We tracked down some data on the achievements that have been completed by folks whose 360s are connected to Xbox Live. Here’s some data for folks to chew on:

• Campaign Complete: Normal – Completed the Campaign on Normal Difficulty: 43.28%
• Campaign Complete: Legendary – Completed the Campaign on Legendary Difficulty: 15.14%
• Graduate: Graduated from basic training. Stick with it to earn your Spartan insignia: 66.92%
• UNSC Spartan: Promoted to Sergeant. Proven in combat, you are a Spartan: 52.07%
• The most found metagame skull? Black Eye skull with 34.26%
• The least found metagame skull? Tilt at 22.98% (Go find it, jerks! It’s one of the best skulls in the game!)
• At 6.21%, Steppin’ Razor is the hardest multiplayer Achievement to earn, with Two for One right behind it at 6.77% and Overkill nipping at its heels (6.75%)
• 8.68% of players have unlocked the Marathon Man Achievement
• 1000/1000 Gamerscore: 2.07%

Rank Amateurs

I’ve had a lot of mails from skilled Halo players saying things like, “Hey, I am stuck at level 41 skill level and I am not going up, so your skill system must be broken.” Actually, what you’re seeing is that it works. What the system is telling you, is that relative to the other players currently playing Halo 3, you are a level 41. You should not be going up in skill level until you become appreciably and significantly better.

If you suddenly developed a whole new level of headshot ability, for example you’d find that your skill level would rise commensurately. It is not, like your rank, supposed to climb inexorably based on experience, but rather to judge and determine your relative skill and match you with players of like skill. My experience is that games are closer, tighter and more fairly balanced than ever before. The spikes happen at the low end, as you mix it up with folks who haven’t played enough to determine a steady skill level. As you get better, progress will slow and eventually halt as the system determines your overall ability and uses that to find matches.

It’s important to note that it is an increasingly accurate estimate, designed to become more accurate over the long term. So don’t worry about dips in your performance, or unexpected sprees, those dips and spikes are not given much precedence by the system.

In theory, it is trying to put you in the most competitive matches. It is not some goal or trophy – it’s a tool.

Melee Maybe

Although we’re paying close attention to it, melee is still causing folks a headache. The primary complaint is that the fellow with the most health wins the simultaneous melee strike. There are a couple of problems here. One is that the way this victory or loss is displayed on screen is aesthetically frustrating:

Situation: Two people melee almost simultaneously and one wins.

Display: One melee fails, then, a fraction of a second later, your opponent’s, succeeds.

This looks worse than it is, sometimes because of network conditions. You’ll have to take our word for it that in spite of the apparent gap in time and animation, the two strikes were effectively simultaneous. The problem is for most people that it looks bad and is dissatisfying. But we do appreciate the frustration this causes and we are looking into it. As many have noted, the alternative, host advantage, is not preferable.

VGA Resolution Thingy

So we have a bunch of complaints from people using hi-res 4:3 aspect ratio VGA monitors, who find that when they choose a widescreen 1280×1080 resolution, that things stretch. Or that when they choose “normal” aspect ratio, they lose the advantage of a slightly wider field of view found in widescreen TVs. Well, sadly that’s us following the 360 output settings rather than something specific to Halo 3. We can’t override that setting in the game and we can’t guess what it is the user desires. So we have to go with the majority – which is that they desire the entire screen is filled with the correct aspect ratio and isn’t black-barred or windowed. It’s not ideal, but it is one of the drawbacks of trying to play widescreen content on a 4:3 display. So in short, sorry.

Map Flap

Our multiplayer design teams are hard at work on a couple of things. One of them is a fun, seasonal addition to the matchmaking playlist which should keep you entertained for about 27 hours around Halloween. No specifics yet, but suffice it to say that if you want to spend your witchy holiday playing Halo 3, we’ll give you some spooktacular reasons to do so.

The other thing keeping the designers busy, and the artists and audio guys for that matter, is downloadable content. The maps themselves are being prepared in a logical order, designed to fill gaps in our matchmaking selection and add new, interesting environments to our multiplayer arsenal. The more finished the maps are, the faster they’re likely to make it to marketplace. We’ll have more news on the specific plans for timing and availability soon, and we promise to let you guys get a look at the maps and hear more about what they have to offer.

We’ve been testing the new maps pretty regularly and I loved all except one, which for the purposes of this article, I shall refer to as, “Purple Reign.” I sometimes have an initially adverse reaction to symmetrical or semi-symmetrical map designs because I am not terribly smart and I sometimes have difficulty become oriented within those types of space. Invariably, I get used to it and learn to love them. This was just such a case, but when a new slew of architecture was added in the distance recently, it was enough for me to recognize which way was “up,” so to speak. Now I love it.

So the good news is that as far as I am concerned, all of the projected DLC maps are sweet.  Two of them in particular will cause a Three Mile Island scale pant-fill-disaster in the Halo community. I can’t say why, but some of you will figure it out correctly and be able to say I told you so later.

Luke and I have been playing a lot of SWAT on the new maps because it’s an easy way to check out a map with only a couple of players. At least two of the projected DLC maps however, are simply far too large for even the hair-trigger nature of SWAT to speed ‘em up. Both of them support lots of vehicles, but one of them, John Carpenter’s Prince of Dorkness, doesn’t need vehicles per se. It’s tough to explain. When you finally see it, you’ll understand.  

Source:  Bungie.net

HaloGameWorld.com

Banhammery

We’ve mentioned before that we have implemented lots of security and anti-cheating systems in Halo 3. We’ll never have it perfect because we cannot stop people being idiots, but it’s already significantly better than ever before. We’re about to activate a part of it that required a few weeks of folks playing in the wild before we’d gathered enough data to activate it. Well, we’re just about ready to swing the mighty mallet of justice and it should make a couple of types of cheating extinct very shortly.

Halo 3 has been available for precisely one month and we’re going to be working harder than ever to make sure it stays a safe and fair place to play for the next few years. So please bear with us and remember we’re always watching and more importantly, acting on the information we receive, whether it’s immediately visible or not.

Dear MLG,

Thank you for letting be a small part of your national championship event last weekend in Las Vegas. Thanks also for that taste in our collective mouths – the sweet, sweet taste of whoop-ass.

Love, Bungie

If wackier, casual games of Infection with invisibility, low gravity and random weapon spawns are your speed of Halo, odds are you wouldn’t last 30 seconds in the MLG. For those of you just joining us, MLG stands for Major League Gaming, and is home to the most ruthless and competitive Halo players on the planet (and, incidentally, a bunch of all-around nice guys). 

Recently, MLG co-founder Sundance DiGiovanni extended an offer to Bungie to attend their national championship event. Normally we eschew free trips to Vegas, but since this was for the MLG championships, Charlie, Eamon, Barry, CJ and I flew down from Seattle to “represent.” Sundance lured us there under the pretense of “checking out the tournament,” MLG’s true motive –having us play a Bungie v. Pros “exhibition match” – soon came to light.

The event itself took place in the Sands Expo Center’s dark, hangar-esque arena. In addition to Halo 2, the tournament also had brackets going for Gears of War, Rainbow 6: Vegas and Shadowrun, with nearly half a million dollars in prize money at stake. Imagine a meticulously-organized LAN party with a few thousand of your closest friends and you’d be getting close. Beyond the LAN party feel, the MLG as an organization has gone to great lengths to take competitive gaming and turn it into a truly compelling spectator experience. It’s fair to say we were shocked by the event’s production value.

Within the Halo community, MLG guys are known for their… outspokenness when it comes to their opinions about how Halo should be played. These guys take Halo and boil it down leaving a pretty intense core of pure competitiveness, and noob unfriendly gameplay. But, watching Halo 2 be played at the highest levels is damned impressive. For example, typical MLG settings call for the removal of the motion tracker and spawning with the Battle Rifle. They turn off things like turrets that could result in a less-skilled player getting a few unpredictable kills, and you won’t catch the Pros dual wielding at all.

Even though most of the guys on the Pro circuit have been playing Halo since CE (and many still refer to CE as their true love), few have begun playing H3 regularly for fear of de-tuning their H2 skills.Those H2 skills, have been cultivated by different ways of play, and different ways of holding the controller. Final Boss’ Walshy, one of the league’s most dominant forces, has developed a way of gripping the controller called “the claw” in order to allow use of all the face buttons (index finger) without having to take his thumb off the right analog movement stick. Carpal tunnel FTW. Most unsettling is the specialized argot they have developed to communicate with increased efficiency (Eg, “One-shot at P1!” translates roughly to “There is an enemy in the first pink tower on Midship who can be taken down by a single shot”).

Needless to say, in the few pickup games we played on the floor, it became clear that we simply could not compete at the synaptic level, and that our only hope for survival lay in leveling the playing field. So when it came time to play our exhibition match, instead of Bungie vs. Pros we proposed a Bungie + Pros line-up in the hopes of preserving a few precious shreds of dignity.

 Bungie Engineering super geniuses Charlie Gough (center left) and Eamon McKenzie (center right) in an OGRE sandwich.

Source:  Bungie.net

HaloGameWorld.com

The games with the Pros were… eye-opening to say the least. As far as we were concerned, MLG might as well have stood for “Massive Loss Guarantee.” Chucky and Eamon joined up with legendary twin aimbots Ogres 1 and 2 from team “Final Boss” while “Str8 Rippin’s” Neighbor and Legit carried Barry and I like a couple of sacks of potatoes. “Surgical” doesn’t quite describe these guys’ proficiency with weapons and their ability to place grenades directly underfoot borders on magical. Speaking of magic, personally I believe the Ogres have some sort of latent twin-based telepathy thing going on since they have the uncanny tendency to fire at the same thing without speaking. I will say there are few things quite as satisfying as killing Ogre 2, even if it is a 1 in 10 phenomenon.

After a few more games with some of the other Pros, we had a pretty good idea that playing at that level was going to be a losing proposition for Bungie. So we set our sights a little lower (figuratively and literally) and challenged Lil Poison to a final game. Aside from being an incredibly nice and well-mannered nine year old, Lil Poison happens to be the youngest Pro killing machine in the league. Still, Charlie believed he could use the wisdom of his years to his advantage and agreed to go head to head with Lil Poison on Epitaph. Sadly, not even 20+ years of life experience would prove enough to bridge the skill gap between Charlie and LP. We all agreed watching Lil Poison beat Charlie was a fine way to end the event.

Big thanks to Sundance DiGiovanni and all the folks at MLG for letting us take part in their experience. We look forward to coming back next season for some Halo 3 action!