I can understand a TU but still

Games Other Halo
1

I was speaking to a player in customs last night who I don’t even know let alone. Spoke to him about Halo 4 not having a beta. This will be a long read so be prepared.

First of all, none of the problems Halo 4 have would have happened if we had a beta. I can understand that 343 wanted the playlists direction to go in a type of way that the Reach August Update did. What happened to that you ask? Halo CEA’s mutliplayer became useless, $40 down the drain because of the update. Aniversary Playlists got dumbed down to only Aniversary Slayer. I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again as I stated in another thread. 343 you may have a team that’s composed of Game Developers from companys like Treyarch, EA, Ubisoft, and Betheseda and they may be fans of Halo but that doesn’t mean they know how the matchmaking we’ve come to know since Halo 3 works. I can assure you that if there would have been more people from Bungie’s matchmaking team, Halo 4 would not be having these problems.

Now getting on to the public beta, yes a lot of people wouldn’t have bought Halo because of the beta, but can you blame them? The Default playlists across Halo 3 and Reach aren’t even Halo 4!! If we had FFA, Team Slayer, SWAT, Team Snipers, BTB, KOTH, Oddball, Team Doubles, and MLG, Halo 4 would still be successful regardless of how bad the beta was because the Default playlists would have been there and it would be more enjoyable.

Moving on to the maps. 343 not everyoone enjoys BTB, yet you create maps that are tuned to BTB and lack to create a balance of 4v4 and 8v8 maps. Why not just have a fine balance of the two at launch rather then upsetting your playerbase with a lack of 4v4 maps? With Forge, yes CA did do a decent job with the Defiant and Aniversary map pack, but Forge? Just because a company does 2 map packs doesn’t mean a thing. They created a Forge that lacks a lot of crap. Why not just have all the Forge map specific objects in one pallete and make those objects available on every Forge map? Hell, if you want to create a BTB map you’ll have to either create it above or on the side which offers only scenery and nothing but a while bland map. The maps lack flat land. Reach’s Forge world was fantastic besides the greyness of everything. Why couldn’t Halo 4’s Forge maps be this huge? That would have offered a lot more creatvitity for Forgers alike.

343, please understand this. We are your community, you may not communicate with us on the forums and I can understand that considering how childish and immature it is on here at some times. But it would have helped 100% more if you put out a beta for Halo 4 that we could test. It doesn’t matter if the Reach beta just made more people complain, we would have pointed out the issues to you, and Halo 4 would have been a lot more polished. The COD aspects would have been more polished as well. These next two TU’s will either revive Halo 4 or kill it off and be the death of the franchise. Even I was disappointed to see used copies at my Gamestop because Halo 4 could have been a lot better upon release.

The next Halo title, hence Halo 5, give your community a beta. Don’t think by playtesting a game yourself that you can polish it without oversighting things.

2

They mainly use a public beta to test the netcode for matchmaking. It’s not like the beta for Reach did a damn thing to fix the issues it had.

3

Betas for games don’t automatically solve all the problems or even come close to fixing issues. Reach had a beta, and the game had major issues upon release.

Battlefield 3 had a beta and had horrible issues upon release.

4

> They mainly use a public beta to test the netcode for matchmaking. It’s not like the beta for Reach did a damn thing to fix the issues it had.

Didnt Reachs’ Beta uncover 100,000+ bugs and glitches?

5

> > They mainly use a public beta to test the netcode for matchmaking. It’s not like the beta for Reach did a damn thing to fix the issues it had.
>
> Didnt Reachs’ Beta uncover 100,000+ bugs and glitches?

Thye should have included custom games, thenthey would have found more.

6

> Betas for games don’t automatically solve all the problems or even come close to fixing issues. Reach had a beta, and the game had major issues upon release.
>
> Battlefield 3 had a beta and had horrible issues upon release.

Quoted from Wiki:
Multiplayer beta
Reach’s multiplayer beta was open to owners of Halo 3: ODST. More than three million copies of ODST were sold by November 2009.[48] Bungie estimated between two and three million players for the upcoming Reach beta, compared to the 800,000 that participated in Halo 3’s trial.[49][50] Development schedules forced Bungie to release a six week-old beta, fraught with bugs and issues already addressed in newer builds. Though concerned that these issues might tarnish the game’s image, Jarrard noted that they had little choice but to ship it as-is and communicate with players concerning the fixes.[51]
More than 2.7 million players participated in the beta, which lasted from May 3 to May 20.[52] The game was rolled out from an internal group of Bungie or Microsoft employees, with the total number of players in the thousands. When the beta went public, more than a million played the first day, causing back-end servers to struggle to handle the traffic. While the engineering team had overestimated server load, bugs in server clusters caused game uploads to become backed up, slowing matchmaking to a crawl until the underlying issues could be fixed. Jarrard noted that the 16 million total hours of play time and large-scale rollout of the beta was vital to seeing how Reach would perform.[51][53]
Bungie used the beta to fix mistakes, glitches, and balance issues within gameplay elements.[54] “We needed our fans to provide feedback,” said Lehto, adding that having a large audience to “hammer” on the game allowed them to gather useful feedback to mold the finished product.[55] The game automatically collected statistics such as upload and matchmaking speeds, as well as game preferences; sorting out what Jarrard called “the more subjective anecdotal feedback” from emails, notes, and forums proved more difficult. The Reach beta generated over 360,000 forum posts on Bungie’s community forums. Bungie created official threads for groups of issues to manage the high volume of feedback; “We tried to give people a little bit more of a direct avenue to give that feedback and to make our lives easier. It was definitely a lot to assess and digest,” said Jarrard.[51] Certain feedback from the players did not correlate with the statistical data obtained from the matches during the beta. Chris Carney, lead designer for the multiplayer mode, recalled vocal dissatisfaction with the pistol early in the beta; by the end of the beta, the weapon was responsible for most of the kills coming from newly included weapons in the game. Bungie deployed special test matches to eliminate lurking variables, balance gameplay, and make other informed changes.[56]

7

It didnt solve all of the problems with reach but it did help.

8

> Betas for games don’t automatically solve all the problems or even come close to fixing issues. Reach had a beta, and the game had major issues upon release.
>
> Battlefield 3 had a beta and had horrible issues upon release.

Halo 4 would have been a lot more polished upon release, I can assure this community would not have accepted Halo 4 upon release if the issues weren’t fixed in the beta.

9

> > They mainly use a public beta to test the netcode for matchmaking. It’s not like the beta for Reach did a damn thing to fix the issues it had.
>
> Didnt Reachs’ Beta uncover 100,000+ bugs and glitches?

Indeed and add all the tweeks sutch as DMR getting 15 bullets in a clip. It’s always better to have 100k of daily players testing your game then say 100 daily players.

10

> More than 2.7 million players participated in the Halo: Reach beta

That’s more then Halo 4 had on launch day.

> Bungie used the beta to fix mistakes, glitches, and balance issues within gameplay elements.[54] “We needed our fans to provide feedback,” said Lehto, adding that having a large audience to “hammer” on the game allowed them to gather useful feedback to mold the finished product

This is what 343 needed to do but didn’t.

> Bungie created official threads for groups of issues to manage the high volume of feedback;

343 has a thread for this…after release

This is exactly what I’m talking about.