Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

I think I might have mentioned this before... I start slow when I play Halo 3 online. While it's embarrassing in Team Slayer to spend the first four minutes dying 52 times without a kill, it's worse in Lone Wolves where no one can carry me to victory. Almost without fail, I start a game by dying at least 4 or 5 times before getting a kill. Invariably by this time the guy in the lead has 4 or 5 kills, which means not only am I already -5 in my kill/death ratio, I'm also a whopping 10 kills behind the leader. So if I want to win, I need to get moving.

Come on get down with the sickness

As a result I am playing from behind. Sometimes I win in dramatic fashion (see Cal vs. Stanford.) Most of the time I get close enough to have a shot and then fall short.

One reason might be my strategy on every map. If I’m on Sandtrap, for example, I go straight for a Warthog gun. This will maximize my kills early on and hopefully give me some momentum going into the later part of the match. The problem with this strategy is that I usually go after the coveted weapons. On the pit, while I am going for the sword or rocket launcher, so is some guy who is plotting my demise. Often I am on the losing end of these duels.

I consider every meeting with a single other enemy a duel. My goal is always to kill the enemy during these duels, even if I have to die to do it. If I know I’m hosed, I try to stick them with a grenade. If I have a rocket launcher and he is right next to me, I shoot at our feet. I know it’s not the best strategy, but if I know I’m going to Respawn Land, I want to at least have some company.

At the end of the day, however, I don’t know why I start off cold and get hot. This is true no matter how many times I’ve played for the night or whether or not I’m in the zone. Ultimately it makes my matches more suspenseful, because I can't just jump to a huge lead and try to hold it.

And yes, I finally hit Skill 35, so I'm a Commander. What match got me the rank? You guessed it: Crazy King.

A Top Down Perspective

In case you're wondering, no, I haven't engaged Active Camo. And no, I'm not just taking a long time to respawn. I haven't posted since Christmas. Why? Acute Bronchitis. I missed a lot of work and I slept a lot. But I have managed to play some Halo 3. And I've noticed as the matches, days, weeks, and months speed by, I tend to look at the game from high above.

Now if I could just figure out how to blast that blog entry down there!

First of all, I now believe I will see the rank of Commander afterall. I've made it to skill 34. One more and I get my second star. However, I made Major on November 17th. That was eight weeks ago. To put it in perspective, it took me just six weeks to get from skill 1 to skill 30. It's so easy to drop, and so tough to climb, it might be another few weeks, but I know I'll get there.

Will I get any higher?

Time will tell. I seem to have peaked in my abilities, and more and more often I'm running into General Headshot every where I look. How these people can get 20+ head shots in a game is beyond me. I'd really like that Brigadier bird. It's a nice looking rank. However you do face the eventuality of ranking yourself out of competition, so that the only people you get set up against can kill you so easily your corpses just pile up one on top of another like some weird SPARTAN pile.

I've also learned I really do prefer ranked matches over social matches. It's unfortunate, that. Because I prefer to play a few Lone Wolves matches (ranked), and then join up with my clan for the rest of the night, playing whatever they're playing. Which is usually Big Team Battle (social) or Team Objective (again, social.) Nothing wrong with it, I just like that ranked matches count more. But playing with your friends is what it's all about, I'm coming to appreciate.

Another thing I've learned is that there is a misconception that rank = ability. Sure you have to be skilled enough to make it, and you do have to win matches, but it is kind of like carpet bombing - play enough matches and you rank up. A better indicator of true ability is what their skill is versus how many matches they have played. If you're skill 25 but you've played 1400 matches, you probably aren't as good overall as someone who is skill 20 whose played 105 matches. The only thing that throws this off is people who sign up as a new account and plays through again. Even I can say with some confidence that if I created a new gamertag and started Lone Wolves ranked 1 I would clean people's clocks until about skill 15 or so. Unless they were starting over too. I wouldn't do that, by the way.

Finally, I've learned that spending a Lone Wolves match trying to run someone over with a Mongoose or laser two Spartans at once is an exercise in frustration. Sure I lasered two opponents at once in a Big Team Battle, where there were 8 bad guys in my way to begin with. Trying it against only 4-5 other adversaries is harder than it sounds. I really want the Mongoose Mowdown Achievement unlocked because the shoulder pads you get are the best ones in the game.