Dear 343 Industries:
I would have preferred to write this privately to you via e-mail, but given the fact that this doesn’t appear to be an option and my later consideration that I may not be alone with this issue, I would like to briefly discuss my grievance with your recent Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) make good. I, like many Halo fans, got up on November 11th, 2014 (I’m in my 30s and had work in the morning so I was not able to make a midnight launch) and purchased MCC on my way to work. As an enthusiast of video games that blogs mostly about retro I was psyched to pick this collection up even if it meant a large 20 GB patch file was in my future that evening. I even wrote a blog post that afternoon to discuss my new purchase, which is live here: http://gaminghistory101.com/2014/11/11/neo-retro-chiefs-big-day.
I have a fast Internet collection, but I didn’t expect to have the entire patch downloaded that night so I popped in the disc, started the install, started the patch download, activated the Halo Channel code and went to bed. As is usual for my work weeks I got up the next morning and went to work without much concern for my MCC and in anticipation of the gaming I would be doing that night. It was around lunch time that the reports began flooding in and, frankly, if you follow enthusiast press sites it was impossible to avoid the claims of broken matchmaking, lack of overall online functionality, and even some reports of bugs within the campaign. This is an online game and not my first experience with launch day woes - dare I say I was expecting something like this to happen. It’s okay, I’m a big boy and I have plenty of other options, so I decided to avoid my beloved MCC and delve into several other games I had been meaning to play while the issues worked themselves out through patches and your hard work.
Then a month passed.
I’m sure plenty of people attempted to log in, start a match, or just run through the campaign, but I’m not one of those people. Why would I? Whether it was the Giant Bombcast, Podcast Unlocked, or really any other game site or podcast I listen to there was one consistent message: MCC is broken. Gamers were furious, I’m sure these boards were lit up like Christmas trees, and Bonnie Ross herself had issued an apology on November 24 with a statement that specifically said matchmaking was “a frustrating experience, including long matchmaking times and low session success rates.” No, this is not the game I wanted to play. Still, I knew it would get fixed and I knew eventually I would be able to play my beloved MCC in a full functional working format at some point. I continued to wait as the Internet continued to fume, it honestly wasn’t that big of a deal to me.
December, especially the final two weeks, is a time for holidays, travel, and hustle for the United States, so naturally on December 19 I was out of town with my wife and child visiting relatives. Video games are an important, but secondary, concern in my life and thus I did not have my Xbox One with me when the announcement was made in the evening of the MCC make good. I was to receive a month of Xbox Live, a special emblem for multiplayer, another Halo 2 remade map from the talented team at Certain Affinity, and to my delight the entire campaign of Halo 3: ODST. I knew it would take time for these bonuses to roll out, but that was fine, I had already waited and it appeared that for the first time in over a month that MCC was in playable condition. This was great news, I couldn’t get home to play MCC and await this additional content. After re-reading the announcement, however, I noticed a major problem. The way 343 would determine if you received this make good was purely dependent upon you getting online and playing (or attempting to play) online. I hadn’t done that. I was the patient one. I stayed off the already busy and broken servers while this mess got cleared up. Now, I was left out as a response to my patience. I was very frustrated.
Some say that because I wasn’t inconvenienced that I have no right to the bonus. I disagree. Just because I did not boot the game up and try to play it broken does not mean that I didn’t get inconvenienced, it just meant I was patient enough to wait. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways for me to prove I bought it at launch. Perhaps that blog post is proof enough, but then I always have the receipt from my purchase, the activation on 11/11/14 of my Halo Channel on my XBL account, and that little 20 GB patch I downloaded on 11/11/14. Can’t those also count to prove this? Surely there’s a way for Microsoft to look at my profile and see that I did all of these things.
I certainly hope there is a way I can submit proof of my day one purchase and/or validity for the make good because despite not getting online and playing the game, I was an eager purchaser of MCC, spreading the gospel of its value as I went, and one of the first people to tell everyone that while it was a bad situation, that 343 would fix everything and make good for the inconvenience. I have a different opinion today because I feel that in displaying good behavior I have screwed myself out of items I feel I also qualify for despite not having played the game. Surely I cannot be alone. Is there any way we can reconcile this? I sure hope so.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Halo Fan