Pook and Pie

... I don't see the problem with having a Social playlist for people who might not want to face off against the people who actively do everything they can to make the game un-fun for the enemy team (Boltshot plus camo plus instant reload combo is easily countered, but if you're not partied up, dear Jesus, it's a pain in the ass to tell people to just stop running into his face and getting killed), or jumping inside of walls to avoid getting killed by the people who don't know about it to be a jerk, that kind of thing. I like how someone immediately calls the TC the problem with games like Halo because he, "Wants to roll scrubs" yet wants to keep players like the TC in for the tryhards to 'roll' (I guess, I don't care about anyone's skill levels. TC's probably better than I am, even, lol). I just don't see the problem with adding the option in case people wanted to use it, then again, I played a metric ton of social in Halo 3 because my roommates and I would play the game every weekend and they didn't have gamertags for years. Honestly, if not the above, then maybe an option to avoid parties/teamed groups be implemented rather than splintering the player base (though letting casuals be casual should be of no problem to anyone because, well, why would the good players want to play singleton scrubs, etc), because that's most likely the TC's problem: He's playing solo, and a group of people who know better strategy is going out of their way to use it on him and he has little recourse other than, "Get better or get your own party." Not everyone's friends play at the same time, and a whole group of 4 people using the same armor ability can be a tremendous pain (4 camo users on Haven, 2 with Boltshot/Scattershot/AR, 2 with DMR/BR/ and at one point the OSKO Promethean gun was awful, because they got two kills at the start and then all camped together for the entire game. 4 Sentry bots seemed pretty hilarious for camping teams on Solace, as it seemed like the shots from the sentries mixed with just 1 or 2 BR/DMR shots would take out a single person with ease). Honestly, TC, I'll send you a friend request. Maybe playing with a communicating teammate might ease your stress a bit.

Yeah, the respawning issue can lend to some of the most frustrating games I've had in H4. I mean, I had a game recently on Haven where I exchanged shots with a guy and killed him on the platform on top where the pillars are, he spawned immediately on one of the ramps looking toward that area and shot at me while I was reloading and before my shield even recovered. I threw a grenade at him, died, respawned in the hallway connected to where he just spawned, ran toward him and shot him in the back until he died. Rinse and repeat, like, 5 times of this guy and I just killing each other within seconds of being killed, before the other's shields returned, and in my case at least, before I even got to reload. Heck, earlier tonight I was on Complex and got shot to death by a Ghost I was trying to kill, so I mashed X to respawn in frustration and spawned right in front of the Ghost that just killed me, it tried to boost into me so I stuck it again and killed him, I don't even think his shield came back. I mean, come on, Complex is big enough for that to not happen in, though I guess even my apartment thought that was BS because shortly thereafter the power went out, lol. It's ridiculous. This game doesn't play anywhere near as quickly as Call of Duty, so I'm not really seeing the need for an instant spawn option. Respawn timers seem kind of important because getting spawned with line of sight, or near line of sight, of the person who killed you before their shield even comes back is ludicrous.

Getting cross-mapped is happening a lot less to me in this game than Reach. That's all Reach basically was: Every single game of Hemorrhage was one team staying and camping its base while 2-4 guys would talk and coordinate who they were going to shoot with their DMRs for the whole game so no one could venture around the map. It would be somewhat nice to see the reticule auto aim range for the DMR slightly reduced, but I think that's about all that needs to happen to it. Besides that, I'm a BR user at the moment (according to my own gamercard, Favorite weapon - BR) and I'm finding the manners in which I'm being killed by DMR users to be perfectly legitimate, so... yeah. I know that probably had no bearing on your own opinion, but I'm not having that much trouble.

I'm having a pretty big issue as I bought Halo 4 mostly for my roommate and I to play (we played Halo 3's splitscreen online multiplayer for 3 years, at least every weekend for 8-16 hours, about a year's worth of Reach, etc.), but on any map larger than Haven or Adrift, the frame rate drops so much that the game doesn't become unplayable, but it is extremely difficult to play and land those 5th headshots since we're experiencing, at times, a full .25+ second frame rate lag. For example, in Complex, if I am looking into the middle of the map and firing my DMR, my friend cannot do the same or it becomes impossible for us to aim and fire accurately and actually get kills, and team-shooting becomes a difficult task when it's one of the most intrinsic Halo stratgies for us. The same goes for Complex and nearly every single Big Team Battle map, and that's hardly something we can deal with on a regular basis. Heck, we both got into a Ghost once and I swear to you that we were almost a full half-a-second behind everyone else in the game, the frame rate was jumping around so much. However, with just 1 person on the Xbox, it's absolutely fine and perfectly enjoyable. If two or more of us are on the same Xbox, we've got to stay inside the buildings on Complex, etc., otherwise the frame rate becomes a tremendous hindrance. Since I have more people to play with on one Xbox than I do over the Internet (we prefer to get together on weekends to play, a tradition we've kept since college days), this is a huge problem for us right now. Is there anything being done to correct the large frame rate drops on larger maps?