Fuck 343 Industries

For those who don't know, 343 Industries is the developer in control of the Halo franchise. Bungie created it, but it was left to 343 when Bungie abandoned it for other bullshit projects. The last Halo game Bungie made was Halo Reach. Within 6 months or so of its release, they left it in the rather incompetent hands of 343i.

343i didn't fix any of the problems in Reach, and they even managed to copy half of them into Halo 4 while taking a giant shit on the franchise copying ideas from Call of Duty. Halo 4 is an abomination, but that's another subject entirely. Halo Reach suffered mostly from the same thing a lot of other games do: complete and total assholes abusing it with zero consequences. People boost matchmaking, betray you when you pick up the weapon/vehicle they wanted, idle co-op (Firefight) for free credits/XP, grief in co-op, and hide in co-op to complete the commendation for completing rounds without dying.

What does 343i do? Not jack shit. They could take complaints on the assholes and reset/ban them, but they're too fuckin lazy. They're also too fuckin lazy to patch the XP output in firefight to keep people who don't participate from being awarded anything. They're even too fuckin lazy to tweak the number of voting rounds in firefight so there are enough to get the maps we want every time. Boosting in competitive multiplayer is also stupid easy to solve, but they won't do that either. All they have to do is stop letting people take parties large enough to control the entire lobby into matchmaking. Limit it so no more than a full team can search each playlist. Simple, yes? Apparently, not for them. "Oh, but what about clans and friends who want to play against each other?" That's what customs are fucking for, assholes! Fuck clans.

About a week ago, stat tracking on Reach went down completely. No kills, deaths, wins, etc count. Has 343i addressed this issue? Nope. They haven't even acknowledged this issue!! I'd go so far as to speculate that they did it on purpose. The game is set to go free for the Games With Gold program later this month, so they obviously don't give a fuck about it anymore. People have posted on 343i's Halo Waypoint forums numerous times the past week demanding answers and getting nothing. We had a similar problem a couple years ago (late 2011?) where the commendations in the game would freeze after you earned a specific amount of XP each day. They tried to raise the daily credit cap, which was fucking retarded in the first place. They had no business ever limiting the progress of legitimate players. If I play 16 hours a day, I want my XP for every motherfucking match! Plenty of people did play the game to that extreme too. This was one of those mistakes I said they carried over to Halo 4, along with the XP payout to people who sat in co-op doing nothing. Anyway, that commendation freezing problem took them THREE MONTHS to fix! MONTHS! To fix something they fucking broke because of something that was bullshit in the first place. Nice fucking job Bungie and 343i.

Hell, 343i can't even program an internet forum properly. The dumbasses set their browser cookies to only last 4 hours. I've had sites keep me logged in for 4 YEARS! That's the whole fucking point of cookies! To remember your goddamn login! Not hassle you every 4 fucking hours! Who the fuck do they think they are, NASA!?!? The email notification of forum replies hasn't worked in years either. Plus, when they ban you from the forum you have no access to your private messages. I find this funny since the staff always sends you a private message rather than emailing you, so you can't read what they said until you're unbanned. I was recently banned for posting "discriminatory" comments and flaming, simply for screaming about the problems still occurring on Reach. I couldn't figure out what they even meant by "discriminatory" until I posted again on something completely pointless and mentioned that I thought the fact that sprees don't reset after you hit the last one was retarded. Yes, they actually banned me for saying a random aspect of the game mechanics was "retarded." The even edited the word "retarded" out of my post. This time, I'm banned until the year 4752. I also have a new private message that I can't read until the ban expires. These guys are a special kind of genius.

If they would put half as much effort into policing the game, as they do their bullshit forums, the game would be a much better experience. That's alright. I only put 6000 hours on the game. What the hell do I know? Just ban me because I used the word "retarded" on the forum dedicated to an M rated adult fucking video game. Excellent job guys. Can't wait to play Halo 5 next year.