: Also.. free, required DLC please. I just looooooove spending my hard earned
: money on new maps and then never playing on them because no one else has
: them. It's not just Halo that does this, but Mass Effect 3 had the best
: business model in that regard.

This times a thousand. I honestly felt like I wasted my money paying for the DLC maps in Halo 4. Though I've played over 1000 matches in MM to date, there's several maps that I've only played a tiny handful of times, as in single digits. Most of the matches I've played on DLC maps were in the dedicated DLC playlists because there was no other way to play them, and once that goes away you don't really get to play them. They just don't show up in regular playlists because most of the people online are fucking cheapskates. In Halo 2, 3, and Reach, I saw DLC maps regularly without having to go into dedicated DLC playlists. In the case of Halo 2 & 3, some DLC was eventually made mandatory, and in Reach it just did a better job of matching you with others who had the DLC.

Map packs should be free to prevent these issues. If they want to generate additional revenue, then they should release microtransactions in the form of bonus armor permutations, emblems, and other aesthetic things that don't affect anyone's gameplay experience. If someone doesn't pay a buck for the Locus armor set, it doesn't effect me, unlike when someone doesn't pay for a map pack, which makes it to where other people they get matched with can't play those DLC maps.