Since The Master Chief Collection came to PC it has opened pandoras box of cheaters. Since matchmaking is cross-platform, playing on Xbox like I do offers no escape. These are obvious cheaters that do impossible things like fly around the map and shoot full auto rocket launcher etc. But there are more subtle cheaters that you can encounter.
Someone on reddit's /r/halo community made a comment about how cheating is so bad that The Master Chief Collection is now The Midnight Collection. This lead to me discovering “Midnight” which is software that allows for PC players to cheat. On their site they demonstrate what their software is capable of. It can provide many more subtle cheats such as highlighting all other players, their health, etc.
In conclusion, good players on PC are likely cheating.
Losers like this are why we have to deal with proprietary shit rootkit anticheat software on PC and why I prefer console gaming. This was recorded on Xbox One, but now that MCC is on PC and there is crossplay this is the type of shit that happens. When I was playing I first noticed something weird when he got launched into the air really high on the boardwalk, but I just thought it was some crazy melee lunge+explosion or something. Then they took off into the air vertically right in front of me.
I had several matchmaking matches with a cheater/group of cheaters several times on 2024, August 3rd. In my first match I had a client crash which is what leads me to believe that maybe the increase of client crashes since MCC was ported to pc has something to do with other malicious players (i.e. PC players)
Notice how the match loading screen names do not match the in game names! Quality 343i/Halo Studios code! Blindly trust the clients to be honest!
In this first clip of the first match you can see the cheater flying around the map in a ghost splattering people. He also splatters himself trying to splatter me towards the end of the clip. Sometime shortly after the clip the client crashed (or the clip ended because of the client crash I don't remember exactly what happened). I then boot up the game on the xbone and reconnect.
At the start of this clip you can see the beautiful network model from 343i/Halo Studios as the game struggles and takes a long time to “[Connect] to the transport service”. Because in the age of multi-megabit (and even multi-gigabit!) residential internet connections and fast computers these wirth's law/jevon's paradox enthusiasts have managed to make a software/network model that takes several seconds to connect.
If you seek to 2:36 you can see a that they fly/teleport around the map super fast and appear like a spooky ghost! They don't even show up on the motion tracker they are going so fast.
I matched with them again in the next match and this time it was H2a assault. Even with them repeatedly teleporting the bomb directly into our base they were so incompetent we still won! I don't have the entire match recorded, but I remember much of the enemy team quit and the cheaters continued to fail at planting the bomb and our team won against those degenerates.
Also “Report failed. Too many reports.” Lol.
Later that day I matched with these degenerates again. And this time they weren't just flying around and splattering. They were going full griefer, with fully automatic rocket launchers and magic bullets that instantly appear in front of us when we spawn.
Chat was talking about there being a cheater and the match was real weird. The entire other team quit out and the only strange things I saw was a semi-afk enemy player floating in the air in their base and a banshee flying around all crazy like.