: They aren't unaware. It's not incompetence. Games are designed that way on
: purpose, because player investment systems > no player investment
: systems for their games. Ignoring the objectives and stat padding have
: always been a thing, even before Reach.

Is there any evidence that investment systems improve sales or increase player engagement & retention? You could maybe point to CoD, as CoD4 was the first to have an investment system and was the real big breakthrough for the series, but the series is in decline (though still incredibly popular). But CoD is only one series. Halo itself ought to provide an example of the effects of investment systems on sales and player retention. Halo 3 was the last main series Halo game to lack an investment system, yet it was by far the most successful in the series in terms of both sales and player retention over time. Adding an investment system did not make Reach more popular. It did almost as well as Halo 3, but that was likely in spite of an investment system, not because of it. 343i doubling down on player investment did not keep Halo 4's online population from rapidly dwindling, nor did it keep Halo 5 from being the poorest-selling main series Halo game to date.

: What you're arguing is that a game should essentially be balanced and
: designed around the lowest common denominator of play style, which I
: fundamentally disagree with.

Define what constitutes "lowest common denominator" in your view. I'm pretty sure there are some people who think that anything that doesn't have the skill ceiling of, say, a Souls game is catered to the LCD. I don't mind a game taking skill to win, but giving winning players an even bigger advantage to win even more is simply unfair and unbalanced. CoD does the same shit with killstreaks, and you can't get more "LCD" than CoD since everyone and their mother plays it.

: Yeah, I'll run into farming groups on
: occasion (I never have the experience of kill farming in Warzone Assault,
: so that's what I usually play when I'm solo.) but I look at a lot of your
: changes and see stuff that would make the mode less fun when that's not an
: issue.

What's less fun about doing a better job of balancing REQ leveling to prevent snowballing? What's less fun about actually giving players a real incentive to accomplish an actual objective. What's less fun about expanding the scale of the battlefield in Warzone? Hell, making bigger maps with more capture points and doing away with the ability to lock the enemy team into their own home base could make having total control be even more of a challenge.

Conversely, what actually is fun about being spawn camped for 10 minutes straight, with your only other option being to quit and risk a temp ban? Now that shit happens way too frequently.

: There are still avenues 343 could explore—like a surrender
: option—that wouldn't impact gameplay, but I don't particularly want them
: to align the core experience around "these people will be dicks so
: let's make potential games less fun to try and lock them out." In the
: words of Ian Malcolm:
: "Griefers, uh, find a way."

And there's no point in designing a game that can be easily exploited by griefers as well. You seem to be fine with them doing so. You also seem like you don't really care much about competitive balance, either. Good players/teams should not be rewarded with the ability to do even better against the weaker players/teams, and there shouldn't be obvious and easily exploitable means by which they can simply grief other players. Griefing in BTB in Reach would have been vastly more difficult if the Banshee weren't so fucking OP (and if some levels like Paradiso had such an awful design). Likewise, griefing in Warzone would be much less effective if the home bases weren't so easy to camp, and if players actually had more incentive to accomplish the nominal objective instead of simply padding their kill count.

: I don't think Warzone is a free to play game unless you have no skill or no
: patience. Two or three games of Halo in and you'll likely have the basic
: REQs you need.

Depends on if the RNG is being favorable to you. It is entirely possible for it to take many games just to get decent weapons. It took me several months to get a DMR, for example. For the longest time I had literally nothing that could compete with players armed with extremely long range weapons.

But my main argument in my post wasn't about RNGs or microtransactions/F2P elements in full-price games, but rather it was how REQ levels are handled in individual matches. It is possible for one player to be stuck with level 3 REQs while several guys on the other team already have level 6 REQs. Kinda hard to fight back when you have a basic BR or maybe a basic Ghost or Warthog, and the enemy has tanks, Mantises, sniper rifles, incinerator cannons, etc. By time you get to a high enough REQ level to call in higher-tier weapons and vehicles, it'd be too late to do much of anything.

: My online real complaint with Warzone is that I'd like maps with more open
: terrain for better vehicle encounters (the Sanghelios map scratches this
: itch better)

The reason I mention Battlefield so much is because I think it handles this sort of large-scale combat much better. Bigger maps equally suited to both large-scale vehicular combat and infantry-vs.-infantry engagements, more objectives in a given map and a bigger focus on said objectives, etc. After playing Battlefield 4 for a while starting in early 2014, I quickly became enamored with the sheer scale of its combat in MP. It didn't take long for me to think "Hey. Something like this would work very well in Halo." Unfortunately, Warzone seems more like a half-sized, half-assed, poorly executed version of Conquest.

: and for more bases to have optional exits like Apex—a way for
: defenders to get to another objective quickly, to encircle attackers, or
: for attackers to attempt a sneaky back way in.

I forgot about Apex 7. Its bases are wholly unique in that they have back doors. But that's a consequence of map design. In every other Warzone map, the bases are placed in a way to where their backs are against the outer boundary of the map, so the only way in or out is the front doors. It's quite unfortunate that 343i's Warzone level designers didn't foresee that the bases needed multiple exit points, thus making them harder to effectively cover and spawn camp. Better-designed bases would help a lot with the spawn camping issue.