Halo's Matchmaking Getting Better Later This Week, Hopefully

It's been more than a week since Halo: The Master Chief Collection hit shelves, and players are still waiting for matchmaking issues to sort themselves out. Right now, lots of players still can't regularly get into multiplayer games. It was supposed to get better with a patch tomorrow, but it's been delayed.

A recent update says the patch "will now be releasing later this week to allow for additional fixes, as well as the completion of the testing and certification process."

That does sound important, yes, but it doesn't make The Master Chief Collection's issues any less glaring or frustrating.

Full patch notes are coming later this week, but promised changes include:

"This content update includes a variety of fixes across the title, including Matchmaking performance issues, general UI and game stability improvements, as well as fixes for game-game specific issues in Halo: CE, Halo 2, and Halo 2: Anniversary, and more. The full patch notes will be posted later this week, in advance of the content update release."

Insane they even shipped the game like this.

I hope they fix it soon.

I won't get this game until I REALLY know the MP works. Really glad I didn't get it right away.

This is just a joke now. In other words, we thought we could get the game done by 11/11, but couldn't. We released it anyway. We thought we'd finish most of it by 11/19, but couldn't. We don't know when, if ever, the game will be fixed.

Given how important the Halo franchise is to Microsoft, the most interesting thing to me about this whole fiasco is that MS proper / Phil Spencer hasn't issued a statement about it. Given it's importance, I think this might be the worst launch ever (on console, not including MMOs), on par with EA's BF4 and Sim City problems. This makes ACU's graphical problems look like nothing It is impossible to think that a game with so many issues was not released with full knowledge of how broken it is. While that might be the norm these days, this lack of acknowledgement just makes me feel worse and worse about this launch -

Here you have all of these studio heads, Frank O'Connor, Bonnie Ross, Kiki Wolfkill doing interview after interview, all smiles and assurances. They released a whole damned documentary about the MCC / H2A, fully aware that they were releasing a broken game. Blatant arrogance from developers and publishers.

I'm not trying to sound like THAT guy. I put the game away a few nights ago after several days of trying to get into multiplayer AND the single player campaign locking up on me several times. I've moved on to ACU. Just highlighting that the silence from MS is particularly stark against the backdrop of arrogance. Was excited for what they were doing with the Halo 5 beta, so that adds to the disappointment. Also a great reminder that you should not pre-order games (I'm as guilty as anyone).

I'm not a Halo guy (or an Xbox guy for that matter), but it really impressed me with the treatment they gave this collection of games. The way level selection stuff works, the way the multiplayer maps can fall into any category, just the huge breadth of options that you don't typically find in any game. It's really quite impressive.

It just bums me out that lots of games are all being marred by these serious online issues. Driveclub, the original launch of GTAV, and this just to name a few. It also bums me out that a game like AC: Unity, which I feel is pretty decent at its core, and takes a lot of steps in the right direction for the combat, just completely bombs out due to all these technical issues. I hear LBP3 has its own set of technical problems as well.

It's such a bummer that lots of these major releases are just not finishing on time. This November should have been a precursor to all these great games, but instead it's mostly a trainwreck.

Well, apart from the Bayonetta games on Wii U. That's been solid.

Also later this week Driveclub will be fixed.

HAHAHA

as well as the completion of the testing and certification process

Wait. If this means "The patch is undergoing completion of testing and certification", then fine. But it actually reads "We shipped the game without completing testing and certification". What the heck? I thought that was a thing you had to do, even for a first-party game.

Yeah, this is really weird to me. Not that everything has been flawless in the past, but there has never been anything like this for a Halo game. I guess you could throw in the old "it's because 343 can't do what Bungie did," which is fine, except Halo 4 didn't have any major issues.

It's annoying as hell. I haven't touched MCC in several days now. With new stuff coming out all over the place this month, I'm wondering if I'm ever going to come back to it at this point or just sell it.

Note to 343: You should have run a fucking beta. Come on.

Just hope they can fix it,I've put off buying it right now because of these problems.Once the fix it I will buy it.

I'm still surprised they released it broken.

I'm waiting patiently. Others should calm down, It's frustrating but man, you'd think it's the end of the world on the waypoint forums.

I've only managed to get about 400 kills worth of multiplayer in because the matchmaking is so slow. So I have mostly been doing single player.

What makes me more frustrated is the number of broken achievements that will not unlock. A bunch of small ones in H2A, and I beat Halo 4 on Legendary and nothing. Even a few of the speed running achievements will not pop and I've done the level "Dawn" 3 times now.

@big_jon: I dont agree with immature flame threads. But that aside consumers should continue to get mad about unfinished games rushed to market to meet the suits wanted release date for the games. Buying a game on release, accepting that its broken and waiting patiently is a sure fire way to have all the big companies continue this practice.

I've been tempted to get an Xbox One with MC collection with my Christmas bonus. I'm glad I've waited a bit. Still haven't decided, especially since I know I'll be busy with my PS4 this season on top of great games at the beginning of next year.

@iloveyouprismo I personally think game reviewers should take this junk into account. If the matchmaking doesn't work when you put your review out then review it just like it is: broken. Seems no one wants to do that.

Got no one to blame but myself, but I bought an Xbox One for this and I'm pretty cheesed off. What pains me most is that it seems that releasing broken AAA games is becoming an acceptable habit. I can't blame the devs for this though, we all know it's all down to some asshat in a suit pushing for the release date regardless of if it's ready or not. Pre order culture is largely at fault I think, publishers are already swimming in a mountain of cash before a game is even released.

Hopefully this fixes it. Thankfully online coop works (though with some stuttering) and most everything else with the game is fine. Seems like a strange problem to suddenly happen and I wonder if some recent Xbox Live struggles (achievements not popping, limited services, ect.) have something to do with this or if this is just a 343 problem.

@big_jon: agreed. Wait for the coming patch and if issues are still glaring then it may be time to become a bit incensed. I still don't believe this is the atrocity some are making it out as (maybe have a bit of perspective?)

"The game you already paid $60 for will function properly soon guys, we promise."

My game has crashed to a black screen 6 times now. It also SKIPPED an entire mission in my Halo CEA run.

@finaldasa: I've not been able to get online co-op to work in Halo CE at all. After a hour or so of fiddling with it I gave up. Really disappointed to not be able to co-op Halo's campaign thus far.

Hope it works, since temps just dropped to under 10 degrees and I could use something to do (reliably!)

Perhaps I have been lucky but I haven't really had any AAA games being broken since Fallout New Vegas. I do play a lot of games and buy a minimum of one game a month. But apart from server issues with games like Destiny and Diablo 3, for example, I haven't come across anything that really pisses me off. Granted I don't play Battlefield games anymore(not since BF2) and didn't touch Sim City, two of the most broken games in recent memory.

I bought the MCC to play through the story of those games so I've had zero problems except for one achievement that didn't pop. I played maybe five games online and got into games three times pretty fast but had to try about 2-3 times to get in on the other two times.

Also, I'm guessing you are not referring to the MCC when you talk about AAA games but if you are I just want to say, I hardly count rereleased and remastered games as AAA, not in the sense the internet qualifies AAA, meaning quality and hyped, not the marketing term that it is.

But since you have a Xbox One now I would say buy Sunset Overdrive and play that until MCC matchmaking is fixed. It's one of the best, most fun, games this year. Definitely the most fun I've had with a game this year.

Does the game run? Check

Can people play it? Ummm... SHIPPED!

I'll be extremely curious to see what impact this situation will have on the game's population. By all accounts and appearances, Halo was primed for a return to the competitive shooter spotlight, as well as a return to popularity and accessibility for both old and new audiences.

I'm sure the more devout fans of the series are going to weather this storm because they want to have a nostalgic renaissance with Halo 2 (and the other games in the package), but for new audiences--particularly those who were too young to experience an honest-to-goodness Halo multiplayer before--I can't imagine being sidelined for so long will translate to buy-in.

@pj: Well I'm not talking strictly about games I've bought, just in general. I stupidly bought the last 2 Battlefield games and they were beyond broken. I'm not interested in Unity but the brokenness of that is pathetic. The fact that MCC is not a AAA title in the strict definition and is actually a remaster just adds insult to injury. The content for this game already existed, not to mention ran absolutely fine on consoles up to two generations prior and yet it still doesn't work. The single player experience, specifically the H2:A is absolutely fantastic, but I can guarantee you a huge majority of people who bought MCC did so to relive the times they spent playing Halo 2 online on the original Xbox. I can certainly tell you that's 99% of the reason I bought it.

I actually haven't had any issues in MCC so far, and I dunno how. I've been matching into games in about a minute (which is how long Halo has always taken for me). Hopefully it starts to improve for everyone else, too!

It was a great feeling getting to jump between the four Halo's in matchmaking, it kept things fresh. That being said, it was not worth the 20 minute wait times. Unfortunately I'll probably move on to other things at least until I go home for the holidays.

Can't wait for everyone to say this game is working as intended. Then, and only then, will I pick it up. Can't wait to play Halo: CE multiplayer matches online (with all the original code supposedly. Awesome!). Hell, maybe it'll be discounted by then.

@Patrick Klepek Do you think that all of these games coming out buggy as hell is a symptom of new hardware and figuring out the kinks, or do you think it's game companies obsession with Black Friday sales and rushing the games out?

Been a pretty horrendous couple of weeks for game launches; AC Unity, Halo, Driveclub and Warlords of Draenor (WoW) expansion having horrendous server problems. (most troublesome expansion thus far for me)

I don't think I've ever had a wider disparity between my experience with a game and everyone else's. I've played a tonne of matches, all of which were very smooth and took little time to get into. If it weren't for the volume of people reporting issues as well as MS themselves acknowledging them I would say everyone were spoofin' and goofin' on me.

The single-player has been buggy for me though. A smattering of missing muzzle flashes and no-sound effects here and there. Also one instance where I earned a co-op achievement while idling on the main menu. Not gonna complain about that one though.

This has really soured my halo game experience and I am a person who has played all the games and read all the books. But aside from the matchmaking taking a good 30 minutes to find a game, when you finally do get in, it's just laggy enough to be incredibly frustrating. All my shots are 1-2 seconds off, and I often end up shooting people multiple times and they kill me with literally one shot.

I'm incredibly disappointed with this game and launching it this broken is not acceptable.

Launches with a huge day one download, have gotten into ONE multiplayer match since its release because its so busted. I think this is going a little too far in this age of new games being busted. Hopefully things will start getting better with this game and future games that might ship kinda messed up. If day one patches and continued patches and broken multiplayer is the future of video games, im gonna go live in the past. Bodacious

I feel like day one consumers this year are becoming $60 beta testers...

My patience is starting to grow very thin with this.

Like some of the comments above stated, it's surprising Microsoft hasn't issued an announcement about this. The MCC seemed to me like a system seller a la the original Halo--or at the very least a premium release to further encourage Xbox One adoption--and for the game to be so broken a week after release seems like bad news. While it's somewhat of a fallacy to compare the release of the original Halo to this release, given everything that's changed in over a decade, the fact of the matter is that games used to be shipped in a complete state. Yes, there was no real way for many years for companies to patch games, so they were shipped complete by necessity (in most cases anyway), but to see triple-A titles shipped broken and most of the time needing a day one patch is absurd.

It all comes back to information asymmetry. Customers don't have the information advantage when it comes to video game purchases, and with all these disastrous releases, it may soon sink in that day one purchases no longer provide the expected benefits they used to, e.g. a leg-up in multiplayer, early experience of the story, etc. Hopefully consumers will eventually decide to delay their game purchases long enough so that the industry reaches its old "equilibrium" point of release dates, i.e. consumers will delay their purchases enough so that the company will have to ship the game in a complete state to display its quality and narrow the perceived information gap. But I think many companies know that if they don't ship in or around November that their games will fail to capitalize on their investments, and that many consumers will buy at this time anyway in preparation for the holiday season. So we'll likely see this trend continue until a regulatory agency steps in, or consumers en masse declare, "no more".

This is a systemic issue where a developer and producer feels compelled to make some street date even though the game is very wonky. This isn't a problem with just this game but we as consumers are letting them get away with this behavior where instead I and many others would probably be okay if they delayed a small period instead of this "the patch is coming" thing.

Patch goes live tomorrow afternoon apparently. Supposed to fix a ton of stuff, but we'll see how that turns out.

https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/community/blog-posts/11-20-14-halo-the-master-chief-collection-content-update-notes

What's frustrating to me is that they're only talking about slow matchmaking. But I haven't been able to get into a match through matchmaking, period. All the talk about incrementally improved performance is totally lost on me, because my matchmaking success is nil.

Maybe its just spin, saying that "some users" are having "long matchmaking times" instead of acknowledging that something is just flat out broken, but it makes me think that I'm in a separate, "fucked" category that isn't even being looked at yet.

I've been having some significant issues with campaign reliability/stability as well. And while I feel like addressing the campaign quirks is a goal somewhere lower on their totem pole of priorities, it's still upsetting that I can't, say, play Halo 4 without it crashing. Or play Halo 1 without it failing to checkpoint my progress. Or play Halo 2 without sound effect samples looping in perpetuity.

Or, if I lose connection to an online match, the notification telling me so never goes away, and my menu screen becomes almost totally unusable.

There's solace in hearing more updates are on the way after this. And I completely understand wanting to shore up matchmaking foremost. But entire pieces of this package operate with similar instability.

@historyinrust: Yeah, I had some real issues with the Halo: CE campaign. Luckily, one of them resulted in me skipping most of the Library level, somehow. Swings and roundabouts.

I kept having an issue where the sound would bug out, and the only way to fix it was to quit out of the application completely... leaving me at the mercy of the checkpoint system. Yeah, there are bugs all around.

The patch is out now. Anyone download it? Did it fix anything?

Curious about results, I'm hearing people are losing save data.

Someone take the plunge for me, I don't wanna get halfway through Halo 2 again!

The Neogaf thread tells me enough....

Everyone who purchased Halo MCC deserves refunds. This is disgusting....

Seems on neo gaf it's 50\50 between people complaining and people saying it's working better.I'm in the latter, I've been getting in matches within 30 seconds or so, and they are full and EVEN matches, although I've had matchmaking hang up a few times, I restart it and it works fine.

Seems like this obviously overly ambitious project was not given enough time, or just the fact that it was worked on by so many different companies made it so disjointed, perhaps 343i isn't entirely to blame.Either way this is still unacceptable and people are totally justified in wanting refunds.Personally I won't be doing so because I love having all these games on one disc, and once the match making is 100%, it's going to be a blast.I'm just blown away Microsoft would allow this with their top franchise.