Yeah I mean I feel like every weekly bulletin is the same.
Very proud of the team, we did a lot with a little... no. Every business is hard as shit to build, every product is hard as shit to launch, the difference is most businesses aren't a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. There are no cafes in most businesses. There are no lounges with plasma TVs. There are no trips to NYC to hang out with celebrities. I've never seen a group of people congratulate themselves more on doing their job than 343. I completely understand being proud of the team and what people have accomplished, but don't try to frame it as though the struggle excuses some of the faults.
There are approximately zero people reading this:
that were disappointed with Halo 4, but will now return to the game because of that statement. It means nothing to anyone but the people who already know you made mistakes.
There are approximately zero people reading this:
who then feel better about playing a Halo game with the worst frame-rate drops in the series.
Then I read this
is it the community's fault that we're missing features from Halo 3? Frankie talks about how by all objective measures Halo 4 was a success. Missing core components of your predeccessors is a pretty damn objective failure.
and I read this
What was influenced by the community? Any examples? Was FUD or TTL asking for Complex? If the community is such a direct and democratic extension of the team, which part of the community asked for the first map pack to be big brown maps? Was that ReadyUpLive or r/Halo's fault? Could you guys have democratically put up a vote with the major communities asking if recreating Seattle during crunch time was a good idea? I just find it hilarious that after a year of Trust Us, Feels Like Halo, now suddenly the community is apparently a direct extension of the team and there are just too many gosh darn voices to be heard to make people happy. To extend this makeshift olive branch while simultaneously refusing to outline the next title update is hysterical to me. To this day, we still have no idea who, why, or how 343 makes any of their matchmaking decisions. We open up the weekly bulletin every week and hope there's something interesting. That is literally the only involvement we get with matchmaking updates.
No end user gives a rat's ass about the development process of anything. You don't think about the thousands of man-hours that go into the labeling of every single product in a grocery store, you just buy it. Give us some actual hard definable timelines for when we'll be getting fileshare, when we're getting a ranking system, when we're getting video uploading. Where are these features? Everything is always one or two weeks away. We'll have more details to share in a bit! As someone who hasn't played Halo in over a month, all I took from that update is that video game development is hard and that we'll be getting minor playlist updates in 3 or 4 weeks. Well, no shit. Sometime in the future we'll get missing features added and a title update. Oh and we have more outsourced table-scrap maps to look forward to that we'll have to pay for. Halo 4 is hitting all time low daily peak populations right now, there are 200 people in the playlist of their new DLC pack, and a 4 year old download-only PC game is ahead of it in activity, but who cares, the team is working hard! Puhleaze. I'm sure Frankie will respond to this by calling me a troll and that I hate Halo and hate everything and am moving the goalposts and should leave GAF as I have been told by him before, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that all the 9.8's and long hours in the world can't stop this game from falling further on its face if they keep heading down this same path.
