: The simple fact that you're still unlocking stuff until SR130 means that
: there's going to be at least some imbalance. Not everybody plays all that
: often, and when you only have time for a couple of hours a day and you can
: only play once a week, it can take a good long while after you get the
: game just to finish the "primary" ranks and unlock everything
: besides what the specializations grant. By my calculations, assuming no
: double XP codes (which haven't existed since early 2013), it takes about
: 75 matches just to reach SR26, which is when you've unlocked all weapons
: and AAs (but not all perks). At 8 minutes per match (a conservative
: estimate), those 75 matches amount to over 10 hours of play time, not
: counting time spent in lobbies waiting for matches.

Fair enough, but how much did that really matter on the ground? When playing Halo 4, did you (or anyone here) ever feel like you were in an unfair game because you didn't have access to things other players did? I'm genuinely curious, because I certainly didn't. My experience was that the game did a decent job doing what 343 promised, which was to make it possible to tweak the game to fit my preferred play-style. I never felt like I was grinding for some elusive perk that would put me on a level playing field with my opponents. I had everything I wanted very, very quickly. Perhaps that means that many of the perks were useless and/or interchangeable, which is an entirely different problem.

: Another problem is that even if you have a bunch of SR130's fighting each
: other, it's still hard to make sure everything is balanced. It's an
: inordinately complex systems with way too many variables. It used to be
: everyone started with the same gun and grenades and identical attributes.
: A perfectly level playing field is easiest to balance.

So it sounds like if all of the choices in Halo 4 were unlocked from the start, you'd still be unhappy.

My question is, how interesting is a perfectly level playing field, really? If everybody starts with Assault Rifles, but somebody spawns near a Needler and picks it up, isn't the game no longer perfectly level? Taken to it's extreme, an evenly matched game would have one gun. Everybody starts with DMRs, and the only way to interact with opponents is to shoot them five times in the head. I have no interest in playing a game like that, so my thinking is that perfect balance isn't the be-all-and-end-all of multiplayer design.

Again, this is coming from somebody who has never tried the COD alternative. All I know is that as a player that likes variety, the customization in Halo 4 was a welcome change for me. Not perfect by any means - I didn't like how there was no way to tell which perks other players were using, for example - but it was probably the most fun I've had with matchmaking since Halo 2.