Found this Q&A in the 12/12/12 Halo Bulletin.
Would have appreciated finding this info posted in the matchmaking thread instead of stumbling onto it incidentally, but at least I found the info here on Waypoint instead of Twitter.
Edit: You know, I find it ironic that I neither own Halo 4 or want to and yet I’m making time to share this info with Halo 4’s community in the forum thread it should have been directly posted in for them to see it. A little empathy goes a long way, 343i/Microsoft. Hope this info helps sort some things out for you all.
Questions are asked by BS Angel and answers are given by Josh Holmes, Creative Director for 343 Industries.
Now that we’re covered pre-launch, let’s talk about post-launch. Have any of the responses to Halo 4 surprised you?
<mark>It’s been humbling to receive so many messages from players who have enjoyed the game and being able to play the game in Matchmaking now that it’s out in the wild. When the game was first released, I spent a week at home on my couch, playing the game online while reading reviews between matches. It’s surreal to pour three years of your life into something and then finally be able to see and hear the responses from people playing it.</mark>
I was wondering where you were that first week! Now that you’re back, what are our main priorities in regard to sustain?
<mark>Our first priority is responding to any unforeseen bugs or exploits that are uncovered by the community. Beyond that we are continuing to monitor playlist population and manage the rotation of experiences in Matchmaking to make sure that the most popular experiences are made available to players.</mark>
What philosophy do we use when making these decisions?
<mark>Our sustain philosophy is to support and maintain Halo 4’s online community by analyzing player activity and making measured changes when necessary. We want to maintain engagement amongst the active player population through careful management of the active playlists, taking into account which experiences are most popular and addressing critical bugs and exploits as they are discovered. We also need to infuse the experience with new content in the form of authored map packs and community created maps so that the experience feels fresh and exciting for months and years to come.</mark>
Is that why we’re doing weekly updates instead of monthly updates?
<mark>In the case of Spartan Ops, we chose a weekly cadence for new episodes because it felt like the right timing to keep people invested in the story over the course of the season. We approached Spartan Ops like a serialized television show, but with the added interactive component of missions. For War Games, the weekly updates to playlists allow us to monitor the community’s response to different game modes and take that into account when planning. We’re also able to address map exploits that may be discovered (like the hole in collision that was found in Complex and being exploited in Oddball). Going a full month between updates would prevent us from addressing these issues in a timely manner.</mark>
Another thing we’re doing differently with Halo 4 is rotational playlists. Why are we taking that route this time around?
<mark>We put new playlists into rotation to keep the experience fresh each week and to test the community’s response to different game types. We limit the total number of active playlists to prevent the population from becoming too fragmented so that we can provide an optimal matchmaking experience and if a playlist fails to capture or maintain population over time then it becomes a candidate for retirement, at least temporarily.</mark>
We have some great stuff in the works for 2013. What can you share about the things we currently have up our sleeve?
<mark>The second half of Spartan Ops kicks off on January 21, featuring new environments and missions along with the conclusion of the season’s storyline. We also have more maps coming with the Majestic and Castle map packs, as well as some community-created maps that we will be selecting to add into Matchmaking, which will include both smaller 4 vs. 4 maps and larger Big Team maps.</mark>
It just made sense for me to do it that way.