Oh, the humanity.
It's really sad that Bungie has to keep beating people over the head with the fact that the Halo 3 Beta is... uhm... a Beta. [next-gen.biz]
For those of you who have forgotten, Alpha is usually an in-company test version. The game actually builds and executes and runs a program. Not very well, but it runs, and they can see what to fix. A Beta is when the program runs well enough to pretty much use on a regular basis, but bugs still crop up. A Beta is usually released to a select few outside people to use and play with so there's more of a variety of people using the program a different way to bring up their own unique bugs. Unless, of course, a Beta is public, in which case anyone can download and use and report bugs!
Right now, Halo 3 multiplayer is in a more or less public beta on Xbox Live. It's INTENDED for people to abuse to their hearts content for the sole purpose of crashing the program. Bungie has had a lot of time to work the bugs out of Halo 3, balance the weapons, tweak the maps. As Nintendo's own Shigeru Miyamoto says, "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever." The more time you spend working on a game, the more perfect it gets.
But that's not the point! In a way, it is... Bungie is going the extra mile to make Halo 3 the best game they can make. However, it's not done. It's far from done. It's supposed to be released in September, not June. It's not done yet, Bungie keeps saying it's not done yet, but people keep insisting on pointing out all the flaws in the game. No, they're not reporting bugs, they're telling the world how terrible Halo 3 is, as if it's a finished product. This is what happened to Uru, and this is what happens to many, many games. A Beta isn't supposed to be judged. It's not for you, the player, to sign up and see how the game is, it's for you, the player, to CAUSE CRASHES. If you base your judgment on how good a game is... On what you see in the Beta? You're a moron.
The majority of Halo 3 users are just that! They're morons. The biggest complaint is that Halo 3 looks almost graphically identical to Halo 2, and, for some reason, forgetting that Halo 3 has always been about gameplay and story (Yes, Halo has an awesome story, with three games and four novels, and if you're too high on your anti-Halo soapbox to see it, then it's your own problem.), they whine about how "last generation" the graphics look. Forgetting that Bungie has constantly said, over and over and over that the graphics are not what you will see in the final release. Forgetting that the Beta they're playing is specifically for multiplayer stress testing.
Are humans always this dim-witted and stupid? Ugh.