Halo 4 - Weekly Infinity Update #14

Last week, through a particularly entertaining video, you were informally introduced to Bravo, the newest member of our Matchmaking Systems Team. While he’s frequently working on being the embodiment of your wonder, I did manage to pull him away from that long enough to have him write up the following summary of next week’s Matchmaking update.

On Monday, Spartan Ops continues with episode 10, the final episode of Season 1, which will of course contain five new Spartan Ops missions. Also debuting Monday is Team Throwdown, our premiere competitive playlist. We have been monitoring community game type settings and feedback over the past few months, and teamed up with competitive community leaders Walshy, StrongSide and Gh057ayame to build this playlist. We created an experience that will feature the popular “v2” settings and maps, which have been carefully developed and tweaked for competitive play. The playlist will feature Team Slayer, Capture the Flag, Extraction and King of the Hill at launch. Here are some of the details:

Teams
4 vs. 4

Initial Respawn
Disabled

Death Cam
Disabled

Personal Ordanance
Enabled

Join In Progress
Disabled

Guests
Disabled

Primary Weapon
Battle Rifle

Secondary Weapon
None

Game Types
CTF
Extraction
Team Slayer
KotH

Maps
Adrift
Simplex
Solace
Dispatch
Haven
Shutout
Abandon
Haven
Shutout
Simplex
Solace

Additionally, we are aware that there is a portion of the competitive community who’d prefer to see game types that utilize the DMR, as well as more of Halo 4’s sandbox. As a result, we are working with Walshy, StrongSide and Gh057ayame to develop alternate settings with balanced loadouts that offer varied options for Primary Weapons, Armor Abilities, Tactical Packages and Support Upgrades. We are still making final tweaks to these settings – they may launch with the playlist on Monday, or may be released in a future update. We’ll be sure to announce a final, detailed breakdown of the settings that will be featured in the playlist in the Matchmaking section of the forums, so be on the lookout for that this weekend. We look forward to hearing your feedback on this playlist and will make changes and updates accordingly on a regular basis.

Title Update

In early January, we announced that we had started work on a title update for Halo 4. That work is nearing completion, and it is expected to release within the next two weeks. It addresses some of the concerns we’ve been hearing from the community, but just to set your expectations accordingly, we know we still have work to do. There’s more balancing to be done and more issues to address, and we are actively working with the Halo 4 game team to investigate the feasibility of additional fixes. We’ll share the complete change list after it launches, but here are a few of the big ticket items:

• Reduced the range of the Boltshot’s damage scaling over distance. The previous effective range for 1-hit kills was 20'-25'. The range has been reduced to 15'.

• Fixed an issue that did not allow players to create respawn timers or disable instant respawn in custom games.

• Fixed issues with friendly fire against vehicles. If FF is disabled, damage / EMPs from friendly sources will no longer damage vehicles that are fully controlled by your team.

The full changelog will be released when the update is.

And with that, I’m putting a bow on this sucker and calling it done. I hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day, Forever Alone Day or whatever you happen to celebrate, and I’ll see you back here next week for a Bulletin that is sure to be... "majestic".