Well, Bungie released the Halo 3 v1.1 update in the early morning of Wednesday February the 20th 2008. In short the update is intended to fix some of the perceived discrepancies with the melee system in Halo 3. Apparently there have been a great deal of complaints from user who felt that they were on equal footing as their opponent going into a melee contest to only be left dead after the conflict.
Basically a melee contest comes to be when both players appear to have initiated the melee at the same time. Bungie has attempted to compensate for the 80-100 ms average latency between users by allowing a window for these melees to be judged, though this compensation did not appear to work to the average user. Many users complained that after running head first into battle with guns-a-blazing directly at their opponent, and then meleeing their opponent, that they were killed even though their attack was as accurate and as long as their opponents.
Bungie has said that this system is weighted by how many of each opponent’s bullets landed on the other leading up to the melee; something that would make sense. Though the logic for judging melees seems sound, Bungie has opted to implement a new judgement system for melee contests. In short, unless one player has a sizable health advantage over the opponent in which they are in a melee contest with, both player may be left dead at the end. When players ‘simultaneously’ execute a melee on equal footing, under the new system, equal damage will be assigned to each player hit with the melee.
Although, after reading Bungie’s write up on the issue I understand their initial melee system more, I must admit that there have been many instances where I felt that I had landed as many, if not more, bullets leading into a melee contest only to be left lying on the ground dead in the end – wanting more than anything to chunk my controller through the screen to show the Bee-otch who killed me ‘what was up’. I have not personally been able to check out the new system, but I am updated now and plan to do so shortly 
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