Honestly, I’ve only ever gotten into 2 matches in H2A arena. The playlist has been completely dead since launch, and it’s baffling to me that it’s still in the game with little to no changes. Social is very well populated, probably due to actual fast response times and more modes, but ranked is a ghost town.



I have two solutions that I propose that could revive H2A arena:



1. Add more gamemodes, and fix map weighting



one problem I’ve noticed, even in social, is that remnant and warlord come up way too much. To be fair, remnant is pretty one sided for CTF since it’s asymmetrical, which gives blue team a HUGE disadvantage in one flag. Remnant works well for sniper game types, but that’s about it. Remnant is not only a huge pain in the -Yoink- to get around (even with the teleporters), and it certainly does not work with 8 players. Remnant should have at least 12 players, if not more. Most of my time on remnant is spent walking, and sometimes getting sniped out of nowhere by someone behind a rock.



remnant just isn’t a good map for 4v4, and it should be BTB only. Let’s not even talk about the spawns, remnant also has pretty unbalanced spawns too, which again, favor red team heavily. Most of the good weapons are either in the tower, or very close to the tower. It’s an obvious balancing issue that should not go unfixed.



as for warlock, well, warlock is fine for oddball and sword slayer, but again, that’s it for warlock’s specific niche. It doesn’t promote very much movement or tactics, and the weapon spawns are so few and far between, that non BR gametypes are downright frustrating to play.



It’s like if Battle Creek only had the weapons next to the base tunnel and on top of the arch. There wouldn’t be much variation or fun.



For gametypes, I have a few suggestions. First off, and this is probably a hot take, but ricochet should come to H2A arena; however, I would suggest it only appearing on shrine or bloodline, especially since shrine is, without a doubt, one of the BEST maps to play ricochet on. It’s large enough so that the matches don’t end instantly, but small enough to that the momentum can easily stay going throughout the match, and camping can easily be mitigated.



As for territories, I’d suggest that it mainly be played on lockdown, stonetown, or zenith. My map picks for this one mainly echo the sentiment of not letting the matches be too fast, but also not letting them be too slow. Territories could be played with the standard H3 score settings, but obviously with some things adapted for H2A. Time limit should be 6 minutes per round to prevent against annoying stalemates, and/or total match time being cut down as well; this is to avoid the problems that plagued halo 3 territories, such as the games being far too long with very little action (very noticeable on The Pit).



and for the last one, might I suggest adding assault to the H2A gamemode selection? I’ve played neutral bomb on lockdown in custom games before, and it was pretty damn fun. I don’t think assault is that terribly unbalanced to the point where it shouldn’t be in ranked. As for maps I’d like to see assault on the most, I’d say lockdown or shrine, with maybe relic, if neutral bomb assault is a thing (relic is asymmetrical, and I don’t want remnant like -Yoink- happening).



now for solution 2:



2. Cut off the playlist like a diseased hand



Let’s face it, competitive H2A is a very VERY small minority of halo players. Almost everyone I meet plays H3 or H2C competitively. I’ve met more HCE competitive players than H2A competitive players.



H2A map pool is already shallow, and the lack of gamemodes in ranked really highlights this. It would be fine if we had more modes to play, but doing slayer BR on warlock 5 times in a row isn’t interesting to anyone. I’m not expecting 343 to develop new remakes of maps for H2A, but they should at least TRY to put some sort of variation in the playlist. Having only 4 competitively viable maps, with one of them appearing constantly is enough to annoy ANYONE. Let’s not even mention that for some reason, assault and oddball aren’t even present. Like, the original halo 2 multiplayer proved that these gamemodes were working and balanced more than a decade ago; what’s wrong with bringing them into competitive now?



honestly, H2A arena would be much better replaced by H4 team arena. Because while I don’t personally enjoy H4 as much as H3, at least H4 actually HAS variation.



That’s all I have to say here. Thanks for reading.