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Halo |OT13|

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Wow, the new Bungie.net looks nice but it's completely broken - I can't find my Halo 4 stats anywhere.
Nice to see you again.

Add to OP?
It's certainly worthy of the bullshit first post.

"To this day, we still have no idea who, why, or how 343 makes any of their matchmaking decisions."

"No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything."

can't make this stuff up.
 

rakka

Member
i just played through two levels of campaign on legendary, mind you I'm not the best at it so it took 2+ hours. felt good when I completed them, working towards the legendary armor unlock, and ive just realized I didn't get the commendations simply because somewhere along the line Xbox live disconnected?! do I really have to go through that all over again? though there was a credit limit you could still complete campaign commendations in reach even when offline, or am I remembering incorrectly?

fuck is wrong with this game? I'm trying so hard to love it but there's only so much bullshit I can take.
 

Don't you just love Adblock plus? You know if you PM a mod about the NeoGAF Pro plugin for it (there isn't a thread to avoid bandwidth issues - it's more of a seasoned user practice) they'll give you a download link for a few additional options when you browse GAF.

How long have you been a member of NeoGAF? How long have you lurked?

Joined around Q4 2010, lurked since Q2

How old are you? What country or state are you posting from? (Optional)

17 / Florida panhandle (lol)

How long have you been a Halo fan? Have you played all the games?

Got hooked playing with some cousins not too much older than me in like 2004, own all the games. I have Halo 2, and Wars limited edition, Reach legendary (youarealreadydead.jpg).

What mode do you spend most of your time in?

Ridiculous slayer variants (such as Infinity), BTB, custom game objectives, Forge in Halo 3.

What is your favorite playlist?

Big Team Battle, probably. Team Regicide is pretty good, would be god-tier with 2/3's gameplay

Help us get to know you better. (Optional)

Snoopy (my avatar) is actually not my cat.
I make music sometimes.
I am trying to rebuild the weapon sandbox.

///

I think Halo is probably the best game Microsoft has to play with friends, honestly. Reach was a shit sandwich sometimes but getting a buttload of people on and hopping into matchmaking could still be entertaining. I've never played Minecraft but it could probably be fun if I had some direction/objective with a bunch of friends like how Roosterteeth does it.

Nintendo's is Super Smash Bros.
 
i just played through two levels of campaign on legendary, mind you I'm not the best at it so it took 2+ hours. felt good when I completed them, working towards the legendary armor unlock, and ive just realized I didn't get the commendations simply because somewhere along the line Xbox live disconnected?! do I really have to go through that all over again? though there was a credit limit you could still complete campaign commendations in reach even when offline, or am I remembering incorrectly?

fuck is wrong with this game? I'm trying so hard to love it but there's only so much bullshit I can take.
you can get the Legendary armor by starting each level at the last rally point. Up to you if you want to do even that much again.

Why are you so negative?
Is that supposed to be ironic?
 
Don't you just love Adblock plus? You know if you PM a mod about the NeoGAF Pro plugin for it (there isn't a thread to avoid bandwidth issues - it's more of a seasoned user practice) they'll give you a download link for a few additional options when you browse GAF.

I have it turned off for GAF and other sites I like. I downloaded Adblock when I saw a 1:25 ad for a :30 youtube video, fuck that shit.
 
Don't expect any gameplay changes apart from locations. I think the hiatus was to finish what was started with the first part of the season, not to gain a little extra time to add/adjust mechanics to make it any different than it has been..

Then the last possible draw of Halo 4 is gone from me then. I was keeping an eye out for the first Bulletin of the new year, hoping to hear that they had heard from us and were changing things. But it sounds like not.

Sigh. This is just incredibly disappointing.
 

rakka

Member
you can get the Legendary armor by starting each level at the last rally point. Up to you if you want to do even that much again.

cheers. if i can do that then its not nearly as bad. I'll give it a go. it does say I've completed it legendary in level selection, just not in the commendations.
 
If you know, please explain how 343i reaches their matchmaking decisions.
I don't know and honestly I don't really care. Knowing the process wouldn't make any of the decisions that I find stupid any less stupid. I just found it funny that Kyle would make a statement like that and then immediately contradict himself with "No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything."

Then again I have an odd sense of humor.

No, I never really see you add anything or present a new idea, my impression has always been you just shooting posts down.
I can't fault you for not digging through my past posts other than what you randomly see, but that's not the case at all.
 

Karl2177

Member
I don't know and honestly I don't really care. Knowing the process wouldn't make any of the decisions that I find stupid any less stupid. I just found it funny that Kyle would make a statement like that and then immediately contradict himself with "No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything."

Then again I have an odd sense of humor.

I think he meant something more along the lines of "We don't care how the company was made or how the game was made. On the other hand we do want to know why changes were or were not made."
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I think he meant something more along the lines of "We don't care how the company was made or how the game was made. On the other hand we do want to know why changes were or were not made."
I would think "how the game was made" contains a lot of the reasons why changes were made.
 

Alchemical

Neo Member
It was nice to hear 343 acknowledge some of the problems of the game and that they're planning to fix 'm, but at least for me, these glitches and bugs aren't the things that are stopping me from enjoying the game. Things like AA's, perks, bad maps, flinch, unbalanced weapons (this could change with a TU though), the 1v1 encounters, global ordnance and personal ordnance are what make me not play the game. And most of these things are core principles. I'd be amazed if many of these things will change in the coming weeks.

It's not unexpected that these things won't change and I'm happy for the people who do enjoy the game that some of their problems are going to be fixed, but I'm pretty sure nothing will change for me.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts too. Sadly, I can honestly not imagine a situation whereby the majority of these concerns are addressed, save for a single playlist (MLG I guess.. but meh).

Also... great post, kyle. It pretty much says all the other things I'd like to say about this game / developer etc. which I won't reiterate here for the sake of repetition (though it nonetheless does deserve to be hammered home).
 

kylej

Banned
Yeah pretty much. I write long posts off the top of my head in one take so I'm sure there are grammatical issues and contradictions and whatever else. I think the point is still understood.
 

Tawpgun

Member
Obviously a homage to the CE montage that did that, which had way smoother transitions, it was still good though

I can't seem to find that CE montage though, anyone know the name? It was extremely popular on HBO and all that.
Maptacular

EDIT: Duncan thinks he's all fancy with that blue link. I'm not clicking it. Probably forwards to meatspin.
 
Obviously a homage to the CE montage that did that, which had way smoother transitions, it was still good though

I can't seem to find that CE montage though, anyone know the name? It was extremely popular on HBO and all that.

Maptacular.

I remember watching this back in '06 and immediately downloading all of the songs it used. One of my favorite montages of all time. (Aside from this one, of course.)
 
Yeah I mean I feel like every weekly bulletin is the same.

Very proud of the team, we did a lot with a little... no. Every business is hard as shit to build, every product is hard as shit to launch, the difference is most businesses aren't a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. There are no cafes in most businesses. There are no lounges with plasma TVs. There are no trips to NYC to hang out with celebrities. I've never seen a group of people congratulate themselves more on doing their job than 343. I completely understand being proud of the team and what people have accomplished, but don't try to frame it as though the struggle excuses some of the faults.

There are approximately zero people reading this:



that were disappointed with Halo 4, but will now return to the game because of that statement. It means nothing to anyone but the people who already know you made mistakes.

There are approximately zero people reading this:



who then feel better about playing a Halo game with the worst frame-rate drops in the series.

Then I read this



is it the community's fault that we're missing features from Halo 3? Frankie talks about how by all objective measures Halo 4 was a success. Missing core components of your predeccessors is a pretty damn objective failure.

and I read this



What was influenced by the community? Any examples? Was FUD or TTL asking for Complex? If the community is such a direct and democratic extension of the team, which part of the community asked for the first map pack to be big brown maps? Was that ReadyUpLive or r/Halo's fault? Could you guys have democratically put up a vote with the major communities asking if recreating Seattle during crunch time was a good idea? I just find it hilarious that after a year of Trust Us, Feels Like Halo, now suddenly the community is apparently a direct extension of the team and there are just too many gosh darn voices to be heard to make people happy. To extend this makeshift olive branch while simultaneously refusing to outline the next title update is hysterical to me. To this day, we still have no idea who, why, or how 343 makes any of their matchmaking decisions. We open up the weekly bulletin every week and hope there's something interesting. That is literally the only involvement we get with matchmaking updates.

No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything. You don't think about the thousands of man-hours that go into the labeling of every single product in a grocery store, you just buy it. Give us some actual hard definable timelines for when we'll be getting fileshare, when we're getting a ranking system, when we're getting video uploading. Where are these features? Everything is always one or two weeks away. We'll have more details to share in a bit! As someone who hasn't played Halo in over a month, all I took from that update is that video game development is hard and that we'll be getting minor playlist updates in 3 or 4 weeks. Well, no shit. Sometime in the future we'll get missing features added and a title update. Oh and we have more outsourced table-scrap maps to look forward to that we'll have to pay for. Halo 4 is hitting all time low daily peak populations right now, there are 200 people in the playlist of their new DLC pack, and a 4 year old download-only PC game is ahead of it in activity, but who cares, the team is working hard! Puhleaze. I'm sure Frankie will respond to this by calling me a troll and that I hate Halo and hate everything and am moving the goalposts and should leave GAF as I have been told by him before, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that all the 9.8's and long hours in the world can't stop this game from falling further on its face if they keep heading down this same path.

Chill.
 
It was nice to hear 343 acknowledge some of the problems of the game and that they're planning to fix 'm,

Where are you seeing this?

Here are the comments I see:
It wasn’t flawless by any stretch of the imagination, but by most objective criteria, it was a resounding success. So we know we have a lot to do. And we know we have a lot to learn.

There are a ton of things we wish we'd done better: Features that didn’t make it into the final game. Glitches that emerged. Missteps made. DLC fiascos. Communication breakdowns.

I'm not seeing anything really specific mentioned there. Or at least the things that I see GAF grouses about (file share, playlist musical chairs, weapon balance, maps etc.). The specific issues mentioned: glitches and DLC fiascos are easy non-controversial and ones that anyone for any game would want to fix.

And I sure don't see them talking about pledging to fix things other than "we have a lot to do." Which is always followed up with 3x times as many pats on their own back. The one concrete fix coming is the Forge Small Maps playlist. But that will be there for one week. Other than that, the only mentioned fix is a title update 1.5 months from now. That could include anything.

And there's not a single mention of many of the things that they said they hoped to get in the beginning of 2013. The ones I was watching for are campaign theater, playlist ranks.

These non-updates with vague acknowledgements and even vaguer promises to fix things are driving me nuts. It's driving me nuts because I still want to like this game. Like I have loved every past Halo. I have a goddamn Halo tattoo for f***'s sake. But I haven't played Halo 4 since 12/3. And honestly I haven't missed it. I had kept some hope that the new year would bring changes or updates or those missing features, but this bulletin tells me to give up that hope.

To be clear, I'm not expecting an apology letter. Frank wrote a letter about how proud is he is of the game and the team. Nothing wrong in that. But! I would have loved to have heard more about reasons to be excited to own Halo 4 in 2013. Because right now I'm not excited about play Halo 4 in 2013. Right now, a lot of HaloGAF isn't either.




P.S. Is it just me or is it really telling that the first thing listed for "Early 2013" isn't about the game, but is about the expanded universe? *sigh*
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Where are you seeing this?

Here are the comments I see:




I'm not seeing anything really specific mentioned there. Or at least the things that I see GAF grouses about (file share, playlist musical chairs, weapon balance, maps etc.). The specific issues mentioned: glitches and DLC fiascos are easy non-controversial and ones that anyone for any game would want to fix.

And I sure don't see them talking about pledging to fix things other than "we have a lot to do." Which is always followed up with 3x times as many pats on their own back. The one concrete fix coming is the Forge Small Maps playlist. But that will be there for one week. Other than that, the only mentioned fix is a title update 1.5 months from now. That could include anything.

And there's not a single mention of many of the things that they said they hoped to get in the beginning of 2013. The ones I was watching for are campaign theater, playlist ranks.

These non-updates with vague acknowledgements and even vaguer promises to fix things are driving me nuts. It's driving me nuts because I still want to like this game. Like I have loved every past Halo. I have a goddamn Halo tattoo for f***'s sake. But I haven't played Halo 4 since 12/3. And honestly I haven't missed it. I had kept some hope that the new year would bring changes or updates or those missing features, but this bulletin tells me to give up that hope.

To be clear, I'm not expecting an apology letter. Frank wrote a letter about how proud is he is of the game and the team. Nothing wrong in that. But! I would have loved to have heard more about reasons to be excited to own Halo 4 in 2013. Because right now I'm not excited about play Halo 4 in 2013. Right now, a lot of HaloGAF isn't either.




P.S. Is it just me or is it really telling that the first thing listed for "Early 2013" isn't about the game, but is about the expanded universe? *sigh*

Maybe you should have thought twice about getting a tattoo.
 
Isn't the standard practice with fixes, title updates and new functionality to wait until the work is done, or at least at the end of certification? They've said whats on the roadmap, in general terms, with target dates. To go into more detail can only lead to promises being straight up broken in case certification issues arise.

Why do you expect, nay, demand that Halo 4 should be any different than any other xbox game?
 

Karl2177

Member
I would think "how the game was made" contains a lot of the reasons why changes were made.

But you can present a list of changes and a quick little blurb on why after each one. It's simple, effective, and provides the most info without the extraneous stuff.

Isn't the standard practice with fixes, title updates and new functionality to wait until the work is done, or at least at the end of certification? They've said whats on the roadmap, in general terms, with target dates. To go into more detail can only lead to promises being straight up broken in case certification issues arise.

Why do you expect, nay, demand that Halo 4 should be any different than any other xbox game?

You don't have to give specifics. Go back to when the Defiant maps were released. They were hinting at a new armor available. It didn't actually happen. Or when they were talking about the Reach TU changes. They said something about no fall damage options, but it ultimately wasn't in the update. Does it suck? Yeah, but the explained why it wasn't included and it wasn't an issue anymore.
 
Hey guys what did I mi....oh.....

Yes if all the people who I enjoy playing Halo with stop playing Halo. I'm pretty close now after Halo 4. juices, devo, tawpgun, tunavi, Ken, thermite, ram, trasher, capt blood, overdoz, plywood, booties, free, all my friends from somethingawful, all the other long-time halogaffers like metroidvania, eazy, vhfive, backflip, etc. Everyone stopped playing. Removing Squad Slayer for no reason got rid of half of them, Halo 4 got the rest. I didn't play Oddball Swordbase because it was fun to play alone, I played it because it was an excuse to bullshit and goof around with cool people. That's the only reason I play Halo. 343 is chasing a market they'll never get at the cost of killing off parts of their fanbase.

So true its hurts.
 
Maybe you should have thought twice about getting a tattoo.

Nah. I might have regretted getting a big HALO logo or something. It's just the Sol symbol I've used since Halo 2. And since I still have so many great memories of Halo, I don't regret it.

1443978744_6a4a9182c6.jpg
4981703330_237136a175.jpg
 
Yeah, it's a bit different. You can use tags to filter and sort, just like you would a forum.

http://www.bungie.net/en-US/view/community/forum/tags

Some are already created (community, gaming, etc.). If there isn't one that fits, you can make your own.

If you love it like a waifu, or hate it with the fury of a thousand suns, leave some feedback please. Is beta.

Touched on this in Deadly's thread, but any chance for Twitter integration down the line? That'd be sweet.

Other than that, it looks slick. You guys did a good job. Display name is Zoey and my Unique ID is Dax01. Was able to set my avatar to the Librarian symbol. That's me.
 

Homeboyd

Member
Urk I'll ask here bc b.net scares me. Archive threads (i.e. pinned threads that may have contained tons of links to other resources)... Where are they? Especially important for some of my groups with organized threads containing links to forge map submissions, etc...
 

AF Jon

Neo Member
It's a shame that people feel so ambivalent towards Halo 4, though it's certainly understandable. I still think it's fun to play with friends who just want to screw around, but I will agree that customs have been neutered somewhat which takes away from that. And there a lot of new elements that have been introduced that change the core gameplay in a way that I think don't suit Halo. Not to mention that there are a lot of support issues for the game that ought to have been addressed sooner.

I don't happen to find any of these changes too repulsive, but I don't want to play the game that often because it's driven a lot of other people away. I have Live is so I can play games with friends, not on my own.
 

Rev3rb

Member
Touched on this in Deadly's thread, but any chance for Twitter integration down the line? That'd be tweet.

Other than that, it looks slick. You guys did a good job. Display name is Zoey and my Unique ID is Dax01. Was able to set my avatar to the Librarian symbol. That's me.

Fixed.


Bungie has always had such nice web designs... So clean and simplistic
 

Arnie

Member
Just read Kyle's post, and it was magnificent.

Plain and simple, the franchise is on a negative trajectory if 343 continue along the path they've chosen; to ape other franchises and fundamentally alter core principles.

And the argument about too little, too much doesn't wash when many of the complaints are about asinine changes 343 chose to make for very little gain, or to change the fundamentals. Nor does the argument about the community being an extension of the team, when nobody requested what we finally received, and ultimately disliked. In fact quite the contrary, we vocally opposed them for months with zero dialogue and a blind eye turned.

Does not wash.
 

Tawpgun

Member
I just wish they could say if the TU is going to be more glitch fixing, or is it gonna be feature adding, and sandbox balancing.
 

u4iX

Member
I just wish they could say if the TU is going to be more glitch fixing, or is it gonna be feature adding, and sandbox balancing.

My hunch says no because most of the studio has been out for so long.

It's probably hard to balance test without certain team leads there.
 

J10

Banned
The constant studio back-patting from Frankie is to be expected. It'd be pretty demoralizing for his co-workers if he only said "we fucked up and we're sorry." Positive reinforcement and all that.

While I can appreciate the minimal lip service to certain fans, I see no reason to expect things will significantly change for the better. The demands of Microsoft far outweigh the hopes and dreams of a hundred nerds on the internet. Halo will probably continue to be profitable assuming they properly maintain brand awareness, regardless of how bad Microsoft continues to fuck the gameplay up.
 
Yeah I mean I feel like every weekly bulletin is the same.

Very proud of the team, we did a lot with a little... no. Every business is hard as shit to build, every product is hard as shit to launch, the difference is most businesses aren't a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. There are no cafes in most businesses. There are no lounges with plasma TVs. There are no trips to NYC to hang out with celebrities. I've never seen a group of people congratulate themselves more on doing their job than 343. I completely understand being proud of the team and what people have accomplished, but don't try to frame it as though the struggle excuses some of the faults.

There are approximately zero people reading this:



that were disappointed with Halo 4, but will now return to the game because of that statement. It means nothing to anyone but the people who already know you made mistakes.

There are approximately zero people reading this:



who then feel better about playing a Halo game with the worst frame-rate drops in the series.

Then I read this



is it the community's fault that we're missing features from Halo 3? Frankie talks about how by all objective measures Halo 4 was a success. Missing core components of your predeccessors is a pretty damn objective failure.

and I read this



What was influenced by the community? Any examples? Was FUD or TTL asking for Complex? If the community is such a direct and democratic extension of the team, which part of the community asked for the first map pack to be big brown maps? Was that ReadyUpLive or r/Halo's fault? Could you guys have democratically put up a vote with the major communities asking if recreating Seattle during crunch time was a good idea? I just find it hilarious that after a year of Trust Us, Feels Like Halo, now suddenly the community is apparently a direct extension of the team and there are just too many gosh darn voices to be heard to make people happy. To extend this makeshift olive branch while simultaneously refusing to outline the next title update is hysterical to me. To this day, we still have no idea who, why, or how 343 makes any of their matchmaking decisions. We open up the weekly bulletin every week and hope there's something interesting. That is literally the only involvement we get with matchmaking updates.

No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything. You don't think about the thousands of man-hours that go into the labeling of every single product in a grocery store, you just buy it. Give us some actual hard definable timelines for when we'll be getting fileshare, when we're getting a ranking system, when we're getting video uploading. Where are these features? Everything is always one or two weeks away. We'll have more details to share in a bit! As someone who hasn't played Halo in over a month, all I took from that update is that video game development is hard and that we'll be getting minor playlist updates in 3 or 4 weeks. Well, no shit. Sometime in the future we'll get missing features added and a title update. Oh and we have more outsourced table-scrap maps to look forward to that we'll have to pay for. Halo 4 is hitting all time low daily peak populations right now, there are 200 people in the playlist of their new DLC pack, and a 4 year old download-only PC game is ahead of it in activity, but who cares, the team is working hard! Puhleaze. I'm sure Frankie will respond to this by calling me a troll and that I hate Halo and hate everything and am moving the goalposts and should leave GAF as I have been told by him before, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that all the 9.8's and long hours in the world can't stop this game from falling further on its face if they keep heading down this same path.

Bravo, well written.

Frankie's apology is to little to late.

I have been an avid Halo fan for my entire childhood and well into my early adult years. I lived and breathed the game and have put more time into it then most. With that said, I have lost all faith in the Halo franchise after seeing the clusterfuck that is Halo 4. With every wrong decision that was made not a single word was spoken by 343. Then many months later they release this big apology which is actually just a way to congratulate themselves on a job well done it seems? Fuck it.

There will be people that argue this with me, but it is pretty simple to see that a LOT of the fan base has drifted away to other games where the company actually gives a shit about the community. I have friends that have been playing Halo with me since CE and after trying Halo 4 they are completely fed up and disappointed.

At this point the only thing that brings me back to these forums are the few people on here who I would consider a real life friend, and also to see what sort of new fuck ups 343 manages to pull off.
 
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