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(this is a copy paste of a forum post i made on the Halo: Reach beta feedback forum at http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=43703817 in an attempt to refocus attention on an underrated feature from Halo CE me and my high school buddies dearly miss. Please support the original forum post if you have the time and intrest.)
Hello Bungie.
I really like a great deal of what you are doing with the beta. I enjoy the added focus on accuracy and the pared down and refocused weapon balance, but as I look at all these new shiny features and baubles I come back to a long standing grief my friends and I have had with halo games after 1. Reach is going to be the last chance Bungie has to bring something back for us before they leave the halo games behind.
You see, the reverse tag version of Oddball never made it into halo 2 and 3, but in halo 1 my friend Justin used it to create what we believed at the time to be the most fun 3 to 4 person (we were a one x box friend group back in the day) kill fest ever. It had a humble name: Shotty. The rules were simple. Shotguns and grenades only, small maps like chiron and chill out. You kill a person, it's as if you picked up an oddball.
You kept getting time until you were killed. You killed two people, and it's as if you got two oddballs. Your time goes up twice as fast and suddenly the other players find themselves motivated to kill you faster. A game type that rewards weaving in and out of cover skillfully, getting multikills, and generally being a bastard to your friends. I learned the important skills of close range evasion, stalling for time, strategic retreat, and the early shotgun blast to melee combo. These skills served to define me as a bastardly halo player in my future noob stompin career.
Me and the variants creator still play on occasion, the rest of our group having lost intrest in the series long ago. Every new halo game that comes out we try to create a slapshod version of shotty and get frustrated as without reverse tag the rule set just doesn't work at all.
So I come to you, hat in hand, and request you consider reverse tag rules in the shipping version of reach as another shiny tribute to the greatness of halo 1 in a game already full of love for the old guard. We would appreciate the opportunity to dip around a confusing mess of a map like Chiron and make each other's lives a hell of buckshot and shrapnel with friends once again.