: Agreed that they need to be less grindy (it took me months to finish
: unlocking every weapon after all those useless emblems), but disagreed
: that Month of Mythic is the wrong direction. Letting us unlocking specific
: weapons in specific packs (if for a greater cost) is more satisfying to me
: than having to rely on luck if I get anything useful or not. It's
: especially helpful if the player doesn't have time to play Halo for months
: on end and would just rather have some quick fun with a Mythic for an hour
: before having to resume work.

The problem with Month of Mythic is the insane requirements. Not all of us have $10 to burn on a microtransaction that gives a single certification. The only other option is to rack up 100,000 REQ points. But getting 100k points necessitates potentially up to 100 or more Arena matches or 40 or more Firefight matches. That's a pretty large time investment (10-15 hours of game time) for a single weapon. 343i deliberately made it grind-y, hence the "Pay $10 and get it now." But now you have all the "whales" (the small minority of players willing and able to plunk down lots of money on microtransactions) running around with a sword that offers infinite camo. Warzone already has a bad enough problem with snowballing as it is, but people with ten bucks to spare and a good team can spam uberweapons and make the snowball even bigger.

"Month of Mythic" exemplifies everything wrong with putting free-to-play elements in a $60 game ("fee-to-pay" as Jim Sterling puts it). It's almost always bad for gameplay. It's just the nature of the beast. No developer is going to put premium stuff in a game and then design it to where people will not want to spend money because it's easy to unlock things. The REQ system was obviously designed first and foremost to be a revenue-generation system for Microsoft, hence there being 200+ helmets and 200+ armors, most of which are just variants with different skins, and numerous redundant weapons and vehicles, and all of it lumped together into a single pile with each item selected by an RNG instead of the player. As it exists it's a totally bullshit system, optimized to get people to spend additional money on armors and gameplay items.

Microtransactions/free-to-play elements in $60 games affect the experience, period. I've already put nearly 140 hours into Halo 5's matchmade MP (Arena + Warzone combined) in the past 10+ months, nearly as much as I put into Halo 4's in a two-year span. Yet I'm still nowhere near done unlocking everything (I still need 30+ Silver packs before I even start working on Gold packs). This is the game testing my patience, trying to wear me down in order to get me to spend money in order to thankfully, mercifully just be fucking done unlocking everything. That REQ items are not in Arena is a courtesy, but that too was probably a calculated measure, trying to push microtransactions are far as they could without pissing off too many people and making it not worth implementing. Softening the blow with "Oh, it's not in Arena" or other various excuses does not change the fact that microtransactions are almost invariably bad. They are always designed to encourage players to pay a premium for the convenience of not having to sink countless hours into a fucking Skinner box investment system grind-fest.

Every company that puts microtransactions into a game WANTS you to spend money on them, and they WILL design the game in a way to pressure people into paying money. Even the whole "Oh, you could easily die after calling in a high-level REQ before you can even use it on anyone" excuse to defend it is itself the fucking problem. Non-permanent REQs are designed to be burned through quickly in order to encourage people to spend more money to replenish said items. Why do you think Warzone Firefight is so ridiculously over the top with its difficulty? It's not for "balancing reasons" I can tell you that fucking much. There isn't anything balanced about calling in an enhanced Scorpion, with Wheelman on for added protection, and having a regular non-boss Banshee destroy it with a one-second burst of plasma fire. Seriously, that shit happened to me a week or two ago, and I had the same thing happen again with Goblin one-shotting my Wheelman-upgraded Corp Scorpion with his Needler. Everything about the REQ system just screams "typical manipulative fee-to-play bullshit." Had microtransactions been for cosmetic items only I wouldn't be as upset about this (keyword there being "as"; I don't approve of MTs on principle, regardless of what's locked behind them), but having gameplay items in the mix makes it far, far worse.

Halo does not need premium add-on content. Halo games make hundreds of millions of dollars within their first month, vastly more than their production and advertising budgets, and continue to sell well. They make more than enough to fund the development of an additional 10-15 multiplayer maps plus the budget for the next game. Unless Halo 5 cost waaaaaay more to make than previous entries in the series and ranks in the top 5 most expensive games of all time, even with sales that are far less impressive than previous titles it has already made several times its total budget. Adding freemium elements is just pure greed on MS's part. And you know 343i had no choice in the matter here. This was just pure cynical cash-grabbing modern AAA industry bullshit.

Premium add-on content has always caused issues in Halo. Originally it was premium map packs, but those are going to negatively effect people in some way. Either they make DLC maps mandatory for certain playlists, which upsets players who are unwilling or unable to spend money on new maps, or they don't make the DLC maps mandatory, which means that people who spent good money on those maps may not even get to play them that much, because neither Bungie nor 343i were smart enough to figure out how to pool players properly (I'm not a CoD fan, but one thing it does is properly pooling players in the matchmaking hoppers by whether or not they had DLC maps). This wasn't as bad at first as map packs were made free after a while, but the last time this was done was when Halo 3's Heroic Map Pack was made free back in March 2008. But, aside from Cold Storage (which for some reason was never made mandatory and rarely showed up in MM), every other map pack from the Legendary Map Pack to the Bullseye Map Pack still cost money to this very day. If 343i would tweak the matchmaking algorithm to be like CoD's so people who own DLC maps are guaranteed to be matched with others who own DLC maps, I'd be fine paying money for map packs if it also meant no more microtransactions, but honestly Halo is so profitable as-is, between game sales and merch and other money-makers, that there is no excuse besides pure greed for having premium add-on content.

When we were first told that Halo 5's DLC maps were going to be free, I had a feeling deep down that it was going to come with a catch. Anybody who defends microtransactions isn't merely ignoring the camel's nose poking into the tent, they are inviting the camel further into the tent.

There is one glimmer of hope. Apparently, microtransactions are not incredibly popular, and generate little revenue relative to what sales of the game itself does. At last count (Feb. 22), $1.5 million was spent on microtransactions in Halo 5. That's equivalent to only 25,000 copies of the game itself being sold assuming $60 per copy. 25k copies is about 0.5% of the 5-million-copy install base the game had at the end of January. $1.5M off of 5 million total players is an average of 33 cents per player. Compared to how much money Halo games, $1.5 million isn't a lot. I don't know how much it takes to make new maps, but $1.5M may not even be enough to cover those costs. Hopefully MS will interpret those numbers as being not worth the investment and doesn't mandate that 343i put microtransactions in Halo 5. Then again, those numbers are months old, and various promotional REQs may have increased average per-player expenditures quite a bit, thus emboldening MS. I certainly hope not, but I'm prepared for the worst.

And that's all I have to say about that. Here's some commentary on microtransactions from Jim Sterling:

http://www.thejimquisition.com/the-bullshit-roundup-microtransactions-in-tomb-raider-and-halo-5-star-wars-battlefronts-50-season-pass/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqNuS03k6gI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHszeYz5Mi0

And here's some other rants about the "Month of Mythic," some from people far more pissed than I am about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0BQ07cBI3I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOqggClZx84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc6-_qE7pR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PbKWE_U_IQ