Playlist Selection

Check out the playlist poll at the top of the blog.  Vote to voice your opinion.  If you leave a comment with your preferences as well, I can tailor playlist selection just to those that are on-line at any given time.  Otherwise, the voting is anonymous, and I will go with the majority vote even though people voting may not be playing.

I'm starting to hear more and more grumbling about the playlists that I pick for us to go into on clan night.  This is your opportunity to provide some feedback into what you'd like to play.  We are somewhat restricted in our player roster and party sizes in what playlists are available to us.  I'd like to know what YOU would like to play when we have 4 or more people on clan night.  We most often have 4-6 players.  In general, this is how I pick our playlists:

• 1 player: I'm the only one on and you are all late, so I'm annoyed.
• 2 players: Multi-team while we wait.
• 3 players: Multi-team or Team Slayer while we wait.
• 4 players: Multi-team or Team Slayer depending on daily challenges, or Firefight later in the night when we don't expect anybody else to sign on.
• 5 players: Invasion or custom game.
• 6 players: Invasion or custom game.
• 7 players: Custom game or Big Team Battle.
• 8 players: Custom game or Big Team Battle.
• 9+ players: Custom game.

This is my thought process behind the available playlists:

• Rumble Pit: 8 players, 7 losers, 1 winner.  That means most (if not all) everybody in the party would lose each game.  I don't generally see a lot of benefit for us to ever play in this playlist.
• Living Dead: Zombies is fun, but I will start a Custom game with our preferred settings if people want to play zombies.  Matchmaking settings are a little weird (Evade for humans, 2-3 starting zombies) and end really fast.
• Team Slayer (64% win, 1.33 K/D): This is our preference with 4 or less or with 6 or more.  With 5-6, it is customary that the 1-2 odd guys out throw the game (e.g.: assassinations only) so that the other 4 guys get a win.  Benefits the greater whole.  With 8 people, we just play normal because half the clan always gets a win and we log matchmaking stats/challenges too.  We can also boost challenges/achievements with 8 people, but requires that everybody play nice.  And much of the clan tends to have A.D.D., in that people get impatient and start screwing around, making it harder for those trying to boost to get it done.  Which makes it takes longer.  Which makes the A.D.D. folks more restless.  And the cycle gets vicious.
• Team Swat (50% wins, 1.24 K/D): Headshots only.  The clan, in general, sucks at headshots.  So we suck at this gametype.
• Team Snipers: Sniper guns for everyone.  The clan, in general, sucks at sniping.  So we suck at this gametype.
• Team Objective (50% wins, 0.50 K/D): Capture the Flag, Assault, Territories, etc.  As is evidenced by the 50% win percentage, the clan, in general, sucks at being coordinated.  So we aren't real great at this gametype.  We've never been good at Objectives in Halo 2 or 3, it's not a surprise in Halo Reach either.
• Multi-Team (3% wins, 1.47 K/D): 6 teams of two.  We rarely have 12 people on clan night, so with 3-11 people there are better playlists where we can play together.  For 2 people. I really like to go here and play games like King of the Hill or Oddball where we ignore the hill and just get kills instead.  We lose the game, but rack up hella kills for challenges.  You can see the high K/D ratio, but low win percentage.  With 4 people we can go and mess with 8 other people and still have a good chance of voting the game we want.   However teams often drop when they don't get the vote they want, so with 6 players we may have 2-3 people drop which means there aren't enough randoms left to get the kills we need.
• Big Team Battle (54% wins, 1.11 K/D): 8v8.  You'll see us play this sometimes, but the objectives are generally harder to get than in Invasion, so I avoid this unless we have more than 6.  If we have 6 or less, that means we have 2 or more random people that seldom participate as part of the team.  Generally speaking, random people either don't have mics plugged in and therefore are bad teammates, or are too annoying in team chat and have to be muted.
• Invasion: 6v6 (64% wins, 0.88 K/D).  The objectives are super clear, and there's only two maps to learn.  People complain, but in my opinion, this is the best game type for us with parties of 5-6.  Despite the lower kill ratio, we win in Invasion a lot more than we do in BTB.
• Firefight: 4 people vs the AI.  I'll occasionally bring us in here late at night when everyone else is gone, but games can be up to 30 minutes so it sucks on clan night if people are waiting to get in.
• Score Attack: Single player.  Duh.
• Co-Op campaign: We can do custom games for this, no need for matchmaking.
• Team Arena (63% wins, 1.05 K/D): Competitive 4v4 Team Slayer.  Nobody is really good enough to play here, or dedicated enough to actually get rated in a season.  To give some perspective of the competition here, there are five divisions, I ranked in Iron, the lowest of the five divisions.  darknorpo ranked in Bronze, the second lowest.
• Doubles Arena: Competitive 2v2 Team Slayer.  See above . 2 players only.
• Custom games: Both in Halo 2 and Halo 3, when the on-line competition got too good and it wasn't fun to get face pwned, we had more fun in custom games (zombies, Jenga, freeze tag, etc). 

If you like custom games but don't like the ones I have for Reach, feel free to find new ones for us to try.  You can save your own custom gametype, make a new map, or find somebody else's.  bungie.net and forgehub.com are both good resources.  I want clan night to be fun for everyone.