But Tails, what's the point of playing the game if you can't get credits? Certainly it's not just for the enjoyment of playing. Who plays games just for fun any more?

Computer games are serious business.

The % of people who will hit the daily cap with any sort of regularity is miniscule, and if it wasn't in place people would have already cheated their way to the highest rank which Bungie hasn't even revealed what it is or what you get. They also said more than 6 months before launch that community milestones would have to be met to for some unlocks, etc. The amount on the cap is so high doesn't seem to suggest that they're trying to force people's ranks to be similar as there are already huge disparities, so I don't think that's why they did it either.

It's sort of bullshit yes, but if you're accumulating ~60,000 credits in a 24 hours often enough where this is actually a problem I think you should probably re-evaluate some things.

So anyone care to speculate what one would need to do to unlock the bits of armour from the rest of Noble team? I'd guess that earning the top level commendation in a sniper type thing would get you the shoulder pads with bullets on or the netting on the back of the chest piece, stuff like that. There's no way they'd put in individual armour modals for the team and not let people wear them eventually.

You can see the camo netting chest at Captain, and buy it at Major, I think.

Oh really? I figured it'd be something more exciting than just "Earn a lot of credits" since they sorta hinted at there being more than that involved in unlocking some stuff.

Well, many of the armor unlocks such as the noble team helmets require other stuff than just credits, often the criteria is earning certain set of achievements. You also unlock certain armor on Halo Waypoint, and by earning certain achievements in other Halo games.

You unlock two helmets and a chest piece for having finished H3 and ODST along with Reach and for getting a few easy achievements. Had I ever played ODST on anything other than Normal I'd have unlocked all of those on day one, as it is I unlocked five of the seven unlockables via Waypoint. I think I once saw "armour award unlocked" pop up while we were playing through Campaign but aside from that, it all seems to be credit-related. I'm sure there'll be other stuff released as time goes on like they promised but so far, so Rainbow Six in terms of unlocking stuff, I was hoping for a bit more variety to be honest.

Avatar Awards. There are 5 helmets. They are, for the most part, not all that difficult to obtain.

Some of the options in the armoury list don't appear until you've hit a certain rank, though.

Maybe by time release they meant how long it would take to hit certain ranks, since they added the Cr cap. Who the fuck knows.

Oh yeah, my avatar is actually wearing one of those helmets. I assumed from the pre-release stuff that there'd be more stuff like the Waypoint unlocks, armour pieces you unlock by reaching certain commendation levels, gaining achievements and so forth. I think I read somewhere that the skull face helmet you only get by buying every other helmet so I guess there'll be similar shoulders, chests etc but I suppose anything they give specific requirements for is only going to cause odd behaviour in players grinding for it.

This week's BWU is up, talk of playlist changes, cR AND current Max rank caps.

First off, playlist changes for the first playlist update; word on the street the date is October 7th, and the Update itself mentions they are already working on other stuff for another update later in October. For the first update:


SWAT being gone is obviously good, still concerned about Snipers existing at all in BTB (and to a lesser extent in TS), but still an improvement. Removing the Drop Shield from the objective games was really needed, although that does remove the hilarious comedy from those matches as that shit was broken. Scorpion being taken out on Hemorrhage is also an improvement; Wraiths are still going to be deadly, but Wraiths are way more managable with the smaller vehicles and infantry than Scorpions are. I don't really play Arena so I don't have much opinion on that stuff. Only other minor complaint I have is still no new maps in rotation; rumor was that there would be two new Forged maps coming, hopefully in the 2nd October update?


Regarding the Daily cR cap, they don't release the exact number (again it's supposedly about 60k) and re-confirm that you will not be banned for playing a lot so long as it's legitimate playing; some people were finding ways to exploit by somehow resetting their ranks and commendations so they were re-earning all those cR which is where that confusion came from. Basically very few people are legitimately hitting the daily cap, and mostly as a result of Campaign and Firefight play, but there doesn't appear to be any indication that this will be going away. Also worth noting that they've already said before that Firefight (specifically Score Attack/Grunt Party) is already probably too heavy on providing cR and Commendations and that they are "looking at it." So it's likely that will get toned down at some point anyway, which would probably prevent 90% of the people currently hitting the cap from hitting it anyway.

Now what I hadn't heard is that there is actually a max rank currently in Reach. From the BWU:

Mixed feelings about the current rank cap. I can understand why they would have a Daily cap in place, but having an overall cap seems somewhat silly; unless they lift it much sooner rather than later, you're going to have a good number of people at that cap. Not only does this sort of kill any sort of novelty for being the "top rank," I can't imagine people who hit that are going to want to play anymore until they raise the cap. I know if I hit the rank cap I wouldn't really have any incentive to play anymore until they raised it. I'm totally willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt on this one, I just think they're treading a very fine line here that could go badly real easy.

Also in typing that out I just realized that if we ARE going to be sitting on this current max rank for a bit, I'm almost not sure why they would bother with the daily cap. Hmmmm. It will be interesting to see how they manage this; Luke Smith (as far as I know) is more or less in charge of this stuff, and I've got faith in the guy but this could wind up burning people as well. Guess we'll see.

If anybody out there hits Lt. Colonel Grade 3 anytime soon they seriously need to take a fucking break. I have one guy on my list who is currently Lt. Colonel Grade 1 and he's been on almost every day all day (abusing Gruntpocalypse/Score Attack) and is much worse than Skills is with Achievements. It's retarded.

It's going to take a while before you even pass Captain Grade 3 (and then you have to go through Major 1-3) so what's the rush.

tl;dr who gives a shit about level caps get a fucking life

They're not stopping you from the act of shooting grunts, Devo, they're stopping you from gaining credits. If that's equivalent to having fun for you, then you should seriously reevaluate why you play.

And let's be honest, Devo, if you're playing Gruntpocalypse more than once or twice in a row you're either easily amused or grinding cR/Commendations.

Daravon, I can't help but compare the rank cap in this to WoW raid progression, where a select group of a few people hit the wall early and wait eagerly for Blizz to release the next bit of raid content (all the while complaining that there wasn't enough for them), while the majority of players take their time to get there and half the time don't even see the wall before it gets moved.

It remains to be seen the pace that they move the wall at, obviously, but I see similarities there.

WE GOTTA DO THREE MORE GAMES, SHAKE

I got moved up to Gold. You are still Bronze, Bungie hates you so much. ;____;

How hard is the arena compared to, say normal TS ?
Is there much of a difference?

To be fair, there is no point. If someone is so desperate to unlock a certain armour chunk that they're willing to play Gruntpocalypse 12 hours a day then that's their perogative and it affects me in no way what so ever. Hell, if people are such losers that they want to sit through a cutscene at the end of a level over and over again all day just to get a different picture next to their name I say let 'em. Given that matchmaking still uses the true-skill system behind the scenes to actually match you to similarly skilled players, it makes exactly zero difference to me whether other people want to waste their lives doing boring shit for a meaningless online rank.

Genuine question, surely the incentive to play a game is that you enjoy playing it? Do you actually like playing Halo or are you just playing it to get to the top rank because that's a pretty weird way to approach a leisure activity in my opinion.

I was ahead of you in most of those games! RAGE.

Comes back to the carrot on the stick thing again; even going back to Halo 2, 99% of people would never hit the top rank, but it was always something to aspire to. Let's say that I hit the max rank cap before they lift it (and if I hit the max rank cap and they haven't raised it, they've got some serious fucking problems), the game has a billion ways in-game to track my progress and improvement, and that will be for all intents and purposes shut off. Dangling dozens of commendations and ranks and whatnot in front of a player but offering them literally no way to proceed one iota towards any of them is kinda fucked. Absolutely none of this applies to me since I doubt I've ever come that close to the daily cap, I just find this interesting as an observer. I also don't really understand why they have a daily cap and a max rank cap, they should have just managed the daily cap a little more effeciently so people could still progress (even if not as much as they would like) without just hitting a total brick wall. I'm curious to see how this works out and how they handle it; with CoD coming out in November, if they fuck it up they WILL lose players to that, especially with CoD being the ultimate carrot on a stick game.

I guess since I've never been in a position to hit top rank in Halo games, the concept of giving a shit about rank has always been an alien one to me. Even in Rainbox 6 Vegas 2, a game I'm actually not too bad at, rank has always been for me something that happens as a natural result of playing the thing, rather than being something to aspire to.

Anyway, I'm glad they're shaking up the playlists, I'm fucking bored of SWAT and snipers. I think they should make a version of Haemmorage with six Scorpions at each end, make it a proper tank battle game. I'm glad to see Rocket Race coming back too because it's awesome.

I spent a bit of time pissing about with Forge World last night for the first time ever. I made a race track of sorts although it's totally unsuibtable for more than one person at once so it's more of a time trial thing. Also you need to have invulnerability turned on or you're unlikely to survive the big jump. My best time for a lap last night was about 2:20. It's in my fileshare if anyone's interested.

Now I've got a feel for how it works, I think I might try to make a Banshee race or maybe a Wipeout style race track for Ghosts.

Hahaha, our spread for yesterday, my numbers on the left, yours on the right.

1578 - 1339
1087 - 1376
1414 - 1481
1529 - 1497
1488 - 1331
1326 - 1326
1390 - 1199
1558 - 1479
1105 - 1382

5-3-1 indicates I had a better day than you, surprisingly enough. I honestly thought you had me a few more times than that. I guess because my consistency is about the 1400 mark or there about (with the occasional 1500 game) is why I move up? I don't know, TrueSkill is silly.

I thought I was doing better than you, but clearly that was only in the first few and then "THREE MORE GAMES" ruined me.

I've done well today, though!

For real though, that three more games stuff is a curse. Gotta know when to hold em and know how to fold 'em. I like how badly I bottomed out in that last one though.

Comparing Arena numbers? Fucking nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrds