Now for my actual responses:
Quote (xx0ur3n @ Jul 23 2011 10:31am)
Nothing you claim holds any water. Nor do any of your points correlate at all, so your support for your argument is pretty loose.
I love the usage of vague reasoning, "the 3sk accurate pistol took a tone of skill to use, and the game had the AR and PR to rely on at close range." This is completely subjective, and not only that, but you don't even elaborate on your point. At the same time, it does not disprove my point one bit. I am claiming that a good competitive game requires a very skillful, semi-powerful, balanced starting weapon so power weapons are not so overpowering that they become a set of free kills, but rather if used properly (skillfully), can be an advantage for the player. In halo 1 if you had rockets, you could still easily die if you did not have good awareness and if the other player was very skilled. In halo 2 if you had rockets but you got teamshot you instantly died. In halo reach rockets become a set of skill-less, free kills because of how long the kill time for the DMR is- the gun must be upgraded in order to preserve the games competitiveness.
The H2 BR was an incredibly good asset to the game was because of how amazing of a weapon it was. Because of it's accuracy, it welcomed precision and punished lack luster game play. Adding on to that was the kill time for it, it was slower than the h1 pistol to make team shooting very important, but just fast enough to keep the games pace at a high rate. Because of this, getting teamshot in H2 almost meant instant death, bringing a whole new element of team skill that was not nearly as present in H1. This BR is what made H2 the perfect medium; a perfect marriage between individual skill and teamwork.
Again, none of your points disprove or even relate to my point, so in the context of this argument, most of your statements are null.
My reply wasn't only to the post that I quoted, but to the entire topic. I clearly wasn't only addressing your post by itself, as I didn't mention anything about power weapons. I'm not sure why you chose to reply with a bunch of random shit about power weapons in relation to the starting weapon in each game; all of that is incredibly obvious. Comparing the DMR/Reach rockets to the H2 BR/H2 rockets is a pointless comparison because Reach's rockets are incredibly overpowered; the strength of the DMR is irrelevant. Unless Bungie drastically reduces the power of the rockets, they will always be 4 guaranteed kills.
Quote (xx0ur3n @ Jul 23 2011 10:37am)
False. Halo reach has about 1/3 of the auto aim that CE is. In a purely aiming perspective, it is harder to aim in Reach. If you dragged your reticule across the screen and the reticule hit a player, it would drag for about a quarter of a second because of how much auto-aim was in CE. Halo 2 had a little less, then halo 3 had a less less than halo 2, and now in reach its been reduced even more. In bungie's eyes, they see that even though they add skill-less concepts to the game, they compensate by making it harder to aim. However, they also counteract that by adding a shit ton of bullet magnetism. Bullet magnetism is the curving your bullets do to hit somebody. In halo 3 or halo reach, if you had half your reticule covering somebody's head, then your bullets will only go in that half of the reticule (off host, on host you have halo 1 style bullet magnetism). Halo 1 took so much skill to shoot is because of a couple aspects: 1) player models are much smaller, 2) you had much less strafing momentum, making strafing a huge asset as well as making players be able to move generally faster, and 3) there was no bullet magnetism. If you had half your reticule covering a guy's head in H1, the bullet would still go in the center; this made H1 such a skill game because of the amount of precision you had to have in your shot.
CE has almost no auto-aim. I went on CE just now to confirm it, and I saw no auto-aim whatsoever when it came to actual gunfights(There was quite a bit of auto-aim when the other player wasn't moving, but as soon as he began moving the auto-aim disappeared). Halo 2 had a TON of AA in every aspect of the game. As for the second half of this post, thanks for agreeing with me in so many words.