ske7ch343

hey everyone - Last weekend I said I'd be back once we had updates to share around near term playlist plans for Halo Infinite. I'm happy to report that a Slayer playlist is officially locked and loaded for the update next week. Four new playlists: Slayer, Fiesta, FFA, and Tactical Slayer (SWAT) will all be added via a services update on Tuesday, Dec. 14.

As I noted last week, the team's original plans for a Slayer playlist included a variety of new variants that weren't going to be ready in time to deploy before the holiday break. To address player feedback for Slayer in the near term, we'll be releasing a basic Slayer offering to start and will look to bolster and expand with more variants in a future update.

Next week's update will also include adjustments to challenges including removing some particularly frustrating mode-specific ones, reducing some requirements for others, making the weekly ultimate challenge less intensive (ge...

I can't reply to every person yelling at me/343 here so want to just share a few final things to take or leave as you see fit. When we have some updates to share I'll be back.

First, I'm going to stress again that I 100% understand and generally agree with the frustrations most are expressing even if I don't agree with the attacks and ways in which some choose to express those feelings. Call me a shill, a liar, corp speak, etc. as you want, but I've never lied to this community and never will. And I'm not saying myself are 343 are a 'victim' in any way - that's yet another narrative some folks here have chosen to apply. It's my job to come in here, listen, franky take it on the chin, and despite personally being very put off by the way in which many are expressing themselves, still ensure that we are advocating for players internally. We do that regardless of it being positive or negative and always will.

As for Slayer itself - we're still having discussions aroun...

Glad to hear, plenty of folks are having a great time as well.

All good - appreciate the note. We know this subreddit is one part of the player community and we know that overall, people who are enjoying things aren't nearly as likely to post or comment about it. I agree with many of the frustrations and grievances though don't agree with the extent to which some people express those feelings.

Totally your prerogative and I respect you voting with your play time and choice.

I wish we could just flip a switch. We’d all certainly prefer the majority of players are having a great experience. We’ve got a long ways to go before we come close to where MCC has grown to today but we will continue to advocate and push internally. Nobody doesn’t want to add Slayer - we are just constrained by development realities that are more than I can really unpack here. Nobody likes the feeling of being blasted after years of work so just know that this - and other high pri sentiment items - is a very serious topic. As soon as we have any updates we will be sure to share.

What else can be said? We’ve attempted to explain the situation, folks are understandably upset and have all sorts of their own takes and narratives spinning around. Any attempt at dialog is met with outrage and attacks.

At this point we’ll just need to continue working and moving forward and I understand that’s not good enough or fast enough, etc for many - but this is the situation we are in.

Definitely a frustrating bug and the team is aware. Unfortunately I don't have an ETA on a fix nor do I fully understand what the root cause is but it's definitely on the team's radar and hopefully fixed before too long.

I understand the sentiment, and things like events - for a F2P service based game - are certainly part of a continued engagement model. But there was no nefarious objective I was ever aware of to intentionally limit anything for the sake of 'drip feeding.' Instead it's a matter of realities of development, the unique challenges and complexities of building this game under some pretty difficult circumstances, wanting to ensure the most stable and solid experience possible out of the gate, and a real desire to just get this journey started, knowing that the game will continue to grow and evolve over time. Understand that doesn't necessarily align with everyone's expectations on day one, but the team shares the vast majority of feedback and sentiment coming in and as a studio we are pivoting to a service-based development team/model and will continue evolving and improving the game going forward, addressing issues as quickly and best we can while delivering new experiences when they'r...

Challenge tweaks are also still being evaluated for lower hanging/near term adjustments and we should have more to share soon. Longer term, more robust evolutions around progression and challenges are going to take time to realize.

The team definitely has some ideas along these lines (and many others) - always just boils down to finite time / resources, dependencies, etc.. We'll get there. Match Composer for MCC is amazing, as is Custom Browser, all things that are somewhat development intensive with a number of dependencies but experientially, the type of systems I know the team has their eyes on.

Today is for all Halo fans! Thank you for the kind words and know that everyone in the studio is grateful for the continued support the community has shown and inspired by all the feedback and passion over the years. We are rounding up sentiment to pass along to the broader studio. TY r/Halo fam! <3

What. A. Journey. Whew! Yes, 'launch is only the beginning' - and this isn't even the real launch, we've got that still to come - but what an awesome moment for the team and for the Halo community! It's really hard to grasp just how tough this has been and the incredible work the team did during some ridiculously challenging times. So much respect for every single person who poured their hearts and souls into this because they, like you, just want to make the best Halo experiences possible.

I knew it would be darn near impossible to pull this off - and folks were very, very good at sniffing things out and putting pieces together. While some of it was definitely true, clearly, there were also parts that were 100% false (i.e. there was never a 'huge bug and the whole team was called in to address it', was never a campaign demo for today, etc..).

Not gonna lie this is still surreal and hard to really comprehend. This has been such a long time coming. And, while w...

So excited for this campaign to officially begin! And, love seeing all the positive responses! I know many were getting very anxious for the marketing machine to kick in - it was always coming! And, there's more to come.

While many are praising 343, I also want to acknowledge a lot of partners across Team Xbox who worked really hard to bring this and all the marketing pieces to life (many of which have been working on Halo all the way back to the Believe campaign). Same goes for the folks who work on all these great promotional partnerships which have also been a great boost.

All these years on the front lines have made me kinda cynical by nature, and I generally assume the worst for everything, but my expectations have been surpassed time and again of late. Love this community, particularly when we're all riding high and buzzing with excitement. :) Let's go Dec 8!

Surveys are already all sent and wrapped up. They are indeed mostly randomized outside of only going to ppl who at least played a few games. It was sent to just a subset of the whole flight audience - enough to be representative and statistically significant. Unfortunately not feasible to send out hundreds of thousands of surveys. Thanks for participating - I believe we are still working on an outcomes recap, just taking time given how busy the road to launch is for everyone.

This is awesome!

The Craig of community management? :(

Ngl, things were not going my way in this playtest (they seldom do)

It could happen

Oh wow I completely forgot about that! What a time, what a crew. What's most mind blowing to me now, all these years later, that's THE ENTIRE FULL-TIME TEAM that shipped Halo 2. I think we were about ~60 ppl at launch. (30ish when I was hired) Incredible to think back at how much that sized team pulled off vs. what a typical AAA development studio looks like today.