Some random thoughts on the podcast and some of the things that they said.
I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of buying weapons for your loadout yet, It still sounds like it's going to cause some serious balance issues, but I think they are taking some steps to ameliorate the worst problems. The reason COD generally manages not to fall apart is that the weapons have a ton of overlap, and the basic rifles can often be competitive against the top level weapons, and sometimes the best guns are available early on. This is a system that generally won't work for Halo, where there's generally not a lot of overlap between weapons. If this system existed in Halo 3, you'd be crazy not to take a BR or carbine. 343 seems to be taking steps to rectify this with having multiple weapons with overlapping roles, the DMR and BR for example. I'm sure the human pistol, covenant carbine will be there too. As long as each of these weapons can cover a lot of similar ground, and you have one you can start with the system can work. If not, it's going to be pretty problematic.
Weapon drops actually sound like a great idea to me, and it sounds like it's going to be really similar to the H1 weapon spawning system, replacing H1's simplicity with more visual information to achieve the same end; every one knows when and where weapons will spawn. I mean, timing weapon is a pretty low bar to clear, it will help the worst players, but for good players it doesn't really change how important skill and strategy is (I mean, I can time weapons and I fucking terrible Halo).
