As far as I'm concerned, if 343i wants any shot whatsoever of regaining the trust and respect of the players who they've upset, they need to come forward with a sincere, straightforward, and honest apology.
No excuses, no shifted blame, just an absolutely honest apology that explains what happened and how such an unfinished, buggy, and broken game got released to the public. The existing faceless "apology" posted under the "Forum Team" account on the Waypoint message board simply doesn't cut it:
The achievements are a very small issue in the grand scheme, and it seems as if they were only mentioned with the intention of offloading some of the responsibility. It's a strange thing to mention specifically otherwise given the myriad of other (more pressing) issues.
While The Master Chief Collection certainly has a lot of content, its "large surface area" does not need to be brought up as a defense. This is a port of existing code, not new games from the ground up. That's not to say there isn't a lot of work involved, but the fact that there's multiple games included is not an excuse. Other multiple game collections have been done before, and they've been done better.
None of the games in this bundle are without issue.
As for "issues surfaced at launch," this is probably the most frustrating part of the whole thing. No, issues did not "surface at launch." Issues that were already clearly there became viewable by the public. The game has had issues with crashes, bugs, and unexpected behavior at every event they've demoed it at. Tournaments with professional players have had games canceled and restarted due to crashing. Community questions and requests for media of the various games went unanswered.
Many of the issues in the game are deeply rooted and have nothing to do with the online component. These are all things which should have been clearly obvious during any QA test and exist offline. Things like poor frame rates on Halo 2 Anniversary maps, nearly unplayable Halo 4 split screen, crashes, freezes, save game data losses, audio problems, unaddressed bugs from old builds, missing and broken features, and so on.
Many of the items listed in the bug tracker can not be blamed on the online aspects of the game, and many of the online-related issues should have been caught and fixed long ago. It is painfully, painfully clear that this collection did not receive the polish and quality assurance that production code should.
The situation is far past the stage of "launches are hard; things happen." There's a community who is upset and who has had their trust shaken. But I think there's also a lot of people who are willing to forgive, especially if a truly honest apology happens.
So please, 343 Industries: no red tape, no politics, no excuses. Just admit that the game is broken, shouldn't have shipped in its current state, and that there were issues with development and the schedule. Let the community know that you're truly sorry and that you're sincere about fixing the issues and making it up to everyone.
