Halo Waypoint feels like Windows 8 without developer support and a development cycle akin to EA Games one-year money grab. As you can see I am not pleased. I am not some high-and-mighty website owner, a really great player, an astute map forger, or even an acclaimed critic.
But I am an average user who also develops and designs software for a living and I recognize issues when they are presented. Since your forums seem to be devoid of any sort of customer support, I imagine this will fall on deaf ears which frankly would be less insulting than an admin to read and choose not to acknowledge this post. About a day or so following the release of Halo 4, I witnessed what appears to be the most rushed console game delivered to market I have ever witnessed. Graphics in some cases can placate the average user into accepting reduced functionality, but in this case even users new to the game have to question the logic behind some of the functionality.
For all practical purposes, Halo Waypoint has been developed and built around Halo 4’s data requirements and therefore since my questions are more data-oriented, I felt that this section was a better area to vent my frustrations.
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[Matchmaking difficulties]
First I would like to say that Matchmaking difficulties and the timeouts are a system admin or network software team issues. I do not know what type of fast matrix transformation they are attempting to use for Matchmaking, but the tolerance for acceptance needs to be tweaked. Your algorithm does not seem bad, but your “sliders and knobs” need a proper mathematician.
But honestly, I would be a fool if I actually told you I know what the problem is and honestly this is something I expect to be worked out over the coming months. I can forgive Matchmaking issues especially when the pseudo “UDP-handshake” (not really called that) is used in an attempt at fairness. Host does not become “God” [as much as possible] and I can respect that.
API access
But this post is about Halo Waypoint and the inability to manage your data.
Let me be clear when I say this:
— I have no interest in viewing Halo Waypoint data using a mobile device. I do not represent the majority but I represent a signifigant user base that is bound to a computer.
— I am a math guy, I would love to see how I do… maybe get some cool graphs, model my own lack of skill in game, etc. You utterly prevent me from doing this in any sort of fashion by failing to provide any sort of data export.
— You have abandoned a large fanbase by ignoring the API. The Internet knows a “Halo Fan” almost in the religious fanatic sense. This is a valuable asset that upper management, the PR team, or just plain scheduling overlooked. Rather than pointing figures, someone needs to step up and look to support a user base. Games are for gamers. If you forget who you are making your games for you are lost as a business.
In game quirk(s) during (new) Halo 4 Matchmaking and information retrievals
— Why can I not see the playlist a “friend” is participating in when I select “party details”? If a reasonable answer actually exists for this I would be amazed.
— When viewing the postgame stats, you let your interns decide look and feel. For example:
— If I play a round of BTB (Infinity or whatever coined term you applied), the endgame stats window remains in a blue rectangle occupying roughly 3/5 of the space. This requires I scroll to view the remaining parties. Well I measured it and even at that scale you should have had no problem fitting all 16 entries in the entire vertical span of the television. Lazy and rushed.
— Transparency. Jittery menu transitions due to effects being rendered on the fly. Whatever happened to an overlay then a re-render? I do not work on graphics and from one week of OpenGL I know that this is programming 101. …Unless this was an executive decision made late in the process on buggy software and someone thought the “plopping it on top” method would suffice. Lazy and rushed.
— SR is really annoying and only serves as noise on the screen and does not enhance the actual numerical value of a player’s level. You minus well just render the thing in comic sans.
— Player information “retrievals” can fail. Are you not using a redundant database?! Look Amazon’s S5 cloud service coupled with their databases would serve as an excellent alternative to whatever servers you are currently using. Hash the thing and save yourself some bandwidth and connection issues.
— Information postgame is pretty lacking. Do you have at least one nerd who appriciates a proper graph? You call yourself a gaming company. You can turn in your card here tyvm.
[This website]
Where is my search function for the forums?
Did you add that as a novelty or do you plan in customer engagement?
Are the top sections organized by topic or by your marketing division? (Only one of those answers is acceptable)
Your rotating playlist seems to show a total disconnect with the userbase. That cute little flash area does not support some screen sizes and fails on some browsers due to outdated html / lazy coding practices. It is not as if you have bad developers but rather you do not give them the time or budget they need to perform.
This feels like a sponsored YouTube channel.
Your Halo 4 Stats located at https://app.halowaypoint.com/en-us/Halo4/masterwit/{KEY_STRING} loads images from an insecure source. Therefore some browsers will timeout on loading the images even though your stats already are “locally obtained”. Here is an example message Chrome gave me:
You’re using Akamai, but you are not leveraging them. They have some great services… in fact they could do most of your data if you let them. (You seem so quick to pay vendors anyway)
Your movies are nice, but I didn’t buy a motion picture. This is Windows ME and I am in cynical mode right now.
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Right now, you are the Lindsay Lohan of game development studios. You had so much potential but you are a repeat offender trying 1990’s software development patterns and ignoring your market.
Fix the little things for the little guys like me. It would mean a lot and this could be the best monetary investment you make for future titles. (And stop trying to be Call of Duty, that is like making HP your role-model for proper company acquisitions.)
The little things matter more than you can possibly imagine.