RedStarRocket91

The big thing is just to be active yourselves. Start threads, comment on other topics, share your screenshots and videos, answer polls, participate in games in Offbeat, drop an invite if ever you're heading into matchmaking or custom games and want to set up a lobby or a fireteam with other members. I'm caught between being a full-time MA student and spending most of my weekends working to keep the lights on, but if do happen to be free I'll always be happy to come and join. Really, it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If we have stuff going on, there's more reasons for people to join and stay: if we don't, there's less.

It's a very good question, and the truth is that it's one we've been struggling to find an answer to for over a year now. When the site started out, we only really had to compete with Bungie.net and Waypoint, and that wasn't difficult since, deserved or not, they both had reputations for heavy-handed and unaccountable moderation: all we had to do was let people know that they could speak their minds freely here and, provided they stayed away from profanity and abuse, they wouldn't be on the receiving end of warnings or bans. Now, however, we have to compete with /r/Halo on Reddit and TeamBeyond, and that has a lot of advantages over us. People want to feel as though the discussions they're having are being noticed by the devs, and while you can be noticed by and chat with community managers and even the pro team elsewhere, that's something we can't offer. In addition, TeamBeyond gets regular advertising from 343i directly and is probably the largest discussion hub for its pro players, while since everyone has a Reddit account these days and it has such a huge potential audience, it's really easy to just jump onto /r/Halo or /r/HaloStory or whatever and start posting from an existing persistent profile. Put simply: we can't compete with the sheer numbers of Reddit, and we can't compete with the access, recognition and official 'legitimacy' of TeamBeyond, and as a result we're struggling for activity. It's a sad truth, but once you start getting big businesses/corporate entities and official channels the smaller, independent places suffer as a result, and sadly decades of economics have shown us there isn't really an answer to that beyond finding money and coming up with a unique selling point of our own. We deliberately don't run adverts on the forums or YouTube because we want the user experience to be as pleasant as it can be, so whatever money we use needs to come out of our own pockets (and while we're willing to do so, we're a volunteer staff mostly of student age so we're naturally quite limited), and it's very difficult to think of anything we can do that other places either can't throw more money or a bigger audience at. The good news is that since we've always been very community-oriented, so long as we have members who keep wanting to come here then the staff and forums will be around for them, and since our active member pool is so small you get to know everyone personally really quickly. We're also really lucky to have a partnership with Zandril, for whom we're hosting the official submission forums, and the i01 team, whose game is going to be something really special once released (my jaw practically dropped at what they've been able to accomplish the last time I had an update!), and we have plans for a potential competitive league at some point in the near future, so we're not completely without advantages. But for now, the best we can do is to keep producing content to give people a reason to log in every day, and so while that's not a very good anser, the truth is that so long as we're struggling for money and members, it's the only approach which is really practical.

I really wasn't a fan of the DMR back in Reach. I've never been hugely fond of precision weapons in Halo anyway - I could just about tolerate them in 3 due to the wide spread and bullet travel time - but the DMR, upon introduction, was just frustrating. For a start, the potential range was just too damn far: part of what I love so much about Halo 3 in hindsight but took for granted at the time is how much freedom of movement there is, because beyond a certain distance the BR's spread and bullet velocity mean you just can't reliably land even one bullet, let alone a whole burst, so players can move around the map much more. By contrast, the DMR was extremely accurate when fired at minimum bloom and had a 3x magnification scope, meaning that you could reliably hit targets out to WAY further than ever before. Plus, it's a single bullet, not a burst, so you're not even losing damage due to spread at extreme range: as a result, Reach is a much, much more frustrating game to move around in, and combined with the drastic nerfs to vehicle durability often ends up with teams just hanging back and poking at one another from extreme range rather than actually being able to push across the map. Plus, Reach shares the Halo 2 problem of its precision weapons actually having faster TTKs than its automatics - and unlike Halo 2 you can't even dualwield to change that. As a result, the DMR is just straight up overpowered compared to the rest of the general-purpose weapons sandbox, slows the pace of the game down, and has a huge negative effect on the importance map control. And that's before we even come to the bloom issue, where players who're carefully controlling the recoil of their weapon to ensure the best balance of fire rate and accuracy can still be beaten by players who're just spamming the trigger wildly. As a result, most fights end up as spamfests with the winner determined more by luck than skill, and combined with its ridiculous range and power, just make the whole game a chore to play. That said, Halo 4 did them a lot better after the weapon tuning update. The DMR is still more powerful and accurate than the other precision weapons, but it's offset by having a higher TTK than the automatics and BR, so you're trading raw killing power for accuracy over range. Overall I still think it's too low (I'd far rather we had slightly longer kill times tbh), but at least now it has its own discrete place in the sandbox.

The site has actually been around a bit longer than Twam's profile would suggest, as fairly early in the site's history we changed the software it was running: as a result, Twam appears to have 'joined' later than he actually did (this is also, for those curious, why he's isn't member number one).

Staff Response As a reminder, please keep all discussions polite. Criticism and feedback is encouraged, while personal insults are not.

I have a love-hate relationship with Halo at the moment. I'll start out by saying that I genuinely love the core gameplay. Shooting and movement feel incredibly responsive and fluid, the sprint issue was resolved in a way I think works very well, the balance between automatic and precision weapons has been struck perfectly, and the maps are generally very fair. I'm also told that Forge is as good as it looks, and it looks incredible from what I've seen though I've sadly had very little hands-on time to tinker with it. That said, there are just so many things the game does wrong or badly. While some of the new maps have improved upon it, I'm really tired of the dull, clean UNSC style which we see on most of the maps, and frankly I'm not fond of the overall aesthetic: I get they're different castes but the new Forerunner look is, to me, quite lazy uninspired, and the Spartans themselves look absurd to the point of parody - neither of which are helped by how graphically lacklustre the engine is (seriously, I played games in the early 2000s with better draw distance and LOD). The matchmaking itself is either complete trash or actively hates me (I should not be getting steaked in over 50% of my placement matches), to the point where I've now quit twice because of how fed up I am with horribly unbalanced games, the REQ system is still the most disgusting kind of anti-consumer pay-to-win garbage, and the campaign has literally no redeeming features. The fact that literally everything else is also now locked off behind the XBL paywall is just the final insult. When Halo 5 is good, it's very, very good. Getting into an evenly-matched multiplayer game is as fun, tense, and exciting as it's ever been, and I'm sure that the custom games browser combined with Forge is going to give it more staying power than any previous Halo to date. But it shouldn't be the case that I have to go into custom games just to get a balanced Slayer match, and I shouldn't have to spend real money just to get onto even footing with people in Warzone.

I really love the theme you're going for here! There's always a lot of talk in the community updates and sprints about how the the multiplayer maps have to fit with the writing teams' backstories, but it's sad that they usually end up feeling kind of oddly lifeless and characterless. Just looking at these maps gives such a sense of personality and atmosphere, and going on to tie the actual weapons to the theme of the map is just an extra step toward making it feel brilliant. Really great work here, can't wait to try this out!

Really great question! I'm really in two minds about this. On the one hand, for all MS and Sony have promised that they won't be abandoning the XBone and the PS4, I can very easily see us ending up with a situation where either companies just outright stop developing for them, or one where because the devs are forced to keep developing for the older hardware, they can't fully utilise the potential of the newer one. Either way: a lot of gamers are going to end up spending a huge amount of money on something which is, essentially, wasted because it either doesn't last nearly as long as it should or because it's hamstrung by cross-platform development. On the other hand, there's not really any denying that the XBone and PS4 were embarrassingly underpowered even at launch. The XBone in particular was notably less powerful than my - and frankly, I wasn't even using cutting-edge hardware, and that's before we even get to nonsensical design decisions like mandatory Kinect which robbed it of even more processing power. So we were in a position whereby even on day one, the consoles were basically obsolete compared to even a mid-range gaming rig, and they've only gotten worse by comparison in the time since. Halo 5 is a particularly obvious example here: even ignoring then art style, it's just plain ugly as a game, with low-res textures, janky animations, frequently crappy lighting, and anti-aliasing which would be more at home in 2001 if I could actually be sure that it actually existed at all. I mean, I can take or leave 60fps, and I can forgive low textures or lower resolutions, but to have AA this poor in 2015 is just shameful. To be honest, mostly I just see this whole generation of consoles to date as a mistake. The Scorpio and Neo are what we should have had from this generation, in that they actually seem to be on par with high-end PC machines from the specs I've seen, rather than the obsolete and underclocked hardware that was crammed into the XBone and PS4. Obviously it's important that they're actually utilised properly by devs as new and better software is written and distributed, but for me the core problem is just the sheer issues with power, and optimisation is only going to take you so far on that front.

My university is very restrictive about what devices they allow to access the internet, so sadly I'll have to decline. Thankyou for the offer, though, and best of luck with the testing!

Oh my God. I absolutely loved Myst back when I started playing it, it's something I've always wished I could see for the first time again. And this looks exactly how I remember it, too! Really amazing job, DireWolf, I can't wait to give this a try!