do you care about speedrunning tricks or glitches or exploits, like the Keyes bump or the Forklift skip on nightfall or jumping across mountains in delta halo, uprising, etc? i don't see anything wrong with those things or save and quit personally, but it's your personal "rules" that matter

It's clearly an exploit, but LASO missions can take hours and can be heavy with RNG. One slip up in a difficulty level that has you dying in a tenth of a second out of cover shouldn't be punished with hours of progress loss. I personally feel Iron shouldn't affect anything in singleplayer, its frankly asinine, though in co-op its a nice balancing feature that forces cooperation and planning more. If iron worked as the developers intended LASO would become co-op only for me as it is. I mean really, Truth and Reconcilliation in H:CE and Gravemind in H2 standout as missions that can take players upwards of 4 hours, some even having it take 6-8 hours for a single mission. I can't believe that some autists even defend the idea of being sent back to start especially with the RNG heavy ai.

If it's possible without third party software I don't consider it cheating, especially now in the digital age where things can and do get patched out. I'm sure that if 343 wanted to, they could change the Iron Skull to work on save/quit since malfunction already does that on it's own. How well you do in LASO will pretty much always depend on what your RNG is like, especially in CE. Almost nobody gets through the Library without deaths in LASO by being good because it isn't possible without nearly perfect RNG in regards to enemy AI and ammo/weapon spawns.

If the game doesn't play fair then neither should you

LASO isn't meant to be balanced or fair, so you shouldn't feel pressured to play fair either.

Again its up to you how you want to use the rules. Im sure some people out there would complain that you didnt earn an achievement legit by some standard but its your enjoyment that matters. Of course, if you want to do things "legit", its going to be a lot lot harder than regular laso, but its up to you to say if its more fun that way. Backpack reloading id argue is a cheat, but I can barely think about doing legendary CE without it, even if its from muscle memory alone.

Depends. True LASO (penned by Tyrant) does not allow you to do this. But honestly, most people will never, ever, bother with that. So no.

In my personal opinion I do not consider this to be cheating, although my OCD constantly disagrees with me. And it's for one reason only, co-op. Iron skull's rules are completely unfair towards solo players in comparison to co-op. co-op is already easier given an extra gun and grenades not to mention an added meat shield and enemy distracter. If the rule was the same for both solo and co-op then I would have a personal problem with Save -> Quit -> Reload. Why does fairness matter? Because a co-op duo just have to bruteforce a mission and they will get the playlist specific achievements no problem, including bragging rights. This is just objectively unfair compared to solo. There are also straight up insane things that can happen that just makes each halo game uniquely infuriating no matter how good you are.

In other words, unless the rules are the same for everyone, then those rules are forfeit. Which is why I personally see putting a makeshift reticle on the screen as cheating personally, the rule is consistent with every player no matter the mode and is part of the actual challenge and not something that just wastes peoples time.

However with all that said, like other people's answers before me, play the game the way you want to play it. LASO is ridiculously difficult to begin with and people don't want to waste hundreds of hours due to some deserved and many undeserved resets.

Yes I know this is an old conversation. I wrote this for future readers like me.