My Adventure with the TEAM CLASSIC playlist.

When I first read about the TEAM CLASSIC playlist and associated CLASSIC MAP remakes, I was a bit concerned. Here was Bungie actively giving support to the desires of a group of people who would return HALO REACH to the stone age if they could. I was kind of pissy about it actually. So pissy in fact, it spurred me to start collecting daily population statistics for that playlist and another one called ACTION SACK. I figured I'll post the results and show "them" what happens when you put up a playlist that caters to a HALO minority.

So, hard work gets you over the hump of being pissy. It ain't easy collecting and presenting data correctly. In order to compare playlist populations from day to day you need to collect the data at the same time each day. Bungie only publishes the current playlist population numbers and apparently those are updated every minute or so. I chose 8:00PM Eastern time as my time of collection. I figured it was within an hour or so of peak population, was a good schedule for me and would show the habits of the greatest number of HALO REACH players. To that end all but 5 of 38 collections were on time and those were late by 45, 45, 60, 101 and 150 minutes respectively. I kept them in the study because I figured, what the hey.

TEAM CLASSIC started out at 7519 players and dropped like a stone for a week. I was thinking, this playlist is toast and it will soon be a ghost town. Then, the flattening out began. It leveled off and hung around the 1000 mark for a couple of weeks. That is actually a good number to be at. It shows a dedicated number of people willing to play this gametype. Good for me too because numbers like this are not going to change REACH at all. I started rooting for it a bit. I like rooting for the underdogs, scummy as they may be. ;) Maybe the playlist is a very good thing for REACH if these players were to otherwise be playing a different game. Hey, even I can be positive sometimes.

Thirty eight days in and with a bit of sprucing up with a few objectives added and map corrections, we can see that the playlist is not showing well. 400 to 600 is not great. Bungie will have to decide whether to retire this playlist or keep it. It all depends on what effort it takes on their part to maintain it and where those players would go if it didn't exist.

One interesting thing came out of all of this. During this study period I simultaneously collected population numbers for all of the playlists. Yay! Now what?

You'll see. ;)