On The Road to REACH Matchmaking

Bungie has enlisted the help of community representatives to locate and test maps for potential inclusion in matchmaking. I think the program is called Community Cartographers.

 

I am in the process of preparing my MEGALITH map for submission. This is the first of my chronicles on the adventure. You have a ringside seat on whether I will succeed or fail. No matter which process or site I submit my map to, it could take months before I get even the slightest feedback, if any. Therefore additional blogs from me could be few, if any.

 

MEGALITH has been around now since October. We’ve played on it at least twice a week with anywhere from 10 to 16 players. I have judged the resulting experience to be reasonable. Feedback has been minimal. Not at all surprising to me, as I’ve seen many maps on forging sites get little actual feedback. I know the map functions so I’ve been thinking about submitting it to sites where “Community Cartographer” representatives hang out. Two of those sites are HBO and Forgehub. I’ve already submitted MEGALITH to those sites before but I will resubmit soon with all of my changes made since October. Most of those changes have been in the last few weeks.

 

Within weeks of REACH’s release, I have been reading about forged maps with frame-rate reduction issues. Without any way to measure for it I just put it out of my head because I wasn’t seeing any on MEGALITH. Recently I became aware of one test that could make or break a map submission. Split screen gaming. With this information in hand I loaded up MEGALITH in a 3 player split screen custom game. I moved each player to what I think is the most graphically intensive view of the map. That would be the central area of the Stonehenge construction. I pointed each player to look at the greatest number of objects. Using just one player, I rotated the view from left to right. The results were disappointing to say the least. The view chugged like an old steam engine. Map submission potential went to zero.

 

My next Blog I will treat you to how I have made changes to the map that has breathed hope into this adventure. Pictures to be included, whoa!