A GUIDE TO WHY PEOPLE ARE ANNOYED FOR THE UNINITIATED
The year is 2014. The multiplayer FPS genre has been dominated by a very specific brand of aim down sights/sprint based shooters, which started really exploding with the popularity of Call of Duty. Since then, for the majority of shooters... if you want to play them, you have to deal with that type of combat and gameplay.
But there existed a time before Call of Duty. A time when Unreal Tournament and Quake existed, which were some of the most finely tuned and blazingly fast FPS multiplayer experiences ever made to this day. A time when Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer was so sweetly balanced that it didn't need to hold your hand so you could hit something. The gameplay itself was so engaging and so competitive that you felt compelled to get better, and didn't need a constant feed of positive reinforcement to do so. You didn't need level ups and fuckin' attachments and stat differentials; it wasn't how much you grinded that mattered, but how much of the accumulated skill sets you internalized.
Halo existed in the between time, right when consoles were starting to be really feasible for competitive FPS titles. And it added some new things, yes, but it was still very much rooted in an older tradition, one where again it was simply skill vs. skill and the pace was entirely governed by the rules it played by which remained a staple.
Consider where we are today. One of the reasons people were so furious about Tomb Raider 2013 is that it destroyed entirely a gametype that literally no longer exists in the industry, replacing it with something we see every other goddamn day. It may have been acceptable in some remote way if we had a world where the older genre was thriving, but we don't. And it's not like the older genre was bad (quite the contrary, it remains amongst the best ideas ever had in gaming) - it's just newer gamers were conditioned to have their hands held to such an extreme that they no longer could adjust to those old gameplay ideals.
The same is true of Halo. Because there are extremely few games anymore in the old tradition. Almost no games in the old Halo tradition. They simply don't exist, squeezed out of existence by whining new fans who couldn't adjust, couldn't acquire the skill sets, and therefore demanded the few remaining vestiges of this amazing older style to be expunged. So now Halo too is becoming like all those other "me-too" shooters, and where does that leave those who actually liked that older tradition? With few if any options left.
And that's just part of the issue.
Because maybe if there was some way to do ADS/Sprint and still make it feel like Halo, people would accept it. But as demonstrated with Halo 4, there isn't. It destroyed the heart and soul of the multiplayer and the community simply abandoned it, full stop. They catered to people who did not fucking care and the result is the series cratered.
When you have ADS/Sprint, it changes the entire ebb and flow of the combat. Where before you had "Run and Gun" characteristics, now you have "Run or Gun" flow, where people are either slowing/stopping to shoot through iron sights or then engaging sprint to get out of dodge. This literally transforms the way a traditional Halo match used to go. And it doesn't transform it into something better, but something vastly different, with lower skill requirements and that feels like a billion other shooters on the market.
You don't have to be a fan of Halo to understand why this is so problematic to so many.
