The Battle Pass
When 343 Industries announced that they were including a battle pass in Halo Infinite, we were a bit leery about how they would handle it now that games like Warzone and Fortnite are popular. Still, we were hopeful that they would do it right, as they did before.
Nope. The battle pass was immediately met with negative feedback. Previous Halo games had a battle pass, but it was 100% free. All you needed to do was buy the initial game and play it. Sure, Halo Infinite has a free Battle Pass, but it's basically worthless if you like to customize your Spartan and weapons.
Currently, you can unlock armor for the Mark VIII, weapon skins, and armor coatings, but they are pretty limited. You will need to fork over 1,000 credits (Recently reduced to $8.99 as of this writing) to access the Premium Battle Pass.
The Premium Battle Pass will essentially unlock the "complete" multiplayer experience. Once you have the Premium pass, you will unlock an entirely new set of armor, the Mark V [B] variant, which offers more customization options that you earn by leveling up.
You will also be able to earn 2x EXP boosts and Challenge Swaps by leveling up (more on that later). In other words, the ability to fully customize your Spartan and be able to level up more easily is locked behind a paywall. As a side note, there is no way to earn credits other than buying them with real money. That said, even if you do fork over the 1,000 credits, most of the armor you can unlock is pretty basic.
While you can earn free armor, coatings, etc through events, most of the "cool" upgrades will need to be purchased with credits from the shop. Again, this places a lot of the upgrades locked behind a paywall. The 2x EXP boost will earn you double experience points while the boost is active (60 mins), while the Challenge Swap will let you swap out a more difficult challenge in the battle pass for a random challenge, both of which are locked behind the Premium Battle Pass for now.
To make this fair for everyone, 343 should give players 100 credits per 5 games played, for example. Completing 20 matches to earn the Premium Battle Pass sounds pretty fair to me. That way everyone has a chance to enjoy the "complete" Halo Infinite multiplayer experience.
Progression/EXP Gain
Experience points, or EXP, are gained solely from completing challenges in the battle pass while most games (and past Halo games!) offer experience and progression for playing matches and doing well in them. The more games you played and the better you did would help you progress to the next level. But not Halo Infinite. You need to complete challenges just to earn any EXP at all.
Initially, the EXP gained per challenge completed was painfully low, so you would need to complete a ton of challenges just to advance one level. 343 immediately started implementing updates to fix the progression, but they have mostly been hot fixes and nothing major. Now, when you start up Halo Infinite for the day, the Daily challenges are extremely easy (win 1 match, for example) and offer 50 or 100 EXP. The weekly challenges will start off easy, kill 10 enemy Spartans (either in general, or in a particular game mode) or kill 5 enemy Spartans with the Battle Rifle, for example, then progress to something more difficult. This is great if you are only able to play a few matches per day or per week, but is not so great if you play multiple matches every day.
In my opinion, 343 needs to go back to the previous progression system they had in Halo games, and make it so the amount of games you play and how well you do is the main way to progress (say, 70% of your EXP), while challenges offer additional EXP to earn.
Other Issues 
Big Team Battle, or BTB, has been plagued with issues since day 1, and 343 can't seem to find out what the issue is.
Initially, 343 reduced the team size from 12 to 10 and disabled the "join game in progress" feature. That has since been reversed. Players who try to enter a game with multiple friends in their party have had issues joining games, players will disconnect from the pre-game lobby for no reason, and players will sometimes get kicked mid-game for no reason with no new players added (resulting in severely unbalanced team sizes).
There have also been issues with the melee mechanics. Personally, I have not had any issues in the past few weeks, but previously, the melee mechanic was extremely broken. If you melee an enemy Spartan from behind, it is considered an instant kill. You could press the melee button, and the actual action on screen would be delayed by a few seconds. In that time, the enemy you were after could manage to melee kill you somehow. This was not a ping issue, as some players (like myself) reported this issue even with a ping of 30 or less.
There have also been similar issues with the Gravity Hammer and the Energy Sword. I personally was able to jump just in time to miss the swing of any Energy Sword but was killed anyway. I was so sure that I dodged the attack that I checked Theater Mode. I very clearly was not hit by the sword, but died anyway.
Then, there's Ranked gameplay. I personally have not played too many ranked matches, but the main complaint I have been hearing is that a single loss in a ranked match can set you back half a rank tier while you need 10 wins or more to progress that same amount. The other issue is that the post-game report occasionally does not load properly (the game saying that you lost the match, even though you won, for example), which negatively affects your rank.
Conclusion
Halo Infinite Multiplayer is broken in multiple ways, and is a long way from perfect. That said, and even with the issues, it is an absolute blast to play. Running around with the Grapple Shot or Repulsor and gunning down the enemy team or completing objectives with your teammates is a lot of fun. 343 has a ton of work to fix the issues at hand, but I have faith they will get it done as they did with the Master Chief Collection.
Some good news; it seems 343 announced the other day that you will be able to earn credits in season 2 (starting some time in May 2022) just from playing the game. I actually just found this out while researching for this article. It is still unclear if you will need the battle pass to be able to earn the credit, though that will likely be the case.
Want to hear more about Halo Infinite, or another video game? Let us know in the comments. This article was written on 1/22/22.
