It's 100% official that my Xbox account had a major issue for the past 7+ years. The amount of friends/data on the account caused inputs to not register properly while also not being synced to the servers as fast as possible. We suspect this problem may have begun for everyone shortly after Halo 5 came out when the "NXOE update" launched for Xbox One around late 2015. If I remember correctly, that's when more major heavy aim was introduced in Halo 5 and it started to weigh your account down if you had a lot of friends/data. Which may explain why during the beta and the first couple weeks of Halo 5, the aiming was not nearly as bad. It's also 100% official that this happens on PC as well. This is NOT an Xbox console exclusive issue. This has to do with how inputs/data are stored in packets that are sent to the servers. The hardware is not relevant in this situation. My inputs now never get interrupted like they have before in the past on PC. My inputs never get eaten/lost and they feel like completely different games compared to the past 7+ years of playing. It was limiting my ability heavily to be consistent and stopping me from playing the game to it's full potential. After I stopped competing in Halo 5 in 2017 to go to full time streaming. I never really played on smurf accounts, so I never really knew anything different than what I played on. It's a bit sad that we've been competing on a platform that determines your game quality, input registration, and shot registration speed based on the amount of friends and other data on your account. There was always rumors of smurf accounts being better for whatever reason, but no one could really pin the reason why. Well, now we know for sure it is 100% the friends list, messages, and whatever other data on your account weighing the packets down to cause your game to feel unsynced and slower overall to the server.

So big update on this, here is the whole story: For months now, I started to randomly get a very odd glitch when I played Halo that made my game seem like it was in turbo mode. It was so weird and we couldn't pinpoint why it was happening. Then about 10 days ago my Xbox account started to glitch and not receive messages anymore. I tried to hard restart my box, clear cache, but nothing seemed to fix it. So I decided to just completely wipe my message backlog of 6-7 years. For whatever reason, clearing my messages made the UI of my Xbox Series X run at supersonic speed compared to before and also noticeably made the games run better. This was literally seen and proven in real time live on stream. Then that got me thinking, what else could I remove from my account that maybe could be slowing it down? So I removed my discord connection, then that also made me wonder...what if I also deleted all of my 1000+ friends on my account? Well I have the answer, I did that tonight on stream and it was the most bazaar thing we ever witnessed. Not only did it make my UI run even faster again, but more importantly... it actually completely changed the way my inputs were counting on Halo, how the aim felt, how smooth the game was, my shots were registering faster than before. In EVERY Halo game on MCC, not just one. Viewers even were saying it looked like a completely different game than I was playing before. So that got us thinking again...how could removing 1000+ friends be affecting how the game is registering inputs? Well the answer may be that your account info is tied to how inputs register to the server. The less data you have to carry with it the better since it will be faster. I instantly started feeling the difference compared to when I was playing hours just before, all because I deleted my friends. My zoom functions were feeling completely different/faster especially the light rifle in Halo 4, inputs were instantly registering faster than ever before, and there was no pause in the inputs when a lot were pressed. I don't know what all this means, but that is a major design flaw and a major issue if your account is tied to how good the game feels. Which also means...could your account also be affecting how the games feel on PC?! Since this is not a hardware based issue and it's how your account connects to the servers? Also after I deleted all my friends, I was able to have the start menu in MCC instantly pop up and exit faster than ever before during gameplay when normally there is a big pause lag. So somehow maybe the achievement data of friends is also weighing it down in game? The turbo glitch that I previously mentioned does not happen anymore either since clearing my account info. So how could deleting 1000+ friends change how inputs are registering in game and how the start menu is functioning? ...This problem has to be addressed at Xbox imo if this is how it works.