Hey everyone, as promised here’s an update on game settings and playlists for the upcoming HaloWC 2018 season. One of our major goals moving forward, and especially for this process, is to make sure we have a more open conversation with players and fans, and want to continue that today.



“Sounds good, Josh! Can you tell us why you’re testing BR/Gunfighter Magnum starts?”



First, earlier this year, the sandbox team started working on a weapon tuning update to address issues including the Splinter Grenade lethality, AR skill gap, and more as we outlined back then. Our intention has always been to resolve those issues, and to bring a more complete sandbox back into the HCS once the tuning was done.



While working on that tuning, we decided to put up an HCS playlist in the mean time since we had split the settings from Team Arena. We kept Team Arena because we had a concern that the HCS settings would not be popular enough to replace Team Arena, and that we should wait and monitor the performance of both playlists over time before making a decision on what to do next.



Over the course of the intervening months, we closely monitored the health of the HCS, Team Arena, and other playlists relative to those. We considered which playlists had seen attention over that period, and which didn’t. By all measures over that period, the HCS list performed increasing poorly. It was the only playlist that didn’t increase in population over the summer even though other playlists (including Team Arena) that had been given no new modes or maps did.



Because of this history, we have a concern that match time and match quality will continue to decrease in the HCS playlist.



We feel more people playing our main settings hopefully means more players understanding them, more players interested in watching them, and more players interesting in competing on them.



To achieve this, we asked the designers who designed our most successful playlists to help us design a playlist that was competitive but also as successful as our other playlists, while keeping the recent emphasis on precision vs. automatic-driven gameplay. The BR/Gunfighter combo strikes a balance between being powerful enough to answer most threats, but not being so powerful that there’s no reason to pick up anything on the map.



“Got it. For the upcoming Halo World Championship season, which starting weapons will be featured?”



While we are still concerned about HCS playlist health and will be monitoring it closely, your feedback has been clear that the BR/Gunfighter combo needs additional testing and iteration and we’ll continue to do that separately. Given the timeline until Halo World Championship competition kicks off, the HaloWC 2018 season will feature Magnum starts. Also, the current weapon tuning will be in effect, meaning things like improved Active Camo effectiveness will be featured in competitive play and there’s future potential to re-introduce changes like the adjusted Splinter Grenades, Grenade Launcher, and Energy Sword movement if they are well-received.



“Thank you! What does this mean now for the HaloWC Oddball Preview playlist?”



Later this week, the HaloWC Oddball Preview playlist will be swapped with the Fall HCS settings, with the same maps and game types that were featured least season.



“Got it. HaloWC is drawing near and we don’t really know what to play when we want to practice or try out a new team – what can you tell us?”



It’s safe to continue practicing on the same settings that were used in the Fall season. We’ve just received results from the latest Oddball pro player survey, and are actively reviewing with design teams to evaluate where we can move forward.



“Ok, thanks for the update, Josh!”



No problem!



--Josh