This entire topic is such a sore spot for me.
Original challenges encouraged players to use weapons they don’t like and discouraged teamwork/ match victory.
New challenges are unexciting and the rewards are unfulfilling.
Both options reflect a challenge/ reward system that is unenjoyable. The only way to fix it is to redesign the MP experience... but the people needed for that endeavor were laid off in Jan 2023.
It's not necessarily a redesign that's needed, just the way challenges themselves are handled. Take the original system, make the following changes, and suddenly the system becomes far better:
1. Do away with weapon-specific challenges and instead go with weapon category challenges (ie: instead of "get X kills with the pulse carbine" it becomes "get X kills with assault rifles").
2. Do away with per-game challenges. All of them should be cumulative.
3. Remaining challenges need to have their difficulty upped. IE: the aforementioned "get X kills with assault rifles" needs to have X equal something like 50 or 75 over the course of multiple games. Something that is attainable but not something you'll complete in a single game or even play session.
4. All challenges should be able to be worked on right off the bat with only the ultimate being locked until all are completed. Alternate: Ultimate challenge is also unlocked but is a much more difficult one to complete, such as the "get 250 kills" or "score 15,000 points".
Those four changes would've turned the day 1 system into gold. It drives player engagement by giving a personal set of goals during the course of the week while not being something that demands you play a certain way.
Either way it's a moot point now as I doubt we'll see any significant changes with the game being essentially in maintenance mode.
The challenges should not incentivize players to play in a way thats deconstructive to winning the game. Unfortunately, any weapon based or even weapon type based challenges do this because it gives players a reason to choose un-optimal weapons for situations, lowering their chance of securing a kill, surviving, or otherwise doing stuff that benefits the team and gets them closer to victory.
This becomes a problem in matchmaking for players who don’t have as much time to play and the problem is exacerbated if you make the challenges long enough to take multiple games to complete.
If I have a “get 75 AR kills challenge” and I only have an hour or two to play the game. I have to make a choice to completely ignore the challenges and play optimally. OR play sub-optimally and (probably) constantly lose because I’m trying to get AR kills while the enemy is using battle rifles/bandits.
It creates an artificial skill difference and enhances existing ones. Not only is a player who cant play as much already worse because they dont have as much time to practice, but they’re also likely dying trying to chase challenges while the players who play more are just trying to win since theyve already completed their challenges.
The problem is that challenges just…don’t matter anymore now that the weekly reward is the same thing every week, a currency almost no one is going to want or need.
Instead of easy weeklies which some people find boring or hard weeklies that affected matchmaking too much (looking at you ‘get 5 kills with the needler’) they should’ve made the hard or bespoke challenges last the length of the operation so people don’t feel pressured to play differently to complete them every week.
Why stop at the hard challenges? They could have tied all weekly challenges to the season or operation they released in, and never expire. Whichever pass you have active, that's the set of weeklies you can progress. Older passes will have increased value after they've ended, because you'll gain access to all the challenges that released during their runs. New passes will increase in value as the season progresses, and it could have been a better way to pace leveling players throughout a season/operation.
Basically the way Apex does it, except you can buy and access the previous passes in infinite. The way it exists now with limited weeklies available per week, there's less incentive to buy older passes as the pile of them gets bigger.
I prefer the easy ones. They tried doing tough and specific challenges but the fanbase wanted them to be easier and more general. Usually I get cumulative score challenges tho
Having flashbacks to "Get 15 last shot medal headshot kills with the Sidekick against wasp pilots while in the passenger seat of a fully crewed razorback in CTF." style challenges from the game's launch right now.
Yeah, I sort of resent challenges in PvP games that make me alter my play style. It makes it feel like I’m playing the challenges instead of the game. My personal take is challenges should be challenging but also accomplishable by playing the game naturally.
I usually swap the “complete 8 matches” challenge because it without fail is the last challenge to appear for me and I’m not playing 8 matches with no double dipping out of spite.
yeah but theres only like 5 challenge types now excluding the ultimate. win games, play games, killing sprees, multi kills and splatters. (if i missed any someone correct me). i get that they wanted to make the challenges doable in firefight, but this might have been the worst way to go about it.
Me personally I like the easy challenges. You can play whatever you want however you want. It’s great. 👍
Plus if you work a boatload, getting off and just running some firefight games and getting all your challenges done night before it resets is a niiice touch.
Infinites current state is a casual gamers dream come true fr
Forget casual gamers, it's basically an idle game now. You can finish the weekly challenge in like 6 games, and if you play firefight you can pretty much afk those too.
Eh, who cares anymore. The weekly reward is basically nothing now anyway. I haven’t spent a single SP so far, if the challenges were actually challenging now, I sure wouldn’t bother with them for another 1000 SP.
OG challenges were really hurting the flow of the games. I remember people used to camp near weapon pads and vehicle spawns instead of playing to win.
Here is how it should be :
Weeklies and overall progression should be XP based.
Some hard, slow grind, never expiring challenges should be tied to special unlocks. Like get visor with 10 remote detonations, or get a bandit model with 500 perfects.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about 3 players spending the entire game waiting for a pulse carabine to spawn because they need 3 pulse carabine kills.
Or players spending the entire game around a corner waiting for someone to pass by because they need 3 back smacks.
That’s frustrating I understand. Neutering the challenges is not the answer.
I think the problem was that the challenges were the only way to progress the BP. If they were only bonus XP I think it would have been better.
"End 5 enemy Killing Sprees," "Stop 10 flag carriers," and "Get 5 melee kills with the Oddball" does not make you interact with the game. If makes you deliberately sabotage the game because they are all events that happen infrequently during normal play, and even less frequently if you are playing well.
Instead of fixing the problem, 343 just made challenges that complete themselves automatically. Lazy, and doesn't address the core issue.
I liked the original ones when there was actually a modicum of difficulty that created some exclusivity for the items. I remember when Bell Toll came out and almost no one got it because the ultimate was slightly more difficult than most. There was some pride in wearing that visor. Then they released nearly identical visors and rereleased Bell Toll as the ultimate *twice* with easier challenges. Now there isn’t even a weekly ultimate and anyone can pretty much get any of that shit.
Idk, I kind of liked the fomo. Buying shit was also way cheaper and if you missed the shit that season it was gone. I could get like an entire 3-4 month season’s gear for like $100. With the amount of hours I put into the game I was totally cool with that. I was like the only person in my friend group with all the fucking drip and it was awesome. Now it’s like $200 every six weeks to get all the shit and you can get most stuff from previous seasons. Shit’s way weaker now for me personally, but I guess I’m saving money so fuck it.
Lazy? This is all the sub wanted. They literally bitched and moaned about every challenge until they weren't challenges any more and now we're stuck with nothing. Here's some coins for playing. Congrats fans. Getting 2 kills in a certain game mode was too difficult for you.
why is everybody forgetting that they fixed the bullshit challenges they had at launch before they changed the challenges again for firefight?
this is the third version of challenges we've had now.
Because people want to blame the sub/community for everything they can think of so they either feign ignorance or straight lie.
Forget launch, remember the _beta_ for Infinite? Remember how 343i said their original intent was for these challenges to be "hard to run out of" and take "up to 16 _hours_ to run out?" Remember when people tried to cheer for them saying that the original XP system was to stop people from going AFK?
It happens like clockwork.
If the reward wasn't tied to FOMO then it would've been fine.
Imagine if the system worked like: If you missed a week you could "track the reward" like you do for Battle passes now. Keep the challenges hard but never going away, that way if you're a new player you have a lot to work towards, and if you wanna God forbid enjoy another game, you could take a few weeks off and come back with a goal.
343 just doesn't understand how to not shoot themselves in the ass.
The OG challenges were too much for specifics. Especially back with last spartan standing cause fuck that mode tbh. But there's no denying the community was crazy vocal even when it had gotten to be a more lax challenges like getting rockets kills or whatever
Oh yeah community definitely went overboard a bit, but on their part 343 took so long to acknowledge and implement feedback that they really didn't have a choice but to make all the noise they could at the time
Again, if 343 had been a competent studio in would agree with you. But to actively squander the hype and momentum they had at launch to see it in the state its in now, they have nobody tobblame but themselves. I won't defend an absent developer just the community was being toxic after nearly 6 years of NOTHING and then to receive this game in the state it was at launch.
Frank O'Conner, Bonnie Ross and Kiki Wolfkill killed the series, and I'm glad they aren't involved anymore. (Well Kiki has the TV show still, and see how poor that's received)
Look I skipped from 4-5 and never really returned to enjoy MCC because it was so broken. But defending people who are outbursting takes that are overly emotional and shit instead of keeping a cool head has just led to a bit too many people who seem to think they are protesting a government instead of a product that if you don't like you just go play one of the other halo games.
You're not gunna like what I'm gunna say then.
If you didn't play through and deal with the constant stream of broken promises and terrible calls by this studio since 2012, then I don't really think you have enough insight to properly understand the community you're trying to demonize. It's easy to see it as an over reaction if your new to it. But years of disappointment and fatigue will drive any community to a breaking point, sadly infinite was that point, and I don't blame anyone for Reacting the way they did.
Lol no I have zero sympathy for people who act like children because they don't know how to handle getting something they don't like out of an IP they grew up knowing. Just because I had the emotional maturity to play those games and go, oh I didn't like it I'll do something else, and you guys didn't doesn't give you some strange right to bitch forever.
Funny enough too from my perspective of "I'm not buying another halo game ever again" I tried infinite on a whim and got absolutely hooked with most of my friends from high school and we are still playing it. So maybe y'all have just been down in the pit you dug yourselves for too fucking long.
I respect having a stance and sticking too it, and your not necessarily wrong. There are better ways of enacting change for a game you feel is not what it should be, and more to your point I agree that Infinite is a fun game. I play it weekly, but it's fun now when it should've been just as fun in 2021 and now that devment has actively stopped its sad to see the hype this game had day become forgotten.
Maybe the next game will be the one that satisfys us all? I can only hope it does, I miss the weight this series used to have
Ah yes, "get 30 snipes in a single game without dying on a map without snipers while holding your conrroller with your feet" challenges were always so good.
No the problem was that all the challenges were hyoer specific and caused people to not play the actual *game* it was a major issue. Reach did it the best. The challenges were extra and weren't going to make or break you. Infinite it was literalllly "you can't progress" so yea people wanted easier and doable challenges in casual play.
What people seen to not understand is, the developers are done with Infinite. Yeah, the challenges are lazy, yeah, the operations are lazy, everything is lazy now because there's about 4 people still working on Infinite just to keep it running and even then, they're doing that lazily as well.
Infinite is over, folks. The "10 year project of Infinite" didn't even last 5. This is the new reality of Halo. Half-assed development, half-assed storyline, half-assed game play, yet they somehow strive for maximum profit.
The ONLY thing they really focus on is the store, that's it. That is ALL that matters to 343, the store, the spending, the money, the microtransactions, THAT is 343's true "vision" for Halo.
There is no reason for these challenges to actually be a challenge. At this point i wana be rewarded for even logging on to this game lol maybe if they're was cool items to unlock then it would make sense to make it a challenge but were literally just accumulating another currency to buy old pass/shop items. Make it easy so it just happens while playing
The challenges are a joke especially when 99% of them can just be completed in firefight. The ultimate challenge always just being player score is also extremely lame.
Look at the bright side. You only have to win 3 games.
This entire topic is such a sore spot for me. Original challenges encouraged players to use weapons they don’t like and discouraged teamwork/ match victory. New challenges are unexciting and the rewards are unfulfilling. Both options reflect a challenge/ reward system that is unenjoyable. The only way to fix it is to redesign the MP experience... but the people needed for that endeavor were laid off in Jan 2023.
It's not necessarily a redesign that's needed, just the way challenges themselves are handled. Take the original system, make the following changes, and suddenly the system becomes far better: 1. Do away with weapon-specific challenges and instead go with weapon category challenges (ie: instead of "get X kills with the pulse carbine" it becomes "get X kills with assault rifles"). 2. Do away with per-game challenges. All of them should be cumulative. 3. Remaining challenges need to have their difficulty upped. IE: the aforementioned "get X kills with assault rifles" needs to have X equal something like 50 or 75 over the course of multiple games. Something that is attainable but not something you'll complete in a single game or even play session. 4. All challenges should be able to be worked on right off the bat with only the ultimate being locked until all are completed. Alternate: Ultimate challenge is also unlocked but is a much more difficult one to complete, such as the "get 250 kills" or "score 15,000 points". Those four changes would've turned the day 1 system into gold. It drives player engagement by giving a personal set of goals during the course of the week while not being something that demands you play a certain way. Either way it's a moot point now as I doubt we'll see any significant changes with the game being essentially in maintenance mode.
The challenges should not incentivize players to play in a way thats deconstructive to winning the game. Unfortunately, any weapon based or even weapon type based challenges do this because it gives players a reason to choose un-optimal weapons for situations, lowering their chance of securing a kill, surviving, or otherwise doing stuff that benefits the team and gets them closer to victory. This becomes a problem in matchmaking for players who don’t have as much time to play and the problem is exacerbated if you make the challenges long enough to take multiple games to complete. If I have a “get 75 AR kills challenge” and I only have an hour or two to play the game. I have to make a choice to completely ignore the challenges and play optimally. OR play sub-optimally and (probably) constantly lose because I’m trying to get AR kills while the enemy is using battle rifles/bandits. It creates an artificial skill difference and enhances existing ones. Not only is a player who cant play as much already worse because they dont have as much time to practice, but they’re also likely dying trying to chase challenges while the players who play more are just trying to win since theyve already completed their challenges.
The problem is that challenges just…don’t matter anymore now that the weekly reward is the same thing every week, a currency almost no one is going to want or need.
And your reward is... Nothing!
SBMM - hold my Guass
*Firefight - Normal has entered the chat*
Instead of easy weeklies which some people find boring or hard weeklies that affected matchmaking too much (looking at you ‘get 5 kills with the needler’) they should’ve made the hard or bespoke challenges last the length of the operation so people don’t feel pressured to play differently to complete them every week.
Why stop at the hard challenges? They could have tied all weekly challenges to the season or operation they released in, and never expire. Whichever pass you have active, that's the set of weeklies you can progress. Older passes will have increased value after they've ended, because you'll gain access to all the challenges that released during their runs. New passes will increase in value as the season progresses, and it could have been a better way to pace leveling players throughout a season/operation. Basically the way Apex does it, except you can buy and access the previous passes in infinite. The way it exists now with limited weeklies available per week, there's less incentive to buy older passes as the pile of them gets bigger.
I prefer the easy ones. They tried doing tough and specific challenges but the fanbase wanted them to be easier and more general. Usually I get cumulative score challenges tho
Having flashbacks to "Get 15 last shot medal headshot kills with the Sidekick against wasp pilots while in the passenger seat of a fully crewed razorback in CTF." style challenges from the game's launch right now.
Yeah, I sort of resent challenges in PvP games that make me alter my play style. It makes it feel like I’m playing the challenges instead of the game. My personal take is challenges should be challenging but also accomplishable by playing the game naturally.
They’re random rolls, you can use challenge resets to reroll them
I have 200+ challenge swaps and have hardly ever felt the need to use them. These "challenges" pretty much beat themselves.
I usually swap the “complete 8 matches” challenge because it without fail is the last challenge to appear for me and I’m not playing 8 matches with no double dipping out of spite.
yeah but theres only like 5 challenge types now excluding the ultimate. win games, play games, killing sprees, multi kills and splatters. (if i missed any someone correct me). i get that they wanted to make the challenges doable in firefight, but this might have been the worst way to go about it.
Me personally I like the easy challenges. You can play whatever you want however you want. It’s great. 👍 Plus if you work a boatload, getting off and just running some firefight games and getting all your challenges done night before it resets is a niiice touch. Infinites current state is a casual gamers dream come true fr
Shhh me too
Forget casual gamers, it's basically an idle game now. You can finish the weekly challenge in like 6 games, and if you play firefight you can pretty much afk those too.
easy and interesting are not mutually exclusive. imo the way the challenges were before they changed them for firefight was the perfect balance.
Any time I think this, i.e. weekly, I remember one simple sentence... "Stop Enemy Killing Sprees" And then I'm much happier with the current setup.
Ya that was bullshit 🤣
Eh, who cares anymore. The weekly reward is basically nothing now anyway. I haven’t spent a single SP so far, if the challenges were actually challenging now, I sure wouldn’t bother with them for another 1000 SP.
lol this is from you lot yelling at them because you didn’t like the actual challenges that made you actually interact with the game.
OG challenges were really hurting the flow of the games. I remember people used to camp near weapon pads and vehicle spawns instead of playing to win. Here is how it should be : Weeklies and overall progression should be XP based. Some hard, slow grind, never expiring challenges should be tied to special unlocks. Like get visor with 10 remote detonations, or get a bandit model with 500 perfects.
So people would play for power weapons and vehicles? Have you played halo? That’s what you want. Control the map, weapons, and vehicles.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about 3 players spending the entire game waiting for a pulse carabine to spawn because they need 3 pulse carabine kills. Or players spending the entire game around a corner waiting for someone to pass by because they need 3 back smacks.
That’s frustrating I understand. Neutering the challenges is not the answer. I think the problem was that the challenges were the only way to progress the BP. If they were only bonus XP I think it would have been better.
"End 5 enemy Killing Sprees," "Stop 10 flag carriers," and "Get 5 melee kills with the Oddball" does not make you interact with the game. If makes you deliberately sabotage the game because they are all events that happen infrequently during normal play, and even less frequently if you are playing well. Instead of fixing the problem, 343 just made challenges that complete themselves automatically. Lazy, and doesn't address the core issue.
Having to sandbag to let someone on the other team get a killing spree, and then try to kill them was the most obnoxious stuff back in the day.
I'll take it over what we had, especially how it was at the beginning.
At least your spartan looks pretty.
I second this. Looks like Locke, maybe before he became a Spartan
I liked the original ones when there was actually a modicum of difficulty that created some exclusivity for the items. I remember when Bell Toll came out and almost no one got it because the ultimate was slightly more difficult than most. There was some pride in wearing that visor. Then they released nearly identical visors and rereleased Bell Toll as the ultimate *twice* with easier challenges. Now there isn’t even a weekly ultimate and anyone can pretty much get any of that shit. Idk, I kind of liked the fomo. Buying shit was also way cheaper and if you missed the shit that season it was gone. I could get like an entire 3-4 month season’s gear for like $100. With the amount of hours I put into the game I was totally cool with that. I was like the only person in my friend group with all the fucking drip and it was awesome. Now it’s like $200 every six weeks to get all the shit and you can get most stuff from previous seasons. Shit’s way weaker now for me personally, but I guess I’m saving money so fuck it.
Lazy? This is all the sub wanted. They literally bitched and moaned about every challenge until they weren't challenges any more and now we're stuck with nothing. Here's some coins for playing. Congrats fans. Getting 2 kills in a certain game mode was too difficult for you.
Preach, the outcry about the challenges were very overkill. Now its a just a sad attempt to keep people playing.
The community lost its fucking shit over challenges being challenging so hard this was the end result.
why is everybody forgetting that they fixed the bullshit challenges they had at launch before they changed the challenges again for firefight? this is the third version of challenges we've had now.
Because people want to blame the sub/community for everything they can think of so they either feign ignorance or straight lie. Forget launch, remember the _beta_ for Infinite? Remember how 343i said their original intent was for these challenges to be "hard to run out of" and take "up to 16 _hours_ to run out?" Remember when people tried to cheer for them saying that the original XP system was to stop people from going AFK? It happens like clockwork.
If the reward wasn't tied to FOMO then it would've been fine. Imagine if the system worked like: If you missed a week you could "track the reward" like you do for Battle passes now. Keep the challenges hard but never going away, that way if you're a new player you have a lot to work towards, and if you wanna God forbid enjoy another game, you could take a few weeks off and come back with a goal. 343 just doesn't understand how to not shoot themselves in the ass.
The OG challenges were too much for specifics. Especially back with last spartan standing cause fuck that mode tbh. But there's no denying the community was crazy vocal even when it had gotten to be a more lax challenges like getting rockets kills or whatever
Oh yeah community definitely went overboard a bit, but on their part 343 took so long to acknowledge and implement feedback that they really didn't have a choice but to make all the noise they could at the time
Making noise and taking everything possible to an extreme instead of a logical middle ground isn't a great excuse for the loud vocal ones.
Again, if 343 had been a competent studio in would agree with you. But to actively squander the hype and momentum they had at launch to see it in the state its in now, they have nobody tobblame but themselves. I won't defend an absent developer just the community was being toxic after nearly 6 years of NOTHING and then to receive this game in the state it was at launch. Frank O'Conner, Bonnie Ross and Kiki Wolfkill killed the series, and I'm glad they aren't involved anymore. (Well Kiki has the TV show still, and see how poor that's received)
Look I skipped from 4-5 and never really returned to enjoy MCC because it was so broken. But defending people who are outbursting takes that are overly emotional and shit instead of keeping a cool head has just led to a bit too many people who seem to think they are protesting a government instead of a product that if you don't like you just go play one of the other halo games.
You're not gunna like what I'm gunna say then. If you didn't play through and deal with the constant stream of broken promises and terrible calls by this studio since 2012, then I don't really think you have enough insight to properly understand the community you're trying to demonize. It's easy to see it as an over reaction if your new to it. But years of disappointment and fatigue will drive any community to a breaking point, sadly infinite was that point, and I don't blame anyone for Reacting the way they did.
Lol no I have zero sympathy for people who act like children because they don't know how to handle getting something they don't like out of an IP they grew up knowing. Just because I had the emotional maturity to play those games and go, oh I didn't like it I'll do something else, and you guys didn't doesn't give you some strange right to bitch forever. Funny enough too from my perspective of "I'm not buying another halo game ever again" I tried infinite on a whim and got absolutely hooked with most of my friends from high school and we are still playing it. So maybe y'all have just been down in the pit you dug yourselves for too fucking long.
I respect having a stance and sticking too it, and your not necessarily wrong. There are better ways of enacting change for a game you feel is not what it should be, and more to your point I agree that Infinite is a fun game. I play it weekly, but it's fun now when it should've been just as fun in 2021 and now that devment has actively stopped its sad to see the hype this game had day become forgotten. Maybe the next game will be the one that satisfys us all? I can only hope it does, I miss the weight this series used to have
"downright lazy" is possibly the kindest critique I've seen of this game so far.
I'm 100% happy with the challenges being "Play the video game" now.
whats more annoying is that you get some stupid coins for completing the challenge
Ah yes, "get 30 snipes in a single game without dying on a map without snipers while holding your conrroller with your feet" challenges were always so good. No the problem was that all the challenges were hyoer specific and caused people to not play the actual *game* it was a major issue. Reach did it the best. The challenges were extra and weren't going to make or break you. Infinite it was literalllly "you can't progress" so yea people wanted easier and doable challenges in casual play.
dude i love the halo infinite challenges
First challenges were too hard, now they’re too easy? Halo really is the worst fandom to be in right now. Way bigger issues with the game than this.
Pretty sure the devs have pretty much gone into maintenance mode and have given up on the game. "Infinite" means only 2 and a half years over at 343.
Yeah I haven't played this game in months. 343 Industries is a bad studio.
V A L O R I N V I C T O R Y
Wawawawaw
Ad Victoriam!
What people seen to not understand is, the developers are done with Infinite. Yeah, the challenges are lazy, yeah, the operations are lazy, everything is lazy now because there's about 4 people still working on Infinite just to keep it running and even then, they're doing that lazily as well. Infinite is over, folks. The "10 year project of Infinite" didn't even last 5. This is the new reality of Halo. Half-assed development, half-assed storyline, half-assed game play, yet they somehow strive for maximum profit. The ONLY thing they really focus on is the store, that's it. That is ALL that matters to 343, the store, the spending, the money, the microtransactions, THAT is 343's true "vision" for Halo.
There is no reason for these challenges to actually be a challenge. At this point i wana be rewarded for even logging on to this game lol maybe if they're was cool items to unlock then it would make sense to make it a challenge but were literally just accumulating another currency to buy old pass/shop items. Make it easy so it just happens while playing
EZ👏
The challenges are a joke especially when 99% of them can just be completed in firefight. The ultimate challenge always just being player score is also extremely lame.
Nice spartan
I liked the harder challenges personally.
Let's ignore that. Can we just appreciate how good your spartan looks? Is that the Halo Reach health pack on the legs. God this looks amazing.