While I appreciate Ske7ch taking his time to try and be transparent with us, a lot of the things he said don't really add up and leave me with more questions than answers.

This isnt a post to bash 343 or Infinite. It's simply an analysis of Ske7ch's post and what doesn't make sense or what further questions I have after reading it. Like I said, I do appreciate Ske7ch trying to be transparent with us. But some of the things he said were more an answer of "no, we weren't thinking that" when the community was asking for "what were you thinking". Here is an example. Ske7ch said:

"I don't believe anyone at 343 thought not having slayer was a good idea"

But at some point, it did get removed. In the sense that it was in the previous games, now it isn't in this game, there was a decision made to not continue that trend. I'm not going to accuse 343 of any motivations here, but I do want to ask, what was the motivation? And yes, 343 doesn't owe us any answers here. But if you're going to try and be transparent with a post like that, make sure it isn't half-baked transparency. Because if it is, then it was just a waste of everyone's time reading and meant nothing. So again, what was the motivation behind removing slayer? If nobody thought not having slayer was a good idea, then what was the good idea that got it removed. And later on, he does bring up about slayer based playlists making objective playlists unhealthy (and we will get to that in a bit), but you can't say that was the idea. Because he went further on to say that they were already working on a slayer playlist:

"The team's plans for a Slayer playlist, I think, are more robust than what might suffice for an interim solution. I love the ideas and some of the variants they're working on - those all require tuning and most importantly - testing. QA is a huge dependency and it's a critical part of the development pipeline that has been running nonstop for months to launch this game (side note: can't wait to tackle that last part in a bit)

So again, I ask for this one, what was the "idea" that resulted in a slayer playlist not being there on launch? (Edit: I should include how in the tweet from Joseph Staten the other day, he said the lack of playlists were to not fracture the player base, which somehow Ske7ch doesn't mention here and gives a different reason to slayer, but I should comment on that here anyways. Other Halo games worked just fine with large playlist selectors and they weren't crossplay with PC and a console that's been out for almost 10 years, they weren't free to play, and they were during a time when gaming was nowhere near as popular as it is today. So I call bs on this answer too) Moving on.

"Historically, a slayer only playlist and an objective only playlist has always resulted in the Obj playlist quickly becoming unhealthy"

This one just didn't make sense to me. I'm not really sure how objective based matches got "unhealthy" in the past. One of the ways I could see it happening is by people playing slayer instead of the objective in those matches, but then wouldn't someone think that forcing people to play the objective and not slayer when they want would only make it even more unhealthy? Another unhealthy thing would be if objective playlists weren't getting as much love. If someone say Objective playlists were getting 10% of the fanbase while slayer was getting 90%, and they wanted more players in objectives, then again, why would they think forcing the players into objectives would fix any issue? Next one.

""Making players have no control and have to use swaps" has never once been a thing I've heard."

This is in regards to the claims of how the lack of a playlist selector will force challenge swaps. I appreciate him mentioning this here, regardless if some believe it or not, but there is an equally, if not bigger, accusation about a system that seems to "encourage" challenge swaps within the game that he chose to not bring up. And like I said, this accusation is just as popular, if not more popular, as the one he brought up, so they had to have heard it. And that's the lack of skill based progression. I know they have addressed this in the past, but simply with "we agree, progression is slow, we will work on other avenues to give you exp, but for now, here is a bump on your daily exp rewards". And that's all fine and good, but was the initial idea behind a challenge only system an idea to force players into buying challenge swaps? I would appreciate an answer for that as well. Because Ske7ch's words here make it sound like he agrees that making a system that "makes a player have no control and have to use swaps" is a pretty scummy business practice. And I would have to agree with that. But regardless of if that system was born from a lower amount of playlists or no other avenue to progress other than with challenges, the motive would still be the same. To make a pretty scummy business system. And it sounds like Ske7ch would agree with that. Speaking of businesses:

"But this is a business. The servers you play on cost money"...

100% agree here, Ske7ch. But just because I need to pay my bills to keep the lights on for my bakery, doesn't mean I get to price my bread at $100 without some negative feedback about the ridiculous pricing. And I guess I'm just confused, because I just came from putting 1200 hours into Apex Legends, and I don't get how Respawn can keep their lights on with tons of free skins you can unlock per character with crafting materials that you get by just playing the game, giving you free items with almost every level up, and give you a generous amount of in-game currency for free (most of it coming from the battle pass, so not really free? But you get what I mean). They don't have to resort to this type of pricing system to just scrape by. The same goes for CoD and Fortnite. So what makes Infinite's multiplayer so different  

Finally, my favorite part:

 >"I did not really enjoy having to grind through 20+ games of QuickPay to hopefully get Oddball so I could hopefully win 3 times to complete a challenge"

Ske7ch. This sounds like this is your first time playing the game (Edit: Yes, I know Ske7ch isn't a play tester, but you don't think he booted the game up once behind the scenes?). What happened to:

"QA is a huge dependency and it's a critical part of the development pipeline that has been running nonstop for months to launch this game"

Or what about that "secret" group of game testers, the Forerunners. I believe I read it was a group of 24 players that are even in the credits and have been testing the game for the past two years? Something like that. Why is it only just at launch that these problems are beginning to surface? This isn't some bug that takes millions of players to find. I can definitely give devs slack when it comes to that stuff. No. This is about a good portion of your challenge system that impacts players on a daily basis.And finally, what about the flights? You guys already got this feedback during the flights. And that was when the challenges were limited to the few things we got to test and the progression speed was sped up. You guys still got these complaints and your response was "I know you guys don't like this system during the flight, but just give it a try when we release the full system later on", and it seems like the only change was it got harder? Why would you think players would like that? Why does it sound like you never played your own game until you launched it for everyone else to play?

That's about it. And again, 343 doesn't "owe" us any answers, as Ske7ch made clear in his post. But these are definitely the answers we should be looking for, when Q&As come up.

Tl;Dr; What was the "idea" behind removing slayer playlists? What was so unhealthy about the previous systems of having Slayer & Obj game modes separated and why did they think combining them would fix this unhealthiness? What was the motivation behind a challenge only progression system (since progression systems are usually systems made For The Players, and it never sounded like "The Players" wanted this)? What makes Infinite so different from other large-scale F2P games where it can't afford cheaper items or as many freebies as those other F2P games? Why does it sound like Ske7ch has been working on this game for years and is only just now booting up the game to make sure it works?