Halo: The Master Chief Collection – 100 Days Later
By: Rhys Weir | February 19th, 2015
November 13th, 2014 – Day Three
After constant reports from 343 Industries about server-side updates, they decided to remove a few playlists to try and improve search times in the remaining ones.
Removed Playlists
Remaining Playlists
- Team Hardcore
- Rumble Pit
- Halo 4
- SWAT
November 22nd, 2014 – Free for All
- Team Halo 2: Anniversary
- Halo Championship Series
- Team Slayer
- Big Team Battle
- Halo 2 Classic
- Halo 3
Since team sizes were still incorrect and players were constantly being split from the parties they were searching with, many people asked for 343 Industries to bring back the Free for All playlist in hopes they could at least play some sort of matchmaking game without having to worry about losing their party. 343 listened and later announced that the playlist would be coming online “within the next few hours” – this announcement was made at 3:25AM PST. Like all other playlists, it was going to be unranked until existing matchmaking issues had been ironed out.
It wasn’t until 10:18PM PST on November 23rd, 2014 that the playlist finally released and brought more disappointment to the already disgruntled community for a variety of reasons:
November 24th, 2014 – The Boss
- FFA was Halo 2 Anniversary only
- Max Player Size was set to 10 instead of the traditional 6-8 in previous titles
- In some cases, players were playing 11-16 player FFA games in the playlist
On November 24th, Bonnie Ross – Studio Head at 343 Industries made a blog post on the homepage of Halo Waypoint were she personally apologized for the shortcomings of Halo: The Master Chief Collection and promised that the team was working around the clock to ensure the game would be in a playable state that was promised before launch.
“On the matchmaking front, we have encountered unexpected issues that were not apparent in our internal test environment and that have resulted in a frustrating experience, including long matchmaking times and low session success rates. Within 343 Industries and Xbox, I can assure you that resolving these issues is our #1 priority. We continue to partner with the Xbox platform team to analyze all data to make ongoing server-side adjustments to continually improve the matchmaking experience.
We are also preparing additional content updates that will address existing campaign, UI, and other issues to improve the overall experience. With each update we will carefully analyze data to confirm that the improvements we’re seeing internally are also happening with fans at home. “
You can check out the full apology from Bonnie Ross by clicking here.
December 10th, 2014 – The Return
This date marked the return of Team SWAT, a playlist previously removed on November 13th to hopefully speed up the matchmaking process and it brought back 4v4 team sizes for five playlists:
Previously, these playlists were all 5v5 and made maps quite crowded in some cases. This was only a playlist update rather than content update which makes core changes to the game, so no further changes were made to matchmaking and stability on this date.
- Team Slayer
- Halo 2 Classic
- Halo 3
- Halo Championship Series
- SWAT
December 19th, 2014 – Compensation
Bonnie Ross had returned from the shadows and made a post on Xbox Wire informing players that because of all these issues, players would receive various forms of compensation to make up for the messy launch of the game. For anyone who played the game before December 19th, they would receive the following at a later date:
December 29th, 2014 – The Future
- In-game nameplate
- In-game avatar
- Free month of Xbox LIVE Gold
- Halo 3: ODST’s Campaign for Halo: The Master Chief Collection running at 1080p and 60FPS
- Remastered Halo 2 Anniversary Map – “Relic”
December 29th marked the release date of the Halo 5: Guardians Beta and would ultimately put Halo: The Master Chief Collection content updates on hold for a month. It should be worth noting at this point that content updates for Halo: The Master Chief Collection were releasing WEEKLY up until the release of the Halo 5: Guardians beta.
Content Update Release Dates
While the entire purpose of this article is to show the journey from November to February for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, it is worth touching on the Halo 5: Guardians beta and how well the game performed in terms of matchmaking and parties.
- November 14th, 2014
- November 20th, 2014
- November 26th, 2014
- December 3rd, 2014
- December 7th, 2014
- December 15th, 2014
- December 22nd, 2014
From the get go, players were able to join up with their friends and jump straight into matchmaking playlists and find games in under 30 seconds. These games were balanced teams, in most cases equally matched in terms of skill and matches actually started. A tweet from Josh Holmes on Twitter actually said that of the thousands of games played in the Halo 5: Guardians beta in the first week, only SEVEN started with uneven teams.
The sheer thought of a very early beta working much better than a retail product released from the same company was once again, baffling and people weren’t exaggerating – the matchmaking and party system in the Halo 5: Guardians beta was functioning better than Halo: The Master Chief Collection in every aspect.
January 21st, 2015 – Welcome to the Beta!
In a quiet blog post on Halo Waypoint, 343 Industries announced that they would be having a beta for the next content update for Halo: The Master Chief Collection that would be available for members of the Xbox One Preview Program. While nothing had been confirmed at this point, many people throughout the community were speculating that this would be a huge rework of the both the matchmaking and party systems and would address the core issues once and for all rather than releasing small updates every once in a while which clearly weren’t making any real impact.
The beta for the upcoming content update was scheduled to take place over the weekend of January 27th and ended up being delayed and eventually cancelled to ensure that the public release of the update arrived faster. Almost a month later, this update has still yet to arrive and we still don’t have a solid release date for it.
January 31st, 2015 – It’s coming, we promise.
Today marked the date that Bravo brought back the weekly Halo Bulletin posts which were stopped shortly before the launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection and replaced by video bulletins. While the video bulletins did mix things up a little, in most cases they completely ignored the issues with Halo: The Master Chief Collection with multiple episodes not even mentioning the game. In the first edition of what was now called the Halo Community Update, Bravo outlined what issues they are targeting for the upcoming content update and that is:
All three of these are arguably the biggest issues with the game and fixing them would do wonders despite the other issues like Halo 2 Classic netcode, games failing to load, etc.
- Matchmaking search time
- Match search success
- Lobby / Party Functionality
February 11th, 2015 – Stick With It
Stick With It is an achievement in Halo: The Master Chief Collection which offers 5 Gamerscore if you meet the pre-requirements seen below:
February 11th, 2015 was the third month that Halo: The Master Chief Collection had been out to the public and many players hopped onto the game to try and unlock this achievement. After reading various posts on achievement websites and testing it myself, I can confirm that as on February 19th, 2015 – this achievement will still not unlock and is bugged. Like every other issue in the game, 343 Industries apologized and promised they were working on a fix.
February 19th, 2015 – 100 Days Later
Well here we are. February 19th, 2015 marks the the 100th day that Halo: The Master Chief Collection has been available for purchase and as you can probably guess from the previous 5,000+ words, the game is still in a very dysfunctional and unplayable state. I haven’t even been able to touch on every single issue and bug that is still plaguing the game because to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t know when to stop. There are huge issues like the long-search times all the way down to minor issues like the lighting on Sandbox in Halo 3.
100 days in and Halo: The Master Chief Collection does still not have a decent-functioning matchmaking system, a working lobby/party system and a plethora of other long-standing issues. Even if the upcoming content update does finally fix the long-standing issues with matchmaking and parties, there are still all of these issues that need to be worked on and even more that I’ll probably miss out:
Long-standing issues
*: This bug actually spawns another interesting but insane bug. If you are holding an objective like the Oddball, Flag or Hill when this glitch happens to you, your dead body will be in possession of the objective until you finally respawn. Other players will not be able to pick them up and will essentially lose to a dead body. Dead players who are stuck on the 4 second respawn glitch will also show as a red dot on the radar until they finally respawn.
- Crashes on all titles
- Freezes on all titles
- Long search times
- Low matchmaking success rate
- Peer to Peer matches are more common that matched on dedicated servers
- Rank resets
- Halo 2 Classic’s netcode
- Halo: Combat Evolved anti-aim bug
- Forge in Halo 3
- 4 second respawn bug in Halo 2 Classic*
- No microphone indicator to see who is talking in various titles
- Incorrect emblems shown in-game for Halo 2 Classic, Halo 3 and Halo 4
- Halo 3 directional sounds are broken
- Halo 3 multiplayer games aren’t recognized by Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s stats
- All of these bugs in Halo: Combat Evolved
- De-sync bugs in Halo 2 Anniversary and Halo: Combat Evolved’s Campaigns in co-op mode
- This notification for terminal videos always shows up and there is no way to get rid of it
- Various AI in Halo 2 Anniversary don’t dual wield weapons despite doing so in the Xbox original version
- This UI bug prevents players from changing teams in custom games
- Trait Zones in Halo 4’s Forge can’t be used because the UI option to modify them is missing
- If you betray a team mate in Halo 3 three times, you won’t be kicked – you will be sent to the other team.
Those are just a list of some issues that have been a problem since November 11th, some have been acknowledged by 343 Industries and some haven’t and we literally have no time frame when any of them will be fixed. In just 100 days, 343 Industries have managed to make very little progress in fixing all of these issues in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. With the upcoming content update having over a month of development time, it should seriously be fixing all the issues it promises to fix on the matchmaking and party-side of things.
This weekend, Halo: The Master Chief Collection could possibly be going on sale for $24 and I literally don’t know if I should be telling people to pick it up or not. On one hand, it is an absolute steal getting all of that content for that price but on the other hand, it hasn’t worked for 100 days and there are no signs that it will be fixed completely any time soon.
I trimmed A LOT of the main post. Full post here http://teambeyond.net/halo-the-master-chief-collection-100-days-later/
Not sure how a game with this many problems is being compared to Bloodborne.
Cause no one has decided to cronical all the problems of bloodborne.
Again you are only proving my point here. Looking at this list makes it seem a lot worse here. The majority of these problems are minor shyt that happen in most games.
If you were to look at a bug log for bloodborne then write out an article chronicling those bugs, and talking about how they make you feel. It would look the exact same.
