Halo Reach: And Lo, There Shall Be A Patch

EDIT: UPDATED!!! First patch drops TUESDAY!

So you’re playing Halo Reach! Yeah! And you notice that the matchmaking playlists… are boring. And they don’t often really work well.

Fear not!

Bungie has stated that the reason that matchmaking is relatively vanilla and boring is that they’re still seeing what works and what doesn’t. In fact, they’re coming out with a patch October 5 that will fix a bunch of pet peeves people are having (NOTE: this list is not comprehensive):

• SWAT variants will be removed from Big Team Battle and Team Slayer and moved into their own, brand-new, 100% Hemorrhage-free “Team SWAT” playlist. (For those of you not in the know, SWAT is Slayer with no shields, no motion tracker, infinite ammo, and the only loadout available is DMR/Magnum/Sprint.)
• The gametype weighting for the Team Slayer playlist is being adjusted to fall in line with voting trends. More standard Slayer, less crazy variants.
• Team Objective will now feature the Powerhouse map more often, and will even have 1-Flag and Stockpile games on it.
• A new gametype (Rocket Race) is being added to Multi-Team. Basically, it’s a Race, only the guy in the back of the Mongoose has an unlimited-ammo rocket launcher. Expect hilarity.
• “Classic” (Sprint-only) variants are being removed from Big Team Battle, and Team Snipers will appear much less often. Again, this is to keep gametype weightings in line with voting data.
• “Pro” (no-radar) variants are being removed from Arena, and the Boardwalk map is being removed from Arena Doubles. In addition, for the Arena playlists, Zealot will be replaced with a variant called “Arena Zealot” with altered initial spawn points and a “Return to Battlefield” time-limit soft-kill zone to prevent people who camp in space.
• Credit earn rates for Gruntpocalypse are being reduced.

And here’s what’s going down with a second patch later in October (NOTE: again, not comprehensive):

• The controversial betrayal-booting system (which allows victims of teamkilling to kick the offender from the game) has been revamped: it now takes three instances of teamkilling to trigger a potential boot, just like it was in Halo 3.
• Friendly fire has been disabled in Firefight Matchmaking.
• Team Snipers will get its own playlist.
• “Pro” variants may or may not return to Arena, or get their own Arena playlist, just in time for season 3
• Campaign Co-Op Matchmaking will go live. Note that, since people vote on which mission to play, and the voting system doesn’t take game completion into account, you’re going to want to beat the game first, either alone or with a friend. For that reason, Campaign Co-Op Matchmaking will be restricted to Corporal-level players and above (keep earning those credits!)