Suggestion: A Place for custom maps in the Matchmaking

Games Other Halo
1

Hey you guys!

Halo Reach definitely is a great game and one of the best multiplayer titles ever made. Nevertheless, after many hours of fighting online, it can get some kind of boring because of the limited amount of officially featured maps. Especially playlists like Invasion and (partly) Living Death appear not to have many different maps.

That’s why recently, I started looking for good community maps and found the YouTube channel “TheHaloForgeEpidemic”, where they show us nice community creations and give examples on how it could feel to play on them. Many of those maps are really well done.

But there is one thing that makes me feel very sad about those maps: it is simply too difficult to play on them as you need to have enough friends to make up a custom game. Even for the smallest maps based on some simple Team Slayer you need 8 people to have a pleasant game, not to mention that many good community maps are created for infection, invasion or BTB. All those people need to be in your friend list and have to go online at the same time, which often is quite difficult. For example I have never watched a situation with 8 of my halo friends being online at once.

Another problem with custom maps is that it isn’t too easy to get them. There is no (fine working) centralized database accessible straight from the Xbox, where you can simply select, for example, invasion maps and get a bunch of the best rated creations. No, you have to search them on the internet and try to download them from the old bungie.net database (which doesn’t seem to work fine after the start of the new Halo page).

So what I think would be REALLY great was a pair of matchmaking-based playlists which would feature community maps and game types. This could take place in several ways, for example one person acts as the host and downloads a map from the (new) database. After that, the host’s party is accessible through the “custom” playlist so that random people can join the game. Everybody, who enters, automatically downloads the map and the game type, and when a designated number of folks are there, the game starts.
Another Idea would be that every week/month 343industries chooses a few custom maps with related game types and places them on the “custom” matchmaking playlist. This way everything could go on as usual, when the party is full, the players vote for the map/game type to play. The only difference from a typical game would be that after they chose what to play it takes some seconds/minutes until everybody has downloaded the map.

So, what do you think about this idea? Would you like to see custom maps implemented in a special playlist on the matchmaking? Don’t you think it would be a great experience? Also this way, more players could get a motivation to start mapping…

Let’s simply discuss the given question in this thread. And maybe we could send a mail directly to 343industries…?

TheLastUn1c0rn

… please excuse my bad English…

2

A custom lobby would have been great.

3

That would be cool, I would love to see a playlist with community made custom maps rotated in every month. I dont know if 343 will be doing anything like this but it sounds like fun to me =)

Welcome to Waypoint.

4

Thanks :wink:

I also think such a lobby would be awesome.

5

i would much love to see the return of the community playlists but sadly, it probably won’t happen …

6

Why do you think so? If players want it, why shouldn’t 343 implement it again?

And btw what did the community playlists use to look like? When I started to play Reach, there already was no community playlist…

7

> Why do you think so? If players want it, why shouldn’t 343 implement it again?
>
> And btw what did the community playlists use to look like? When I started to play Reach, there already was no community playlist…

when bungie was in charge, they did a community slayer playlist to test the community maps but hardly anyone played in the playlist sadly, it was a playlist full of bad slayer maps at the time but now map quality has increased a lot that its worth doing and would be preferred for a lot of people.

i don’t think its going to happen though because of its previous failures, limited resources and not enough playlist slots available.

8

> > Why do you think so? If players want it, why shouldn’t 343 implement it again?
> >
> > And btw what did the community playlists use to look like? When I started to play Reach, there already was no community playlist…
>
> when bungie was in charge, they did a community slayer playlist to test the community maps but hardly anyone played in the playlist sadly, it was a playlist full of bad slayer maps at the time but now map quality has increased a lot that its worth doing and would be preferred for a lot of people.
>
> i don’t think its going to happen though because of its previous failures, limited resources and not enough playlist slots available.

They did community BTB as well. I wish I could have played that. We actually have one playlist spot left, so we could do one in Grab Bag.

9

> That would be cool, I would love to see a playlist with community made custom maps rotated in every month. I dont know if 343 will be doing anything like this but it sounds like fun to me =)
>
> Welcome to Waypoint.

We had that… it was called Community Slayer

Too bad it was removed. It was certainly a good place to test future maps that are being considered for matchmaking and see the reception to them.

I hear the Cartographers pitched the idea to bring it back but to no avail.

10

I loved Flagstravaganza playlist. That was my all time fav. It also featured a number of community maps.

11

Yes, it would be REALLY great if they could give us back those community playlists.

And what was Flagstravaganza? I’ve never heard about it…

12

loll too funny

13

> Yes, it would be REALLY great if they could give us back those community playlists.
>
> And what was Flagstravaganza? I’ve never heard about it…

It was a 5 vs. 5 Grab Bag playlist that Bungie had before the transition that featured only flag gametypes and two new ones that are in Team Objective: 2 Flag Slayer and 3 Flag CTF.

14

Yea thats a good idea they need to do that. Maybe they can monitor what map gets the most votes to know which ones are good to keep. Also they should choose the maps that has alot of community reviews like people could send in their maps for review.

15

Of course, I don’t have any experience in programming a piece of software like Halo and I can only guess, how much time it would take to implement a custom playlist.

But if 343 really thought creating a new system for custom maps wasn’t worth the work, I could already feel comfortable with something like a contest, where people send in their maps. The result could be, that every month two or three chosen community-made maps are added to the regular playlists. Of course, that wouldn’t give everybody the chance to share his work with the whole community, but it already could increase the variety of maps.