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Fan frustration with the Halo Infinite Multiplayer Battle Pass and more came to a boil over the weekend, as the Halo subreddit was locked down to prevent harassment of 343 employees.
The mods of r/halo have since reopened the subreddit, elaborating the exact causes of the lockdown which prevented any new posts being made over the weekend.
“The primary cause was users on the sub directly harassing, insulting, and being toxic to each other for having different opinions”, they said. “This level of animosity and overall anger manifested itself in different ways, including rare cases of doxxing and death threats. The lockdown was not solely due to death threats. The lockdown was not to stifle or remove criticism against the game or 343; the front page for the entire lockdown was filled with criticisms, and the front page now post-lockdown is topped by new ones. Respectful criticisms and disagreements will always be allowed. Insulting others is not.”
They also said they would be taking more stringent action on troublemakers, doling out more temporary bans going forward.
“The number one goal of the mod team is civil discussion. Insults will be met with longer tempbans. People coming here specifically to antagonize other users will not be allowed”, they said.
The Saga of Halo Infinite
While Halo Infinite doesn’t officially launch until later this week, the game’s multiplayer has been free-to-play for a while now. While fans generally praised the Halo-brand of fast gameplay, the general consensus was that Halo Infinite Battle Pass was a little too aggressively monetized, with most customization options such as armor pieces all being locked behind the premium battle pass.
On top of that, you got these points by completing challenges- many of these were game type-specific, but Halo Infinite sported one unique flaw: you couldn’t choose your gametype. These were randomly assigned to you every time you hit play, likely to keep certain gametypes from being underpopulated. That means that if your challenge was to win games in Oddball, you had a non-zero chance of simply never getting to try the gametype.
Combine all these and you get a game which players felt was overly grindy- sure, you weren’t getting gameplay advantages, but customizing your Spartan has been a big part of Halo ever since it was introduced in Halo 3.
343 Developer Speaks Out
343 employee known on the reddit as Sketch also spoke out about the unpopular choices, as well as the whole debacle over the weekend.
“First, I’m going to stress that I 100% understand and generally agree with the frustrations most are expressing even if I don’t agree with the attacks and ways in which some choose to express those feelings”, they write.
“The launch playlists were setup as they were to take a measured approach”, they continued. “We have UI limitations with the game right now in the way and number of playlists that are exposed. We have complex and not-ideal progression and challenge systems intertwined in playlists and modes that are not necessarily trivial to de-couple and change. (yes the entire challenge/progression system needs a lot of work – something the team is acutely aware of and prioritizing)”.
