H4 Infinity Challenge(Pull up a seat)

Games Other Halo
1

I want to let everyone know that I am not here to complain and whine, but to raise awareness. I have loved Halo since the beginning and I was honestly shocked and upset with how this has been handled. Especially with how they pride themselves on listening to the community. I am disabled, with 3 herniated discs. My commitment to this was a struggle and it hurts a lot that I was singled out, and that the people who really cheated received no penalty.

I was in 15th place for Tier 1 in Spartan Ops for the Infinity Challenge. 3 days before the end of the event, I was removed from the leaderboards. No email, notification, nothing. I did not cheat, I stayed up for the first 48 hours, and then slept about 3-4 hours each day until the end of the event. I didn’t have anybody play for me (except running to the bathroom) and I turned off my Xbox in fear of red ring. My game history says it all.

I was the ONLY player removed from the top of the boards, no other person was removed for cheating or collusion in Tier 1. Even despite clear evidence of people having their Xbox on for the entire week straight and obscene game numbers. You think at least 1-3 would have been dropped, right? 20+ emails to -Yoink!- Gaming later, I finally learned that 343i was responsible for my removal. VG said they would forward my case to them. I never received an email back from either company. So I took to the Waypoint forums, and tweeted/PM’d BS Angel. I got absolutely no response.

After my 2nd attempt on Twitter she responded and gave me a cookie-cutter company response basically saying. “We removed people who broke the rules, you cheated”. I said I wanted to contest/dispute this claim. You know, get to the bottom of it? Since I was the ONLY one who cheated and all. No response. After stewing on it for a while, I got motivated and tried again.

I tweeted BS Angel, mentioning that I never got a proper response/explanation. I also said that emails or DM/PM would be much easier/appropriate. She asked for a link to my original forum posts, which I provided, and she responded with yet another cookie-cutter statement “We monitored the leaderboards for players using exploits that went against the tournament rules, who were then removed.”

ORLY?

So I ask what exploit I used. No response to that, just this “The tournament has concluded. We will not be overturning any removals. Apologies for being the bearer of bad news.” What the hell is with this? I just don’t get it, if this was in the Bungie era, this wouldn’t stand. She won’t even admit what I did! We all used the same method for beating that level as fast as possible. I’m one of the biggest fans out there, probably THE biggest on the top of those boards. Now some random who cheated will get a cameo in the next Halo. I won’t stop fighting this or bringing it up until they do the right thing.

2

I had no idea grinding the most Spartan Ops games in a period of time was like…a thing.

My distaste for the err “competition” in question aside, your treatment does seem to be rather shady. At the absolute least they have an obligation to simply tell you WHY you were removed.

3

The Infinite Challenge was a mess I believe… They did a much better job with the global championships I think.

4

The Infinity challenge was a mess. People cheated, 343 removed (Probably both cheaters and non-cheaters), and people didn’t get their prizes before a long time.

5

I thought I’d also run for the cameo, untill I realised that I had school, and that everyone at top tier didn’t have any obligations, someone to play for them and as I also later learned, had found glitches to speed up 15 minute SpOps matches into 4 minute runs.

I think you have to read the terms of agreement to see if they do not have to tell you the reason of you getting banned. Because if that isn’t stated anywhere then everyone who got removed should get the reasons explained to them.

Leaderboard

Let’s make some simple calculations here.

If I understood it right, the games in each tier is only tracked during the time January 12th to 19th. That’s 8 whole days. 8*24 is 192, that times 60 is 11 520. That’s how many minutes there are in those days. Let’s see how long each SpOps game on avarage took during that time in the Top 10.

minutes
1: 6,6
2: 7,1
3: 7,4
4: 7,4
5: 7,8
6: 7,8
7: 8,1
8: 8,3
9: 8,4
10: 8,5

That’s assuming no one had anyone to play for them and they didn’t go to sleep for 192 hours. It’s quite astonishing that if we go by that, they managed to keep energized for so long that their playing didn’t suffer.

If we then assume that they did sleep, their avarage match per playing time decreases, then there are toilet breaks, eating food which you can do while playing but you’ll still lose game time, then their avarage decreases even more.

Tier 3 winner has a more believable time assuming the player slept 8 hours each day. Then it’d be roughly 18 minutes per match. Which is around what time a regular SpOps match takes, right?

> During the Finals, all scores will reset, and Finalists will play the Game in the Game Mode they used to qualify to compete for a chance to win prizes in their corresponding Tier. Sponsors computer is the official time keeping device for this Tournament.

Rules

So I was right then.

Also, isn’t there a part in the XBL terms that you’re not to allow anyone else access to your account? Okay, we all do that from time to time, but seeing as the IC was a serious tournament I’d imagine that specific rule weighs more. One account represents one person.

But seeing as there’s nothing about not allowing anyone else to play on your account and nothing about not allowed to glitch your way through the whole IC then there’s nothing to do.

> I turned off my Xbox in fear of red ring.

Actually the RROD is more frequent if you power down your Xbox, let it cool and then turn it on again, atleast for the older ones. The problem was/is faulty soldering, cold soldering if we like to call it that. It means that when the electronics cards were produced soldered the temperature wasn’t right which lead to a lot of air pockets in the solder isles. As something heats it expands and as it cools of it shrinks. Different materials shrink and expand differently. The air pockets expands at a different rate than the tin. The only two substances that have the same expansion ratio in regards to temperature is concrete and iron, that I know of atleast.

Anyhow, as the air expands in the pockets it puts pressure on the tin which also eventually begins to crack. The cracks get bigger by time untill eventually the conductivity becomes so poor that it doesn’t work properly anymore.

That’s atleast my explanation.

6

Yeah Naqser, you think they’d have the maximum # of games at least ballparked that someone could get if they played nonstop. The best times with a good team was around 3:30-4:00

Oh well, this is all I can do until I see some 343i employees in real life. At least I got it out there.

7

Also I just wanted to point out that I’m about 95-99% sure nobody from Spartan Ops was removed for cheating in the top 30 of each tier.

8

> Yeah Naqser, you think they’d have the maximum # of games at least ballparked that someone could get if they played nonstop. The best times with a good team was around 3:30-4:00
>
> Oh well, this is all I can do until I see some 343i employees in real life. At least I got it out there.

The problem is that if they can’t really put a maximum # of games anyone could have at a certain time. Since there’s the possibility that someone is good enough to get through a mission faster than their anticipated minimum time required for a mission, without glitching/cheating. While that person then would break the number of game legit, he/she would then be banned because he/she was to good. Albeit that’s perhaps a better option than just letting things get out of hand and ban random people. Such as what happened.

I mean when I did a little research I came upon a thread from 9 or so months ago where someone at the bottom with 24 matches had been banned for cheating.

3:30 sounds like a really fast time, that’s with glitching, right? Which is online in MP against the rules. And if people get banned for cheating, then glitching must be against the rules. So is allowing control over an account to another person, or so I believe.

Either way, I doubt there’s really anything you can do about this. As pissed and furious I get looking at the kind of literal crap that ran through the whole Infinity Challenge, there’s little anyone can do about it. The players banned will be banned, they apparently have no obligation to tell any player the grounds for being banned apart from “you were found cheating”. Even though I’d say it’s a right to know what you did wrong so you can’t repeat it. Perhaps they’re too ashamed of their automated system, perhaps an angry intern got lose on the system or anything else that they’re too ashamed to admit. Like the whole DLC fiasco which got slated over by an even bigger lie.

I don’t remember reading anything about a winner for SpOps or even Wargames. To me it was like the competition never existed after the final date. Except for the design thing of the car. I’ve never seen any photos, interviews, announcments and so forth regarding the participants of the challenge, or I can’t remember any, atleast not on the front page.

I think they’re ashamed of how it was handled and what managed to slip through.

9

Yes that is with glitching, which every player did in the top 30 of each tier. It was a minor glitch, it lets you skip one battle at the end, that’s it. Every player could have done it, it’s not hard.

If they did some math, I’m sure they could easily come up with a guesstimate of a maximum number of realistic games total, or at least per day. Even with the battle at the end, it was around 5:00 minutes I guess for a slow team.

They should have done the research themselves and properly monitored what people were doing in game to reach such times. I agree, they are probably just embarrassed. It just sucks immensely because I was the only player removed from the top of the boards, and I’m such a massive fan you know?

10

> The Infinite Challenge was a mess I believe… They did a much better job with the global championships I think.

I agree with you, Erick. The Infinity Challenge was their first major tournament, but it was more of a grindfest than it was a competition, which it was supposed to be. Encouraging players to cheat/grind away as much as possible and take away sleep and other valuable time (even washroom breaks!) is not very professional in my books.

The Global Championship on the other hand, I think 343 Industries did an AMAZING job with. Absolutely incredible, I think we all had goosebumps during that last Pistola vs. Ace match. It really got the community together and gave us something to look forward to. It was like the Halo Super Bowl. Not to mention, the production value and prize money were also huge.

Kris Tribal, if what you say is true (I’m not questioning you), I am very sorry to hear about your current situation. There’s not anything I can do, but I hope for the best for you and get everything sorted out.

11

OP, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been undeservedly dubbed a cheater, but I’m afraid there is not much you will be able to do, the infinity challenge was a while ago and I don’t think, even if you prove you didn’t cheat, that any decisions will be overturned in the leader board side of things. I’m sorry, but I hope that you at least get an apology or a reason to why you were kicked from the top of the leader board.

12

Yeah I mean, honestly I just want an apology/explanation and the FUD Mega Bloks set, lol.

That or give me a minor cameo in the game! I played with a random few from the top of the leaderboards during the event. None of them seemed excited or enthused about winning that prize, or seemed to be big Halo fans at all.