Striving to make the Halo 3 multiplayer experience the best of the best, Bungie has recently announced that a bucketful of changes have been made to the multiplayer slice of the 360 flagship title, including the introduction of DoubleXP Weekends playlists and a number of tweaks to the matchmaking and the DLC playlists.

Two Weekend Hoppers DoubleXP playlists are scheduled for this month, one of which has been up and running since Thursday, March 6th:

Grifball, the game created by Burnie Burns of Red vs. Blue will be an unranked, weekend-long social playlist awarding DoubleXP to winning teams. We’ve slightly adjusted some of the rules for Grifball (unlimited round times make for unlimited griefing potential), but kept the game’s core intact. You’ll be able to go in with party configurations ranging from one to eight people. This playlist will be available from Thursday, March 6th at noon until March 10th at 12:01 AM. (all times Pacific Standard). I apparently forgot to mention that the Grifball hopper is being treated like a Tournament hopper — a hopper where there will be prizes. Tournament prizes.

Beginning March 20th at noon will be the return of Team SWAT in the Social, DoubleXP variety. Team SWAT is an old Halo 2 gametype where players have no shields, increased body health and do not have the luxury of radar. This eight-player maximum hopper will be completely Team Slayer focused with the SWAT ruleset. This weekend playlist will be available from March 20th at noon until March 24th at 12:01 AM (all times Pacific).

Matchmaking and several multiplayer maps have undergone the following changes:

• Fixed map exploit on The Pit
• Fixed map exploit on Construct
• Fixed map exploit on Epitaph
• Reduced Ranked Big Team Battle “Large party” size to six players and increased Big Team threshold to two
• Fixed Spartan Laser occasionally falling through map on Sandtrap
• Fixes to matchmaking to allow more even leveling for players
• Disabled Mixed Skill restrictions for RBTB and Team Slayer

As for the Heroic DLC modifications, the hopper has been divided into DLC Slayer (4v4) and DLC Objective (6v6). Whereas Slayer options include Team Snipers, Team Rockets, Team BRs, Team Duel and Team Duals, Objective variants include Multi Flag CTF, Multi Flag BR, One Flag, Assault, Neutral Bomb Assault and Team King.

Since all these changes have been live for a few days now, tell us what you think of them and whether you feel like something else is need of a tweak.

Thanks to whatev for submitting.