12.7.14 Halo: The Master Chief Collection Content Update Notes
#1
Sun, 12/07/2014 - 19:46
12.7.14 Halo: The Master Chief Collection Content Update Notes
By 343 Industries - 1 hour ago
The next time you log into Halo: The Master Chief Collection, you will be prompted to download the latest content update. This particular content update focuses on matchmaking, parties, custom games, achievements, stability, and more. While this update contains a variety of improvements, we continue to work on additional content updates that will be rolled out to address further issues. Below, you’ll find a summary of the updates that are included in today’s update:
Matchmaking & Parties
- Made improvements to matchmaking team balance
- Made an update to improve matchmaking search times and success rates, specifically expediting the “Players Found” and “Connecting Session” search phases
- Made improvements to prevent a player’s rank from resetting unexpectedly
- Made an update to resolve an issue that allowed players to be placed into an incorrect lobby after a matchmaking game
- Made improvements to prevent the party from being disbanded upon returning to lobby
- Made an update to ensure that players are sorted by team in the “Match Found” screen
- Resolved an issue where Team Slayer matches in Halo 3 could separate players onto individual teams
- Resolved an issue where players could be placed into a group of 7 players and unable to find more
- Made improvements to ensure that the party-leader is prompted to “Bring Party” when leaving a lobby
- Made an update to ensure that split-screen players cannot be divided onto different teams
- Made improvements to ensure that clients are not kicked from parties at the end of matchmaking games with a “failed to connect” error
- Made an update to ensure that Halo 2: Anniversary matches do not continue indefinitely after entire opposing team quits
- Made an update to ensure that parties are not separated when the party leader navigates through multiple titles
Custom Games
- Made improvements to prevent manual team selection from getting reset after a Custom Game match
- Made an update to ensure that the “Make Party Leader” command functions correctly
Achievements
- Made an update to ensure that the “Too Close to the Sun” achievement unlocks when prerequisites are met
- Made an update to ensure that the “Monopolized” achievement unlocks when prerequisites are met
- Made an update to ensure that the “Devastating” achievement unlocks when prerequisites are met
- Made an update to ensure that the “You’re Joking” achievement unlocks when prerequisites are met
Game-specific
- Made improvements to Halo 2: Anniversary objective pickup, specifically in regards to objective “juggling”
- Made an update to Halo 3’s movement input, specifically to resolve a deadzone issue which affected moving in a straight line
- Made additional improvements to Halo: CE fall damage scenarios
- Made an update to resolve a Halo 2 Classic campaign issue where a black screen could overlay the gameplay screen
Stability
- Made a variety of stability improvements across the following areas:
- Matchmaking
- Custom Games
- Halo 4 Campaign
Misc.
- Made an update to ensure that clan tags appear in the post-game carnage report for all players
- Made an update to ensure that players are sorted by team in the post-game carnage report
- Made an update to ensure that emblems are displayed correctly in the post-game carnage report
You have to give it to them, they are really trying to get things right.
I wonder if the lawyers have told them to phrase things in terms of "made an improvement" and "resolved an issue," as "fixing a broken piece of shit" might imply guilt and leave them open to a lawsuit.
oh good, Tristan.
In other news, this is THE patch. I'm getting into full matches of H2A all night.
Eh, not THE patch right now at least. Downloaded it early this morning and while I got into 2 matches quickly (I was getting into matches quickly on the last update), they were both 5v4 games. Hopefully it's due to not everyone having the patch, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I guess I'll be waiting till the next patch to play the game. Games with uneven teams aren't fun. Maybe one of these months they'll figure out how to find an even number of players and divide that number by two.
I've been playing more H3 on MCC than anything, and it's been really fun, but to the extent that they still haven't fixed even matchmaking, it's still really bad.
After they fix matchmaking team sizes they need to fix the netcode. The host advantage has been really bad especially on certain games. I'm still waiting for those dedicated servers that were promised.
Hope to get on tonight, might be tomorrow night though. I know this has been a really ugly rollout but I'm seriously loving playing H3 and H2C again. H2A is even fun on most occasions.
(CE online is just....NO).
Yeah the hit detection on those earlier games is definitely an issue. Those are things they should be able to correct though, especially H2A since it's their new multiplayer product. CE worked fine that first week when games were on dedicated servers, but they have obviously pulled those from the game. When dedicateds return I think CE will play better at least on their servers. P2P/customs will probably always have problems.
H3 always had non-BR starts, at least non-BR social and team slayer. BR starts are a voting option though. I've been playing a lot of H3, Team Slayer has options for BR and non-BR and I think the objectives are BR starts although I could be wrong there.
I know for sure that they're using the disc versions of H3's maps (i.e. Narrows with the radar jammer, Guardian with the flare, etc.), not the versions that were most recently used in H3's matchmaking. It's like they just threw these gametypes into the playlist without thinking twice about it.
It's actually kind of funny though because I was playing CTF narrows the other day and I ran for rockets (which are at the top of the map now where they were when H3 launched) and no one was even there, not even on my team even after I fumbled getting them.
In other words, you can sometimes find yourself in an advantageous position by remembering where the stock map loadouts are.
Also, god I wish there were more CTF games. I triple killed the enemy while juggling the flag on the way to a cap for 2-1 lead.
All problems aside, Halo can be really fun.
Played several games tonight.
Obviously they still don't have dedicated servers a month into the game. Every single game, players were warping all over my screen and being bullet sponges.
The lobby system is still broken as fuck. It took forever to try to invite people to the game. We kept getting split into other lobbies with people we'd never heard of before. WTF?
Voice chat is still broken as fuck. Every single game I played with my friend one of us couldn't hear the other one. But I could hear the other team just fine, even though I have my communication set to "My team only." Fail.
Jumping seems broken. Sometimes there are certain easy jumps that I can't make because it's like my Master Chief just decides to only jump like 2/3 of the normal height. Pretty annoying when you're trying to get up to rockets on Stone Town and you have to take the scenic route because something as simple as jumping doesn't work properly. Oh gee, they have the rockets by the time I finally got there. Oh well.
On the plus side, we had even teams every game. I guess they deserve a medal for finally figuring out how to find an even number of players and divide that number by two instead of making it 6v2.
I doubt they'll ever get this working like it should. It's just too broken and they seem too incompetent. Maybe it's time to switch to COD.
Rules to remember.
1. Never remake anything of dated value and fail to do it perfectly.
2. Nostaligia is very surficial. Often times, people only look at or try old old things once.
For me, it's the opposite of the rose-colored-glasses problem. I had some gripes about the older games back in the day, but many of those gripes would have been ameliorated by dedicated servers and so forth, and the other small gripes don't seem so bad after watching people abuse the crap out of jet packs and stuff in Halo Reach and 4. After those two games, I'd be thrilled to go back to Halo 2. Halo 2's campaign was way more fun and more epic than I remembered it being, even with the old graphics.
The thing that makes me lose hope is the way they are fixing these problems with duct tape. For example, you can tell that the way it splits up the party after every game wasn't truly fixed. The party is still splitting up, except now it manually re-adds people back to the room afterward instead of keeping the party together as a unit to begin with. This is the software equivalent of fixing your plumbing with duct tape. Sure, it works right away (sort of), but is almost guaranteed to cause problems in the long run. In software development this is called a kludge. It's considered a terrible way to solve problems because it'll probably create as many bugs as it fixes, which certainly seems to describe this game and its updates.
Yep. As someone who works in software development, this just goes to show that they don't know how to fix the existing matchmaking code. My guess is that when the party joins the search, the patched code includes something that grabs information about the party and stuffs it into memory somewhere. The party still splits at some point between searching for players and end game, and they probably can't figure out why, so they basically added a method at end-game that pulls the party data back and re-adds the players. It's a linear fix, probably calls some function called PutPartyBackTogether() when the carnage screen loads. It is probably the reason it sometimes takes 30 seconds to hit the B button at the end of the game even if you're playing solo. The game is actively working on putting whatever parties were in the game back together before the B option is available, so you have to wait. It's a shit fix.
Same goes for all of these messages that are telling you they are Joining Session or Connecting Session (whatever that means). It's the same thing, a basic message call that is sent to you signalling that some other work is being done. And those messages were probably created for testers so they can test other problems with matchmaking.
something like this (total pseudocode):
AddPlayers();
InsertMessage( "Connecting Session");
PlayerCount= (CheckPlayers(PlayerCount));
If(PlayerCount < MIN_PLAYERS) {
InsertMessage ("Finding Players")
AddMorePlayers();
InsertMessage("Joining Session");
}
Else {StartGame()};
The messages themselves take about 10 seconds to code. The fixes should likewise have taken less than a day to fix. These guys have literally no clue what they are doing.
At this point I'm done. Now I'm just trying to decide between Destiny and Titanfall.
Since y'all know what the coding errors are, email them to 343. I'm sure they would appreciate the help!
If your'e wanting another game to hold you over until they get MCC collection fixed. I would recommend Destiny over TF. I think TF is a better game IMHO and a blast to play, but the player base is so much smaller now. It seems like the only folks still playing are well experienced so you'd have a steep learning curve. Destiny has alot of fun stuff to do (solo, coop, MP) and there are tons of people playing it right now. Gameplay is tight and it runs smoothly. Just don't expect much of a story, that part is terrible.
Well the game was a total disaster for me last night. Bullet sponges is truth, man. I can't even tell if the update loaded and I hard reset on more than one occasion.
This game and console just makes me sad more than angry.
We just went 2 hours of customs with 8/10 people. No crashes. No big issues.
Old Halo is old. It should have been left in the shoe box. It's the people that make Halo work for me.
We did notice a Banshee fly by inverted in H2C.
I liked the new and improved maps best, but I also didn't mind seeing some of the old maps in crystal-clear HD.
Had fun playing customs last night. Everything seemed to work decently for once. Has anyone tried going into matchmaking with a full party for H2A or anything? I'm wondering how that works and how long to find matches.
It's still impossible to play with a full team. It's 5v5 but the max party size is still set to 4 for some stupid reason. Even in Big Team.
The last time I tried to play with any friends it was a bad experience. Huge amounts of lag, getting split into separate lobbies with random strangers before we even tried searching, huge pain in the ass to get people into the same lobby, voice chat kept fucking up. I spent most of my time shaking my head and telling myself this wasn't worth it.
Par for the course for alpha software. Oh wait, this is a retail AAA title from a fortune 100 company a month after release.
They fixed the party size stuff days before you posted this. So I'm wondering if you've tried it recently.
The only two that are wrong are H2A (max 4, but team is 5) and BTB (max 6 but team is 8). I don't understand why the odd numbers.
Also, I didn't know about them using the original unpatched versions. Why would they do that? They SAID they were using the latest patched many times in interviews, but were not patching further.
Ha Ha! I thought you might ring in on this. Good to know though rather than wasting time trying it myself. I saw a glimmer of hope in the customs I played last night though. The game seemed to be working fine and I was actually having fun instead of being pissed at lag and screwups. Granted I know alot of the game is still screwed up. I guess it will be a long time untill I can get a team together and play hard trying to get our ranks up. There's even a way to always be counted as winning a game you lost. So they got to fix that too. I was in a game the other night with a 50 and some 30's who were no better than me or worse. Good times
You might as well give it a try. One of the weird things about this game is that the bugs seem to vary widely from person to person (which is ridiculous for a console).
I played a while tonight. Had a couple of 5v4 games still. It's still not fixed, although it happens less frequently than before (which was almost every game).
Voice chat and party joining is still fucked up. I go entire games without being able to hear half of my teammates sometimes. I had to restart the game about once every 20-30 minutes to get the lobbies to work. Some of this is probably Microsoft's fault, since party chat doesn't even work much of the time. It seems like the Xbox One took a huge step backward from the 360 in online reliability and user interface. Lots of players are using Skype now because this console's voice features are so broken.
There still seem to be no dedicated servers. One of the selling points of this game was being able to play Halo on servers without the massive host advantage of the earlier games. Four weeks and counting and it's still false advertising. GG Microsoft.
The audio kept cutting out in the Halo 4 game we played.
It breaks up the party whenever the party leader backs out of matchmaking mid-search. I guess they forgot to specify that in their kludge-like fix to party splits. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about for why duct-tape solutions are so bad.
The disc versions of the Halo 3 maps they're using in matchmaking have nothing to do with patches. Matchmaking used different versions of the maps that had been altered in forge from the default versions that shipped on the disc. Bungie realized that radar jammers, flares, shield doors, and spawning people outside the map (on The Pit) were bad ideas and changed some maps in forge.
All that said, it's still really fun when it works. Even with all the problems, I'd rather play this game and have the audio screwing up or have to reboot the game every 20 minutes than play against the game-breaking armor abilities and randomized weapons of Halo 4.
I am only looking ahead to Halo 5 now. I don't have my hopes up though.
343i is pushing eSports heavily now. That's not the kind of game I like.