- Join In Progress Rant:

Twice yesterday I got joined into complete unwinnable games. I mean completely unwinnable! 17,000 to 11,000, 1:47 left, enemy has all three control points unwinnable. 12,000 to 6,000 enemy has B and C on Blind Watch unwinnable! I get that join in progress can help maintain a good experience for the remaining players when someone quits or get disconnected. That's great and something I always wished for in Halo. But at some point a game become so far gone that joining me into it is only ever going to make me mad. There needs to be some sensible limits to join in progress...

Proposed Join In Progress Limits:
- Do not join in progress if a Control, Salvage, or Clash type game has a score spread of more than 2000 or 3000 points.
- Do not join in progress if there are less than five minutes remaining in a game.
- Do not join in progress if an enemy team has all three Control Zones.

Yes, it sucks that a few people on the losing side of a game will have a bad experience with no help coming, but I think it's far better to contain the bad experience to those few players than to spread it to people who expected matchmaking to find them a good game. As part of this, to try and help limit the number of players stuck beyond the join in progress limits, I would also love to see tougher penalties for quitting out of a game. Much tougher. Quitting should:

- Cause a player to forfeit any XP earned in the current game, and should roll back things like bounties and weapon upgrades as if the game had never taken place.
- Cause a player to forfeit any XP, Marks, Reputation, and Random Loot earned in their next game.
- Display a message each time a player quits explaining what they have forfeited along with a continue button that cannot be activated until a short countdown completes.

All players should get one unpenalized quit every few hours. Sometimes you really do have to leave and don't deserve to be penalized. But beyond that... No mercy! :p

- Clearing the Sniper Nest
A short, but mostly true story!

Natela Murk slid a fresh pack of ammo into her Despot SA/5 rocket launcher and moved forward. Three months ago the orange tinted greens and grays of the "Shores of Time" Crucible area was just a confusing maze of caves and clearings… Now, it was almost like home, the young, teenage Hunter knew it so well. After hundreds of matches she was nearly as familiar with similar training areas back on Earth, Mars, the Moon, and even Mercury! It hadn't been easy. She'd been shot, stabbed, body slammed, set on fire, and disintegrated more times than she could count.

But she had also learned.

That was how she knew to dive to her left the moment she spotted the spotted the sniper targeting her some twenty meters past the waterfall. She squeezed off a rocket then scrambled out of line of fire just soon enough to turn what would have been a kill shot into a painful graze of her right arm. Her rocket detonated an instant later... but had obviously missed. The nearby enemy was still showing on her radar... She tried the approach again, and carefully stepped into the center of the narrow tunnel. Her rocket launcher's smart-seeker head immediately began beeping and she fired just as a sniper round tore through her. The result was, unfortunately, the same. She'd made it back to cover and survived but then so had the sniper. He must have ducked up against the wall to the right of Control Zone C and avoided the majority of her rocket’s blast…

Out of rockets, Natela pulled out her own sniper rifle... a long slender weapon with a mid-zoom precision scope. Her Ghost had tagged it as "Epitaph 2261.” Neither Tesni nor Abner knew why the weapon was called that. In fact, no one she'd yet met, Guardian, Cryptarch, Vanguard, or Frame could shed light on the strange name, but the gun worked well all the same. She wasn't the best sniper, she'd first found that out in the Old Russian town of Arkhangelsk when a Fallen Vandal had easily out shot her from a rooftop across from the building she was desperately trying to defend from. Even now, she wasn't much better as a fixed sniper. She lacked that spot-aim-shoot reflex that some Guardians seemed to possess, but over time she’d found another way.

Natela first aimed down her pulse rifle’s sight, envisioning the enemy sniper she couldn’t yet see. Barely moving she swapped to Epitaph 2261 and peered down the scope at the tunnel wall directly ahead. Then, in a smooth motion, she rolled out to her right. The stone wall in her scope slid left revealing a long line of sight to the back of the arena and then, an instant later, her target as he slid into view from the right. He fired, but missed as he’d expected her to plant herself in the middle of the tunnel before adjusting her aim. Instead, she aimed on the move and let loose a single round as the enemy’s head came into view.

Bullseye!

Natela’s joy was far too short lived, however, as her helmet’s optics picked up and painted a second sniper’s scope… this one far farther back at the base of the long, sloped piece of debris at the edge of the training area. Fortunately, he only managed to hit her on his second shot as she rushed forward. She yelled in pain, but managed to stumble into cover up against the large rock marking the end of the tunnel. Heavy drops of water rained down on her from the dripping waterfall above as she fought back the pain and quickly recovered. A moment later she smiled beneath her helmet!

A slight charged tingling in her gun hand had let Natela know it was time for payback!

Drawing on the Traveler’s Light, she willed a flaming hand cannon into being. The Golden Gun was hot to the touch, even through her gloves, but she ignored the pain and circled the rock. She spotted the first sniper, the one who had just shot her, as she crossed into Control Zone C. He was far too slow to react and exploded in a burst of fire. A second rival Guardian was perched on top of the slanted metal structure. He was quicker to react and managed to flinch out of the way of her second shot. Natela lost him as the leaves overhead partially obscured her vision but then found him again a second later. He burned bright a brief moment later as her third and final shot struck him dead center in the chest.

Three quick kills against entrenched snipers was an amazing feet, but the battle wasn’t over yet!

There was a fourth target ahead around the large pillar, Natela’s radar told her. She retrieved her pulse rifle once more and sprinted forward. Time was short. If she’d detected him it was all too likely that he had noticed her as well!

He hadn’t.

The final member of the impromptu sniper’s nest was facing to her left, covering the Vex tunnel that allowed passage part way from Control Zone B to Control Zone A. Natela lined up the green holographic sight of her surprisingly effective, small clipped, exotic pulse rifle and opened fire. The Warlock dashed forward in surprise as her first burst struck him, but Natela's aim never wavered. Her second and third burst tore into her target, and a forth, aimed slightly higher, dropped him in a heap.

“Good work!” Lord Shaxx said calmly as the match ended. “One more like that and we just might win this!”

Natela stood stunned for a moment. Her team had been losing when she’d first entered the top of the damp tunnel. And now… they’d won?! She had lead them to victory?! Without even thinking about it she put away Bad Juju and broke out into a victory dance.

Well… that was a bit dramatized, but only a bit. The match yesterday didn’t actually end with that fourth kill, but I’m sure my 4 and 0 run against the four snipers lining the back of the map behind B and C pushed my team into the lead and into victory a minute or so later.

- Question for the Voidwalkers

Every once in a while I get outright killed by an Axion Bolt grenade. Does that initial burst maybe do damage allowing one of the seekers to finish me off? Or am I maybe being tracked and hit by more than one seeker somehow? Have you ever gotten a kill just with one of those grenades? If so, what does it look like from your perspective?

Thanks! :)