RedStarRocket91

Wait... seven maps in the beta? That's fantastic, as hopefully it means that there's going to be even more maps available once the full game is released. I'm a little disappointed by the fact that there aren't going to be loadouts in the beta, but hopefully they'll make a return, and if anything unlocked is going to carry over to the full game it'll be nice to be able to get a feel for it before I have to use it for real with my stats on the line.

Having both Spectral Jester and Absolute Dog as Moderators at the same time was actually somewhat unusual for the site. For very long periods of their time in the role, both Spectral Jester and Absolute Dog were working by themselves, rather than in a pair, and while that arrangement was clearly something they felt worked effectively for them I've found that having just one person in the orange fits my own style better. There are definitely advantages to having two orange moderators: it's more likely that one of them will be on-site to respond to inquiries at any given time, it means that work can be distributed more evenly, and that those in the position are more free to fit moderation in around their own lives as they have someone to cover for them if they need to take some time off the site. On the other hand, only having a single moderator also brings some of its own advantages, as there's no need for me to worry about information being lost or miscommunicated between me and a partner, the process for making decisions is more streamlined, and perhaps most importantly, there's never going to be a situation where the moderating team is completely split on a decision with no way of choosing what to do, as I can weigh in to resolve it. It's not something I'd like to do, as I far prefer to solve disputes by discussing them than just invoking my authority, but it's a useful tool to have if we're completely deadlocked. As I'm a full-time student who spends most of my day at my computer during term-time, fitting in moderation around my life isn't such a big deal for me as it is for people like Absolute Dog and Spectral Jester, who both have jobs and families to devote their time to, so two of the big advantages of a double-moderator setup is immediately wasted. As I age and take on more responsibilities in the real world, that situation is likely to change, and so assuming I'm still here in three or four years I'll almost certainly be working with someone else (or more likely, I'll resign and ask to return to the Community Moderators after I've recommended my replacement to Twam). It's not likely to happen in the immediate future, but people and circumstances change and so I can't rule it out altogether.

Originally, I think that was actually the intention (hence why even though there are space for three stars, only two are filled). I suppose it's mainly because our staff groups now have their own member group colours which make them easy to identify, and all groups with access to moderation powers now have their own banners atop each post, so another way of identifying staff wasn't really needed. Beyond that, it also serves to help differentiate between the Moderator and Community Moderator usergroups, as they're fairly similarly named and there's a lot of overlap in our roles, and having stars on one but not the other makes for more of an immediate visual distinction than having different numbers on each. If ever there's confusion about the staff hierarchy in the future it's definitely something we'll consider updating, though. We don't really have a set criteria, oddly enough. If there's a space open, we'll look around the forums and pick out a few members who we 'feel' would potentially make good moderators: in general, we look for people who clearly put a lot of time into reading the forums, who seem to keep a cool head when faced with arguments or abuse, who are confident without being arrogant or abrasive, who have a healthy respect for the spirit of the rules, who have a sense of fairness and can be relied upon to put their duty above personal feelings, and whose personality seems like it would fit well with the rest of the moderating team. Once we've agreed on a candidate, one of the orange Moderators will approach the candidate and offer them a chance to train. If they accept, the candidate is then secretly given access to a restricted set of moderator powers and taught how to use them, including things like how to manipulate topics, access and deal with reports, and the warning point system: we keep a few spare accounts around for them to practice on during this time, as it's only toward the end of their training period that we'll ask them to perform any moderation directly. Training usually lasts between two weeks and a month after they've been taught how to use their powers, and during this time we'll test them with things like hypothetical scenarios, past cases, and ask them to comment on active reports explaining how they would deal with the situation. If it seems like they're fitting in and coming to the same conclusions as the rest of the moderating team, or at least showing sound judgement and correctly applying moderation guidelines, then they'll eventually be offered a place amongst the moderators and if they accept once more, they'll receive the full set of moderation powers and go public. Occasionally, things don't work out: if there are consistent errors in judgement, bad application of moderating guidelines, misuse of powers, or even just changing their mind at the end of training, then the candidate will go back into their original member group. This is one of the reasons why we'll never talk or unveil about candidates publicly, and it's one of the few things that we don't discuss with other staff groups, as there's a certain stigma to not becoming a moderator after training and we don't want to hurt anyone's standing on the site, or allow other members to put pressure on them during their training. At any given time, someone on the site could be wearing purple, green, silver, or even a staff colour whilst actually having a restricted set of moderator powers, and there would be no way to tell. Ultimately, there's not really a 'best' way to be offered a role on the moderating team: a lot of it just comes down to being around at the right time, and to being a solid part of the community whilst being willing to cut yourself off from the community if need be. For all that being part of the moderating team can bring a lot of popularity, some days you're going to be the bad guy, and while a lot of the time you'll be dealing with people you don't know and who're obviously out to cause trouble, on some days there's going to be a lot of grey and you're going to have to moderate someone you like. I think everyone on the site has someone who they're particularly close to, or respectful of: if you can honestly say that you would be able to ban that person and ruin that friendship if the situation called for it, then you have perhaps the most important quality we look for in a potential moderator. A lot of people can't do that, and there's no shame in it - it's the worst part of the job, and I hate having to do it - but it is necessary and it's the thing we stress the most when making the final offer to someone who's completed their training.

And why exactly is it 'pointless'? OT: It seems like most individual American retailers have their own special editions of games these days (Gamestop gives a different preorder bonus from BestBuy, which is different from Walmart, for example) so it makes sense that they might do something similar over here. I'm not a fan of splitting up content at all as I like having access to everything, but unfortunately this seems like pretty standard industry practice.

There's not really any specific criteria for what makes a good quality post, but I can give you a list of stuff which makes for a bad quality post: try and avoid things like making very short posts, going off-topic, or just posting images or videos without anything to support it, or repeating what others have already said in a thread - although these are all acceptable in the Offbeat section. Always try and avoid giving opinions or dismissing the opinions of others without any evidence or explanation, flaming other people or being overly aggressive toward those who don't share your views, using excessive bad language, posting anything inappropriate, or writing up posts without really thinking about what you're saying. If you can avoid all that, you're already on your way to a good quality post and the relevant Award! The black magic astrologer spam we've been getting lately has been very frustrating to deal with, as it's been coming from a fairly wide range of IPs and email address extensions with only a few common aspects, and even then not to all of them. Normally when we get spam, it all comes from a single IP or an obvious spam email server, so we can just add those to the filters and put an end to it. However, to alleviate the spam this time, I've had to ban whole ranges of IPs rather than just individual ones: I'm not sure of the exact number, but according to a bit of quick maths in the last two and a half weeks alone we've banned about 450,000 IPs and three email servers, as well as blacklisting about a dozen username components. I really didn't want to do this as I hate the thought of legitimate people losing access to the site, but unfortunately there were just too many spambots to manually flag individual IP addresses, especially as almost every one had a slightly different IP address, but I did work to narrow down the ban filters as much as possible to try and minimise the effect on legitimate users. So far, it seems to have worked: since the last of the new filters went up two weeks ago we've only had two black magic spammers sign up, from South Africa and Brazil, as opposed to the twenty or thirty or so we were getting every day from Indian IPs prior to that. It's not a perfect system and I'm still working on ways to focus the filters better to avoid affecting legitimate users, but it is at least reasonably effective. The 'active posts' on your profile is both exactly what it says and very misleading, in that it only shows posts you've made and not topics you've started, both of which are included in the number on the profile preview you see around the rest of the forums. Stuff from Offbeat and the Clan Recruitment/Advertising forums aren't added to either, and for things like member group auto-promotion the total number is used, so you don't need to worry about getting to the next member group if you start a lot of topics but don't reply to many.

Personally, as much as I loved ODST (and I really did love it) I'd like to see Halo branching out into more genres, purely because it's such an interesting setting with so many potential things to explore. Even though Halo Wars proved that RTS games don't work with gamepads it was still a reasonably solid game in terms of its mechanics and gameplay, so provided that it were on PC or capable of using USB mouse and keyboard peripherals for its control scheme I'd definitely be interested in playing a sequel. There are a fair few genres which spring to mind immediately when thinking of Halo spin offs, in any case: Reach had a fully-developed space combat section which could easily be adapted into the premise of a whole game, perhaps even set during the fall of Reach or even earlier in the war: a free-roaming, open world sandbox game playing as a member of ONI who's tasked with investigating one of the insurrectionist strongholds with an emphasis on detective work, stealth and tactical combat rather than traditional Halo running and gunning: there's even a potential survival horror option regarding the Flood, perhaps as a science team investigating a Forerunner facility who are trapped inside when they accidentally release it and need to find a way to destroy the facility and get out.

To be honest, I don't really mind losing all my commendation progress, though admittedly I'm a fairly low rank so I don't have much to lose. What worries me more is that paid DLC like the Mark V armour, the Assault Rifle Prime preorder bonus, or the various Bullseye weapon skins won't be available to use. It's going to be a real shame if there's no way to access those

In order for web pages to appear in the search results of an engine like Bing or Google they need to be initially recorded and indexed, and then kept up-to-date: to do this, search engines use bots which record the information and then upload it to their servers. It's possible for us to tell the difference between a search engine bot and a regular guest, and so when one of them arrives on the site, its movement on the site is recorded just like any other member, hence why things like 'Google' or 'Bing' will occasionally show up in the members online/currently reading a topic or forum lists. As we're a reasonably popular site with fairly high traffic, we get quite a lot of visits from bots trying to keep their search engine's records up to date: if you ever see a bot at the bottom of a topic, it means that topic is currently being indexed for the relevant search engine.

The two little stars Twam and I have under our names are basically just visual flair. Since we now have banners in the top right-hand corner of our posts and different coloured usergroups they're no longer really relevant for identification, but it does at least help newer members quickly identify myself and Twam as the two most senior staff members on the site. I believe that originally, we were going to have three stars against our names, Community Moderators were going to have two, and all other staff departments would have one (hence why there's room for a third in the banner), but we ended up just applying it to the admin groups instead. It's very dependant on circumstance. Something which breaks the rules in a very obvious, objective way is usually just dealt with by whoever sees it first: if someone is using bad language right in front of a moderator, plagiarising articles, or clearly a spambot, then there's not really any need to discuss it because we have very clear guides on what to do in those kind of situations For other things like abusive behaviour, repeat offences, or anything for which we don't have a specific guide, we'll generally get together and discuss it before taking any action. A lot of things that are brought to our attention concerning individual members are very subjective - what makes something abusive or insulting to one person might be merely honest or even harmless to another, for example - and so because we're a fairly varied group in terms of our backgrounds, personal beliefs and attitudes it's a good way of making sure that we get as many views and opinions as possible before making a decision.

Over the past few months, there have been quite a few instances in which confusion has arisen over some of our rules and the way in which the moderating team acts, especially when it comes to topics like advertising, shoutbox conduct, and even how we fight spam. This thread is therefore intended to serve as a central place where I can give some clarity to anyone who's confused by the rules, who wants to know more about how we moderate, or who's just a bit curious about some of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. A few important things first: There are some things I can't comment on, such as personally identifiable information, anything which could compromise the moderating team, or our ability to carry out moderation. I'll try and answer any questions as fully as possible, so ask even if you're not sure, but please be aware in advance that all I may be able to say is that I can't discuss the matter. I can't discuss any individual acts of moderation such as member bans and warnings or edits to topics and posts. Similarly, I won't respond to any requests to review or overturn any existing moderating decisions, and please don't make accusations toward other members or try to air grievances. I can, however, talk about our philosophy and code of conduct, and give answers to hypothetical situations. Lastly, please try to keep all questions on topic. If you're looking for more general or personal advice and answers, I strongly suggest you post to the excellent Ask The Director 2.0 thread. I think that's pretty much everything. So, ask away!

Ever since the MCC's announcement I'd always thought that the original maps would look exactly the same as when they were shipped, and that the six 'Anniversary' map would be the only one to be given new textures. But after looking at these, unless some of what's on display here is just concept art, not screenshots, then there are either going to be multiple variants of some of the Anniversay maps, or all the original multiplayer maps are also going to have remastered graphics as well. Either way, it's very interesting and I can't wait to see which variant is going to be the standard 'Anniversary' version!

The Anniversary edition is running on exactly the same physics engine and object meshes as the original game, so all the old glitches, tricks, bugs and exploits should still work exactly as they used to - including in the legacy multiplayer. There'll also probably be some new visual easter eggs when using the remastered graphics mode. However, when playing the Anniversary multiplayer (which is accessed separately from the legacy multiplayer) most exploits and bugs won't be present.

For me, the first of the two big problems with Spartan Ops is that it suffers from some very poor design in places - missions involving Prometheans in particular just seem to consist spamming very large numbers of Crawlers on all sides for several waves, and so fighting them becomes repetitive and a chore rather than genuinely exciting or challenging. Part of this is no doubt because there are only really three types of Promethean enemies and they're all bullet sponges which need similar tactics to fight, so if we get a more diverse set of opponents in Halo 5 then this might well sort itself out, but for now I'd prefer if more missions were structured along the lines of the Covenant-themed ones, i.e. small but carefully picked groups of opponents using terrain to their advantage rather than just huge numbers of enemies being thrown at the player. The second of the two major issues is that the missions just don't scale well. Some can be extremely tough to solo without dying even on Normal and Heroic for veterans, but a group of four halfway-competent players is going to have very little difficulty in storming through most of the missions, even on Legendary and with skulls enabled. This is a problem in the Campaign, too, but there it's excused on the grounds that it's only meant to be played by a single person, an excuse Spartan Ops absolutely doesn't have. So right off the bat, two things I'd like to see in Spartan Ops are a better selection of enemies on Promethean-based missions in particular, and enemy spawns tied to the number of human players so that the level of challenge always feels appropriate to the chosen difficulty (perhaps more enemies or higher ranks as the player count increases). The next thing is a bit minor, but it annoys me so I'll list it anyway, and that's making missions compatible with DLC. Seriously, I love my MK V armour and the Bullseye pack's weapon skins, and the Armour Abilities that I got from that seem like they'd be useful too - so it's annoying to jump into a mission and discover that my Spartan looks completely wrong and half my loadouts are broken. It's really irritating and for Season 2 I don't want to have to waste time changing my loadouts and armour every time I swap between War Games and Spartan Ops, so a fix there would be greatly appreciated. Lastly, if Firefight does return (and I hope it does!) I'd like our characters to be able to actually Speak in Spartan Ops depending on what voice was chosen. Even if it's just the regular combat quotes rather than actual dialogue or discussion, it would go a long way to helping the Spartans feel a bit more alive and individual, and of course as long as there was a Noble Six-style voice without quote for those players who'd prefer to just do missions silently, it shouldn't cause any upset among the fanbase (heck, a button to toggle Spartan speech in co-op gamemodes on and off in the menus would be nice).

Loving this! If you can get this in a playable state in the next few months, we might be able to dedicate a Community Event to it in the build-up to the release of the MCC

1. If the speed of light is a constant and cannot be exceeded (even relatively) then why is it that some parts of our universe are so far away we can't see them, given that we cannot have moved from them faster than their light moves toward us? 2. Since atoms in our bodies are being constantly replaced, how does consciousness exist and persist when we are wholly replaced every decade or so on a molecular level? 3. Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle?

Provided that you're the original purchaser of the game (i.e. it's not pre-owned) and it was bought within the last 90 days, then it's still covered by the warranty. This means you can take it back to the store where you bought it with your receipt, and that store will be required to either give you a new copy of the game, or to refund the cost of it in full. Since it would cost you more to drive to get it replaced than to just buy a new copy, you may wish to purchase a digital version via the Xbox Live Store instead, and then as long as you're making a trip near the store within the period of the warranty within the next 90 days you could return it for a refund without wasting money on such a long trip. If you purchased a pre-owned copy, then unfortunately the warranty is no longer valid and you probably won't be able to return it for either a replacement or a refund, as doing so will be entirely at the discretion of the store. Whenever buying a pre-owned disc it's generally a very good idea to ask to see it in-store before the box is sealed and the transaction made, so that you know you're getting a copy without any obvious flaws.

As far as I remember, as long as you're in either the pre- or post-game lobbies, whenever someone speaks you should be able to hear what they're saying. However, when you're in-game although you'll still be able to hear everyone on your own team, you'll only hear what your opponents are saying when you're very close to them and as long as you have the 'proximity voice' feature enabled. If you're beyond a very short range, regardless of how much they talk you won't be able to hear anything: this is intentional, so that you can talk to your teammates without worrying that the other team will overhear your plans. Many players often manually mute people on the other team, so that may also explain why you're having difficulty hearing what they're saying.

Sort of. We currently have four Awards planned related to TGFW: the first, for taking part in at least one TGFW lobby: the second and third, for fighting as part of either the GDR or the OS (Mercenaries and people who change sides can earn both: we might do some extra 'loyalist' Awards for people who only fight for one faction throughout the war, but that's not confirmed yet); and the fourth, for attending at least one match of every lobby. Unlike regular Community Events, the first Award doesn't stack, so you'll only get one regardless of how many battles you fight - unless you attend all of the, in which case it's replaced by the fourth Award.

They're just two versions of the same award, an old one and a new one.

We'll be giving out all TGFW-related awards at its conclusion, as we'll need to check who gets the award for participating in at least one battle versus those who'll get the award for participating in every battle.