343 Updates on Matchmaking Issues

343 is posting updates on their planned work to relieve the matchmaking issues here.

Their earlier update singled out 4 issues which I'm guessing are the most prevalent (?)

1. Issue: Players are experiencing unusually long Matchmaking times.
2. Issue: Parties are being split up when entering a matchmaking game
3. Issue: Games can start with unbalanced teams.
4. Issue: Big Team Battle is currently offering 6v6 matches instead of 8v8.

This is pretty spot on from what I experienced yesterday - I was able to get into about 4 or so matches all from different games. And they all took a very long time to load:

1. Halo CE Team Slayer - Seemed to work fine, no issues other than long load time
2. Halo 2 CTF - Same
3. Halo 2 Anniversary Big Team Battle - Noticed these were loading as 6v6. Really glad it has been identified as a bug and not some horribly misguided choice by 343!
4. Halo 3 Team Slayer - Match begins and my team starts getting destroyed. Now, I'm not great at Halo, but this was unbearable...It took me a while to noticed on the score screen following a death that we were playing 3v5 instead of 4v4.

There are numerous other reports of Campaign issues, most notably with Halo 3. I haven't touched that one but played some of CE and 2' anniversary campaigns. The main thing I noticed on that front were some achievements not unlocking correctly.

There's currently a bug that gives any party leader the ability to boot players on the opposing team. Even in matchmaking

This whole thing is a mess right now.

What the fuck is going on! I couldn't even get a party going outside of the game. Chat was fucking busted.

Just played a match on midship H3, fun as all hell, match ends, loading screen flashes for split second then goes to black, switch to dashboard and kept seeing flickering bars until I reset it.It's getting incredibly disturbing that these kind of game launches are becoming commonplace. 10 years ago these things NEVER happened.

I just don't understand how Microsoft--the company beating its chest about cloud servers and its ability to provide the best online experience--produced a title like this. The key online functionality is just trash.

Haven't been able to test the multiplayer since I'm waiting for the patch to finish downloading, but damn, those are some major issues. How did they goof that bad?

Oh well. It will probably be fixed by the time the update finishes for me. Until then I'll just keep messing around with the campaigns.

To answer your question - it's a really complex game that they did not invest enough time and money testing. The more important question is - How do they release a game in such a crap state? (See also the mess that is AC:U). Unfortunately, the answer is simple: Because they know we will still buy it, be ok with giant day 1 patches, and wait for it to be fixed.

What truly boggles my mind is all the acceptance they get on twitter. Frank O'Connor, Kiki Wolfkill, Bonnie Ross...all these 343 people that love getting on camera to talk about how much they love Halo when they should be fixing the game...they get numerous tweets saying dumb things like: "We know you are working hard on it!" "Keep up the good work!", etc etc. Oh you want to make a point on how hard you are working on it? How about you work hard to not release a game in this kind of state.

Spent some more time with this game last night. Despite all the patches they supposedly rolled out, I had a worse experience:

• CAMPAIGN - Played 1 level of Halo CEA co-op on Heroic. My partner had to back-out about halfway through and when we tried to resume, it did not save our progress.
• MULTIPLAYER - Matchmaking was still extremely slow. I did get into a few matches that were all bugged:
  • 1 Match of Halo CE in Team Slayer playlist. Was supposed to be 4v4 but loaded after only four players showed up, so we played as 2v2. One player quit midway so I'm hopeful it was his choice and not a glitch. The match itself ran fine until: Towards the end of the match, my controller battery was running low so I plugged it in to the console. As soon as I did that, the XBONE lost all response from the controller. I used voice command to go to the Dashboard and there, not even the media remote worked. Going on stand-by did not resolve the issue had to power cycle/reboot the system.
  • Got matched into a 4v4 Team Slayer match of Halo 2 Classic. As the game was loading, all other players dropped/lost connection. The game loaded me by myself on the map.
  • Got into a Big Team Battle on a Halo 3 map. Was supposed to be 6v6 but by the time the game loaded it was 4v4. Otherwise the match ran fine and it was a fun and close match. Essentially a first to 100 Team Slayer game on a smaller of the big maps.
  • Was in a two person party and we got matched into a Big Team Battle on a Halo CE Map, about 5v5. When the map loaded it left me on a black screen with the message "Waiting for Space to Clear." My friend in the party loaded into the level and said there were only 3 people that loaded in. Had to power cycle/reboot the system to get out of the black screen.
• OTHER - As this is all a mess, I thought I would check out "Halo: Nightfall." Unfortunately, I could not watch it as the Halo Channel app did not recognize that I had purchased the MCC. Trying to watch it via MCC launches the Halo Channel, and clicking on it in the Channel launches me back into MCC. An endless cycle.

I realize that this is not the best place to post this stuff, but I needed to vent. Post your horror stories here if you'd like.