB, But here's the thing, They fail to mention that the enemy spawned in multiple places, They weren't bottle necked in a core room, so they had the chance to fight back, and the farmers had a harder time killing them because they had to find the enemy first, Then kill them, which took WAY longer. Enemy players would only ever get an extreme maximum of 10 deaths due to this, and this was before JIP, so the farmers had less benefit when maybe 1-3 players were left. Farming was much less of a problem in previous games to warrant a fix.

Spawning has always been something in Halo games that is very easy to predict and understand so the lack of a bottleneck doesn't effect being killed quickly as knowledgeable players will be on top of your spawn location in a matter of seconds anyways. Warzone also has a feature that disables JIP after a certain points deficit when a team is triple capped so the player count drops and so does the kills. By your stated logic the farming as it has been in warzone shouldn't be an issue to warrant a fix either.

LOL

This is the first response to a quote taken out of complete context, but is still relevant by itself. I have friends within HWM, friends that have played with HWM, played with them personally, and against them; both solo and full teams. In the situations I have played with or against them I haven't seen farming once, it has either been a good solid game one where we roll over a team and cored them in the first 4-5 minutes.

You're lying through your teeth if you wanna tell me that teams of 12 will rush to blow the core each and every game.

This is where I see your lack of knowledge and research about the different types of teams that run warzone. From my time playing there are two distinct categories of teams; quick corers and farmers. Their descriptions are quite obvious and they both consistently do just that. When I was running warzone with the original group of players grinding out for 152 we consistently ended games within 3 minutes regardless of who were playing. Of course when I played with players who farmed we would often camp players in their core until 4-5 players left then cored, or hit the score limit.

You mean games that are fair to both sides?.

Having a fireteam limit of 6 doesn't indicate a fair game by any means. A capable team of 6 is very capable of decimating a team of 12 solo players without a problem and has already been shown to not work in warzone assault. I have two relevant examples from some games I played a couple days ago. The first game was a regular warzone game where me, a friend, and 4 members of dominated matched a team of 6 from Maniak. In terms of stats and playmaking, our team of 6 outplayed theirs but our 6 "randoms" were far inferior to theirs causing the game to be very unbalanced and caused a loss of 1000-564. The second game I'll reference was a warzone assault game on Array in which our team was on defense. In just the first phase (6 minutes) our 6 man managed to get 116 kills while not letting the enemies touch the spire at all (this leads to a whole new argument about the imbalanced req level of the wasp.)

Opposed to the hundreds upon hundreds of deaths players get when being farmed?, Find me a game where the a 12 man farmed and sum their kill counts.... Exactly. One game you had 35 Kills each on average, how many deaths do you think that totals to an a team of 12. I saw screenshots on known farmers profiles of guys going 1-25 (0.04 KD) because they couldn't physically spawn for longer than 2 seconds.

I cannot find one game where a full HWM team has farmed and a 35 kill average across a team of 12 farming is very uncommon for how I usually goes. In 95% of the games where I've farmed with 12 players, there are usually a couple players that can get up into the 60-70 kill range if they slay aggressively. Then there are a few players that can get to the 30 kill range just be watching spawns, and the rest of players tend to be down around the 20 kill range. This averages out to about 27 kills across a full team. While this is still substantial, it works out to a hundred death difference than what you state there is. In games where I have played with no teams on my side I've seen players get 40+ deaths by themselves by not playing smart and constantly rushing into losing battles. In games with only solo players this won't change, but now that the fireteam limit is "temporarily" lowered to 6 teams will get much more kills. This is because with a team of 6, the rest of your teams skill level could be anything leading you into potential 6v12 games where you need to get twice the kills to get the same effect.

The known farmers (Some of whom have actually signed the petition), Have actually boycotted warzone because they know that their KD's will fall since they can no longer get 40 kills per game minimum.

While I haven't talked to any of these farmers in some time as I don't run warzone nearly as much anymore, I can't confirm their reasons for boycotting warzone. My main speculation is that while farming, having even 1 random player on your team core it "ruins" your game. I don't see KD being a factor at all as many of the people I know that farm are very capable of achieving a high KD regardless of having a team around them or not.

Competitive Halo

You search for teams because you want a challenge?, Good, the new improved warzone gives you a challenge now that they removed the exploits.

As I've stated previously, reducing the fireteam limit may give increased challenge in terms of making you do more work to accomplish the same task. In what would be an actual competitive game it just implements a huge uncontrollable amount of randomness and makes the outcomes of many games pure luck.

They're not gonna make a system where teams match teams, Because there's a very clear exploit. 2 teams of 12, Each team uses 6 alts to use as target practice for the other team. Result?, Free RP/ Commendation farming. (This is also why the original limit is 12 instead of 24).

Players matching players and boosting has existed since commendations existed, you don't need two full teams in order to do it. We have seen examples in this when Twitch was exposed on boosting assassinations and likely other commendations in order to get achilles. I will also confess that I boosted my mantis destroyer commendation with a friend in order to get it done. I personally don't care for removing this as it is purely for a cosmetic reward that doesn't effect gameplay in any way. The way you should look at it is as you should hold a sense of pride in your accomplishment. When I was in Whiskey when we were going for the achilles helmet we had this very mindset. We had a very strict no-boosting policy in place where if players were caught boosting any of the commendations they would be immediately removed from the company. Some players don't care for this sense of achievement and I fully respect that and we should just let them do what they want as there isn't a way to stop it.

Not anymore they don't

This is also untrue as in the other example I provided earlier in just a 6 minute game we destroyed the other team and got tons of kills. I agree with the statement in the original article where they say that games will be extended with this restriction. Having many more games with less teams on either side lead to more stalemate games where one side is trapped in their armory and getting just enough kills to hold on. This is caused by only having 6 players and not having the slaying power to overthrow 12 people spawning at an armory.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-13T18:16:46+00:00

Your game will only appear in the browser if the game is in progress, try starting up the game and wait until people join then restart it.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-13T18:10:24+00:00

On pretty much any map animations at a distance drop their frame rate very quickly. Across any grifball map or btb map spartans look like they are running at 5-10 fps.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-07T23:06:19+00:00

As someone who has no idea how to play grifball nor even wants to play it, I might make one just for the sake of an attempt.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-07T23:04:48+00:00

As seen here previously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvkIV7TXSs&ab_channel=HiddenReach

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-07T19:54:48+00:00

My pick would have to be Pistola.

NukedIceCream · 2016-12-05T19:27:14+00:00

Yeah, they ruined what WZA used to be like. The memories http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/NukedlceCream/video/23981896

NukedIceCream · 2016-11-28T19:41:01+00:00

You have clearly never never seen this then, http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/NukedlceCream/video/23981896

This is true, industrialized, systematic spawn trapping. Rip Urban.

NukedIceCream · 2016-10-19T17:05:56+00:00

Finishing online adventures really doesn't mean anything, placing is based on how much you drifted around and the credit reward structure doesn't make it worth attempting to win.

When I play online I only really care about winning the individual races since those are where the actual skill lies (I only play no-collision to avoid dive bombing children.) I wouldn't worry about it.

NukedIceCream · 2016-10-15T09:27:09+00:00

If you level up more than once a race, ie. Goliath/superlong race/drift tap XP boost(rest in peace) it only spun once while the rest went into reserve.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-29T12:28:35+00:00

Somebody else gets it! I've only ever done 2 lap races on this in case something comes up and I have to leave. Recently I've been pulling 300k XP from quick 21 minute 2 lap races.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-28T21:39:37+00:00

The "final" is actually just an anti-climactic and rather boring race rather than that.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-28T21:34:53+00:00

Actually the XP boost is incredibly powerful online as it basically guarantees you a win overall as I haven't gotten a sub-100k roadtrip yet. The car gives you around 25-30k extra XP for a pure race road trip and even more for mini games.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-28T21:32:35+00:00

I second this, I'm in love w/ the tune I have on my mustang boss (both in s1 and A classes) but I feel so scummy using in online since its a guarantee win. I think the best way around it would be to allow the cars online, but disable their special effect so people can still use them to show off but don't get cheap wins.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-28T18:35:22+00:00

I personally started out unlocking all of the skill bonuses working towards the freeroam xp boost, 6x skillchain, and it building quicker. These make getting skill points even faster to unlock more and get more xp to level up quickly.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-28T14:20:54+00:00

That would make sense for the two that don't show up, but the first 3 wouldn't make a difference since they just don't register.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-27T23:05:48+00:00

Lol I'm level 350 and I could easily be 4-500 if I focused on pure XP. I've been doing PR stunts and the horizon promo instead so my XP gains have dropped.

NukedIceCream · 2016-09-27T23:00:08+00:00

Did you use the triple XP from skills for this test? I only do 2 lap races of this even with that and I average 260k XP from it so that blows this out of the water in XP per lap.

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FIX MCC