Halo Infinite is boosting XP again to reduce grind
Bonus XP for the first six matches you play each day
Though Halo Infinite launched in decent shape (our Ed called it "the most stable FPS I've played all year"), one bone of contention has been the slow pace to unlocking things on the battle pass. The developers, 343 Industries already boosted progression pace, but evidently that wasn't enough, and now they're coming round for another pass at the pass. From today, they're planning to offer bonus XP for the first six matches you play every day.
Halo community manager John Junyszek revealed the next steps on Twitter overnight. He noted that when they made those initial changes, "we promised that we'd monitor the data and make additional changes if needed. Now, it's time to follow up on that."
He goes onto explain, "After seeing how XP was earned with those changes, we noticed that players were starting their sessions with slower payouts than we'd like. To address this, we will be increasing the XP payout for the first 6 matches of each day." So, the bonuses coming into effect today are:
He added that they are "committed" to "even larger changes", but "those will take time."
Junyszek also addressed another common complaint, cheaters. With cheating easier and more common on PC, some Xbox folks want the option to opt out of cross-platform matchmaking.
"Unfortunately, cheating is a natural part of supporting a F2P PC game and it's one we anticipated," he said last night. "It'll never go away entirely, but we're prepared and committed to releasing consistent improvements to our game’s systems and taking action on bad actors."
He later clarified that "the wording of 'improvements to game's systems' includes not only our anti-cheat, but the rest of the game as well." He explained, "It's worded this way because we don't take a "single feature" approach, but a game-wide approach to anti-cheat."
He doesn't detail any firm plans but, y'know, obvs it's something they're aware of. The arms race between cheat and anti-cheat is endless.