@big_jon: The problem with sprint in Halo as compared to other shooters (like CoD and Battlefield) is that the kill times in Halo are not even close to being fast enough for sprint to be a balanced option. In CoD or BF, sprint is purely offensive in nature. In those games the kill times are so quick that in most 1v1 encounters the player who sees the other player first gets the kill 99% of the time. That means that in those games sprint cannot be used to flee from an unfavorable encounter -- by the time you turn around and start running in a different direction, you're probably dead. Sprinting in those games is used purely for quick flanks, and adds depth and pace to the gameplay.
In Halo, the opposite is true. Unless it's a lopsided engagement where one player is holding a power weapon (ie. Rockets, snipe, shotty, etc.), the player who is seen by the other typically has plenty of time to react, and in many cases fight back. Now, in previous Halo games if a player was surprised by an opponent, running was rarely an option (occasionally you could "Strongside" away if you were lucky, but most of the time that didn't work). A majority of the time the player with superior positioning would kill his less-aware opponent; those types of encounters made up the fundamental element of "map control" in Halo. It wasn't quite the same as CoD or BF in terms of quick kills, but generally speaking a player who was wandering blindly around the map and not positioning himself smartly was punished for being out of position by a skilled opponent. This is taken a step further when the player who has the superior positioning is able to control the map's power weapons, and directly influence the location of the opponents' respawn based on their own positioning (at least in Halo 1; in 2 and 3 spawn behavior was more random so it was more of an educated guess based on known spawn points).
However, with the addition of sprint to the Halo sandbox, a player who is caught out of position and being shot at by an opponent can now easily flee from the fight, as it takes several shots to kill a fully-shielded player in Halo. In CoD or Battlefield, sprinting from a fight is extremely rare; in Reach, it's commonplace. In many ways, the addition of sprint in Reach destroys map control. A player who would have been punished for bad positioning decisions in any of the previous Halo games now suddenly has a "get out of jail free card" that he can use to bail himself out when he makes a dumb movement mistake and starts getting shot by an opponent. Further, in some cases he actually gains an advantage by sprinting away, as the player who was shooting at him is at a disadvantage to grenades or other opponents if he decides to use his own sprint to chase. If the player decides not to chase, the encounter becomes a stalemate, and all of the work that the first player did to gain a positional advantage is voided. Instead of empowering the more aware player to kill his opponent and establish map control like in CoD or Battlefield, sprint in Reach is mostly defensive in nature and (ironically) slows the gameplay to a snail's pace. I'm not saying sprint can't work in the Halo sandbox, but it isn't optimal with such slow kill times. And I don't know about you, but I personally don't want them to decrease kill times just to make sprint more of a viable option; CoD already does that style of gameplay well enough, and I want my Halo to play like Halo.
Sorry for the long read; hopefully that explanation is thorough enough.
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